‘Let’s face it — when the people at the helm of our pandemic response fail, it’s we the ordinary people who will bear the consequences. As we have been doing so since the start of this pandemic.’
IT’S September, already the first of the “ber” months. More importantly, it marks the onset of what some have claimed to be the “longest celebration of Christmas in the world.”
It also marks the start of a 120-day countdown to the achievement of “herd immunity” that has been repeatedly promised to us (and to the world?) by retired Philippine Army Gen. Carlito Galvez Jr., our vaccine czar.
A happy Christmas, he has repeatedly said. We will be able to jab 70% of the population before the end of the year is what he means. And that is less than 120 days away.
As I write this, some 14 million Filipinos have received full doses of their vaccines — usually two jabs of either Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca or even Sputnik or, of course, of the government-preferred SinoVac vaccine from China. Full dose could even mean one jab of the one-dose Johnson and Johnson/Janssen jab. That’s 14 million Filipinos — compared to 77 million needed for herd immunity (assuming a level of 70% of our 110 million population), or 93 million if herd immunity of a more infectious variant is at 85%.
To meet the Galvez promise, we need to fully vaccinate from 60 to 80 million more Filipinos between today and December 31, 2021. This means needing from 120 to 160 million doses.
Put another way, that means vaccinating 500,000 people daily, without let up.
It’s doable if we will receive 50 million doses a month for the next three months, with days to spare. But that’s assuming you have enough doctors and nurses and other healthcare workers to do the jabbing every day, throughout the country.
Maybe, the long-promised contact tracers who never seemed to have materialized will now surface as assistants to HCWs to do the jabbing.
Maybe, even the construction workers who will be assigned to build the memorial wall for fallen healthcare workers can be temporarily detailed to help do the jabbing.
With 120 days to go and over 60 million more Filipinos to vaccinate, Galvez will need all the help he can get.
If he succeeds, if he would be able to “prove the critics wrong” as he was quoted once as saying, then he would have pulled off one of the greatest mass vaccination programs in recent memory.
And if he fails?
If he fails, it will just mean a longer memorial wall, I guess.
Let’s face it — when the people at the helm of our pandemic response fail, it’s we the ordinary people who will bear the consequences. As we have been doing so since the start of this pandemic.
