No COVID-19 vaccines yet for health workers’ kin
MANILA, Philippines — Family members of health workers are not yet entitled to be inoculated against COVID-19, according to the Department of Health (DOH).
With nearly 1.8 million health workers, the 600,000 doses of CoronaVac and 525,600 doses of AstraZeneca that arrived last week are clearly not enough.
Since half of the doses have to be set aside for the second shot, only 562,800 shots were available so far.
“No, they are not eligible. We give priority to health-care workers,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said on Monday when asked if family members were entitled to be vaccinated along with the health workers.
“Their families will have their turn depending on which priority group they belong to,” she said.
After health workers, the next priorities are senior citizens and people with existing illnesses.
When CoronaVac was rolled out on March 1, several government officials were among the first to receive doses of the vaccine alongside hospital directors and prominent medical practitioners.
One of them is Quezon Rep. Angelina “Helen” Tan, chair of the House committee on health, who got vaccinated with Coronavac at Veterans Memorial Medical Center (VMMC).
While she is a medical doctor, Tan said she was vaccinated “as a rightful allocation provided for my son who works as a surgeon at VMMC.”
It turned out the government-run hospital allows three members of each employee’s family to be vaccinated against COVID-19, with the approval of the National Vaccination Committee.
Dose not enough
“Our doses are not enough for our health-care workers. We are only distributing in hospitals, we haven’t given any to our community health-care workers. Let’s finish the vaccination [of medical front-liners] before we go to the others,” Vergeire said.
Monday saw only the second day of vaccination with AstraZeneca since the supply arrived on Thursday.
The DOH on Monday distributed doses to three hospitals: Research Institute for Tropical Medicine in Muntinlupa, Jose B. Lingad Memorial Regional Hospital in San Fernando City and Bataan General Hospital and Medical Center.
While the CoronaVac doses were donated by China, the AstraZeneca doses were secured through the global procurement pool COVAX on the condition that they would be given only to health workers as the priority group.
Meanwhile, a local partner of the American biotechnology company Novavax denied that a Filipino lawmaker was inoculated with its vaccine, saying it has not yet imported a single dose of Covovax into the country.
“It has come to our attention a claim made by a local government official that Mikey Arroyo received the Covovax vaccine,” Dr. Ma. Luningning Villa, medical director of Faberco Life Sciences Inc., said.
“The company assures the public that this claim is entirely false and inaccurate and same has been denied by Rep. Arroyo himself. Faberco has not imported or brought into the country even a single vial of the Covovax vaccine,” Villa said.
Faberco also works in partnership with the Serum Institute of India, which manufactures Covovax.
Talks are under way between the company and the Philippine government for the purchase of 30 million doses of the vaccine.
The Inquirer on Monday reported that Arroyo, a congressman from Pampanga and son of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, was already inoculated with Covovax, as inadvertently said by Cabatuan Mayor Charlton Uy in his recent Facebook video.
Arroyo said the claim was “not accurate.” INQ
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For more information on COVID-19, call the DOH Hotline: (02) 86517800 local 1149/1150.
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