Recto: Prepare supplies ahead of vaccine arrival

GETTING READY A barangay officer appears to be getting a shot during last Thursday’s Covid-19 mass vaccination simulation exercise at Isabelo de los Reyes Elementary School in Tondo, Manila. —RICHARD A. REYES

MANILA, Philippines — The country’s vaccination managers need not “wait for the horse to arrive before they start building the cart,” but should begin preparing the apparatus for the mass inoculation program even before the arrival of the vaccine, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto said on Sunday.

In the meantime, the Covid-19 task force should start stocking up on vaccination supplies that are available in the market, Recto said in a statement.

“You don’t have to wait for the horse to arrive before you start building the cart,” Recto said, referring to ancillary requirements for vaccination, such as personal protective equipment or PPE, syringes, and refrigerators.

“There are also things [that] cannot be taken for granted, like transportation, and even small things like iceboxes needed for the last mile,” he said.

Government officials told senators during a recent hearing that the Department of Health (DOH) had a stockpile of 30.5 million 0.5 ml syringes, 3.6 million mixing syringes, 3.8 million safety collector boxes, 3.6 million masks, and 151,761 face shields.

The DOH claimed that the supplies were enough to meet initial vaccination requirements and could be scaled up if needed.

But Recto was not convinced, citing a “possible surge in cases on top of regular caseloads of public hospitals.”

“The other important thing is that this should be forward-deployed now to towns,” he said. “We cannot rely on a trickle-down system that will wait till the last minute,” he added.

“In the case of refrigerators that vaccines will need, there should now be a town-level listing of their availability. Vaccines are like ice cream, you don’t buy them in bulk without having a place to store them,” he said.

“It will depend on the type of vaccine. We’d be lucky if we could purchase vaccines that did not require ultralow temperature. Pfizer’s will need special equipment, while Johnson & Johnson’s reportedly has no need for refrigeration,” Recto said.

But the good thing about regular freezers is that “these are not single-use disposables like syringes,” he said. “So after the pandemic, they can still be used by the hospital or clinic.”

“So these, like masks, syringes, and PPE either have long or no ‘best before’ expiry dates. So better to have them in stock now, than waste precious vials of vaccine because a clinic has run out of syringes,” he said.

Vaccination plan

On Tuesday, the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases—the temporary body handling the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic—approved the national vaccination plan, which the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) released on Saturday.

The plan requires all local governments to set up vaccination centers and the DILG and the Department of Health to develop master lists of residents to be vaccinated, with the local governments doing the profiling and screening of target populations for registration and inoculation.

Priority groups under the plan are front-line health workers, senior citizens, indigent people, and uniformed personnel; other front-line workers and special populations; and the remaining population.

Monitoring

The plan requires the consent of citizens before they are vaccinated. It also requires informing them of adverse effects and potential risks of receiving the vaccine.

Part of that step is monitoring and management of adverse effects after administration of the first dose.

The government expects to receive the first shipments of the Pfizer and Sinovac Covid-19 vaccines this month. It is also negotiating for supplies of vaccines from AstraZeneca of Britain, Moderna and Novavax of the United States, Gamaleya Research Institute of Russia and Sinopharm of China. —WITH A REPORT FROM CONSUELO MARQUEZ INQ