MANILA, Philippines — COVID-19 vaccine wastage in the country is so far “minimal” and “very negligible,” vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said Tuesday.
For its COVID-19 vaccination program, the Philippines is so far using 600,000 doses developed by Chinese drugmaker Sinovac BioTech and 525,600 doses of British-Swede firm AstraZeneca vaccines.
So far, reported wastage of Sinovac doses were only instances of broken vials of shots while there were some extra or missing vials of AstraZeneca vaccines in packages, Galvez said.
“Sa ngayon very minimal lang ang wastage, ‘yung mga wastage is more on sa extraction. So sa ngayon, nakita natin very negligible ‘yung wastage,” he said.
(As of now, the wastage is very minimal. It’s more on the extraction. For now, we can see that the wastage is negligible.)
A total of 216,794 medical frontliners have received vaccine doses against COVID-19 as of Tuesday, 11 a.m., Galvez said.
About 2.3 million more vaccine doses from Sinovac and AstraZeneca are expected to arrive in the country in late March or early April, he added.