MANILA, Philippines — The Cavite provincial government has allotted P750 million for the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines for its more than 1.5 million residents, Gov. Jonvic Remulla said in a Facebook post on Monday.
Remulla said provincial officials had started talks with British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca over its COVID-19 vaccine, which would be for those aged 18 to 59 years old.
“Astra Zeneca is proven 60-91% effective in preventing COVID-19,” Remulla said in his post.
According to him, they are waiting for a response from American pharmaceutical firms Moderna and Pfizer about buying vaccines suitable for senior citizens — that is, those aged 60 and above.
Previously, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said that the arrival of AstraZeneca vaccines might be delayed for about a week due to supply problems.
However, the initial batch of AstraZeneca vaccines came from the first round of allocated doses from the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) facility. This would include 525,600 doses of COVID-19 vaccines.
Other vaccines that local government units procured separately from the national government will come later.
The Philippines started vaccinating government health workers and other frontliners on Monday, a day after the arrival of the Chinese government-donated COVID-19 vaccines from Sinovac Biotech.
Among the first to get inoculated were Philippine General Hospital Director Dr. Gerardo Legaspi, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Director-General Eric Domingo, and Metropolitan Manila Development Authority Chairman Benhur Abalos.
The government aims to vaccinate 70 million Filipinos in a bid to achieve herd immunity — that is, when a big enough percentage of the population becomes immune from the virus, either through vaccination or prior infection.