THE head of the National Task Force Against COVID-19 (NTF) said the country has enough COVID-19 vaccine supply that there is no need at this time for local government units to procure additional doses for their constituents.
NTF chief implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez, Jr. made this remark in answer to the accusation made by Congressman Rufus Rodriguez that the national government has been “sitting” on the vaccine procurement applications LGUs.
“The country has been receiving an average of 1 million COVID-19 vaccines daily since the start of October. And once we receive them, they are immediately deployed to LGUs and other implementing units throughout the country. There is no time wasted,” Galvez said.
He noted that the country currently has 10 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in its national warehouses that are ready for distribution, and 40 million doses are due for administration.
“As I have been telling our LGUs over the past several weeks, vaccine supply is no longer a problem for our country. Our main concern at this point is how to get these COVID-19 jabs into the arms of as many Filipinos as quickly as possible,” Galvez said.
He said the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to the Philippines continues to increase, as the country has received a total of 23,353,750 doses this month alone as of October 22, with 8,843,065 doses already administered.
Galvez said that out of the 94,678,340 doses that have arrived in the country since February, 58,723,760 were purchased by the national government, 24,330,280 were donations from the COVAX facility, 7,983,160 were purchased by LGUs and the private sector, and 3,641,140 were donated by partner countries.
He recalled the explanation he made earlier to members of Congress on why the national government had decided to put on hold the multi-party agreements (MPAs) it was supposed to sign with LGUs.
“During the Congressional hearings in September, I informed our honorable legislators that the national government could not push through with these MPAs because we had to be prudent when entering into these kinds of transactions,” Galvez said.
“And upon our review of those proposed agreements, we saw that there were questionable deals among them which would primarily benefit third party consolidators, and would put our LGUs in a highly disadvantageous position,” he added.
Galvez underscored that it is the responsibility of the national government, through the NTF, to protect the interests of LGUs, especially that the money they will be using to procure the vaccines will be sourced from public funds.
“This is what I have been emphasizing to our lawmakers – that it is the duty of the national government to ensure that the LGUs should get the best deal possible and must not be at the losing end,” he said.
He explained that the parties involved in MPAs are limited to the NTF, as represented by him (Galvez); the DOH, as represented by Secretary Francisco Duque III; the vaccine manufacturer; the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) holder; and the procuring entity which is either the LGU or the private company.
Galvez said that no consolidator should be involved in an MPA, as the talks should be directly done between the vaccine maker and its authorized country representative in the Philippines, which is the EUA holder.