MEMBERS of the country’s COVID-19 response team met recently with governors and mayor of various local government units (LGUs) to relay the directive from the national government for LGUs to ramp up their vaccination efforts.
National Task Force Against COVID-19 (NTF) chief implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez, Jr., together with Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Eduardo Año, Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Francisco Duque, III, and Deputy Chief Implementer and testing czar Secretary Vivencio Dizon, met with the local chief executives to inform them of President Rodrigo Duterte’s directive .
During the meeting, Dizon named 50 cities across the regions that will be prioritized in the government’s vaccine deployment. He said these highly urbanized cities (HUCs) outside the National Capital Region (NCR) were given vaccination targets of at least 500,000 jabs daily, which they need to hit and sustain by October, and then reach a daily jab rate of 800,000 by November.
“We will prioritize HUCs and regions with high impact to the economy. But this doesn’t mean the other areas in the country won’t receive the vaccines. Vaccines will be sent to these areas but the lion’s share will be delivered to these cities,” Dizon said.
Dizon explained that the NTF and the DOH conducted an assessment of LGUs and developed a selection criteria for LGUs that were later on identified as priority areas.
These HUCs must have the capacity to inoculate larger populations as quickly as possible, can store all types of vaccines, and their areas are economic centers that are essential in the reopening of their region’s economy.
According to the National Vaccination Operations Center (NVOC) Chair and DOH Undersecretary Myrna Cabotaje, a total of 75,804,550 doses have been deployed to various regions as of October 21.
More than 18.4 million doses were deployed to the NCR, around 11.2 million doses were sent to CALABARZON, while nine million doses where dispatched to Region III.
With the continued arrival of vaccine shipments from different suppliers and LGUs in the NCR about to fully inoculate their target populations, more vaccines are expected to be deployed in the identified priority cities in the coming days.
“We will take care of the vaccines. Focus and invest on the implementation of the vaccination program. Supply is high but demand is low. Time will come that vaccines will fill up our warehouses,” Galvez told the LGUs.
“We should not let these vaccine expire and unused. That’s why we need to ramp up and accelerate the vaccination rollout,” he added.
For his part, Año stressed the purpose of the NTF’s meeting with the local chief executives, and that is “to inform our local chief executives that now we have enough vaccines.”
“If you think from the projected [vaccine doses] is you can still add more, please tell the NVOC because we will provide you the vaccines,” he said.
Año also shared the observations of the agency’s regional directors regarding the reasons behind the low vaccination rate of some LGUs.
“Sometimes, the hesitancy is not really hesitancy, but more on the issue of accessibility. Meaning to say, if we have more vaccination sites, and bringing more vaccination sites closer to the people — either establishing [more] vaccination sites or assigning transport to get people [to the] vaccination sites — many more will have themselves vaccinated,” he said.
As of October 22, a total of 55,168,455 doses have already been administered nationwide, of which 8,639 were administered to the pediatric A3 group or those aged 12 to 17 years old with comorbidities in 26 pilot vaccination sites.
Meanwhile, a total of 25,441,538 Filipinos have been fully vaccinated, which represents 32.98 percent of the Philippines’ target population and 23.09 percent of the country’s total population.
The Philippines aims to fully inoculate 70 percent of its population or 77 million individuals to achieve herd immunity.