Senate seeks nod to buy vaccines for staff

MANILA, Philippines — The Senate will make a formal request to the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases to be allowed to purchase vaccines against COVID-19 for its employees, according to Senate President Vicente Sotto III.

The Senate plans to procure 5,000 doses to protect the chamber’s workers and to ensure that legislative work would be unhampered.

It has been placed on lockdown until April 12 because of the increase in the number of infected employees.

Sotto said the Senate would inform Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr., who is in charge of the country’s vaccine supply, about its plan to procure the doses.

“Our medical services [office] is preparing something like the formal request,” Sotto said at an online briefing.

It would have to enter into a tripartite agreement with the vaccine manufacturer and the national government for the procurement.

Sotto said the vaccines would not be for the senators but for the staff.

“The employees, if you think about it, are considered front-line personnel in essential services. The government would not have a budget if the Senate would not pass it. And we would not be able to work—all 24 of us senators — if there are no employees and the different departments of the Senate won’t be able to report for work,” he said.

He said he was not saying that the Senate employees should be made the priority immediately.

Its front-line workers, the ones in medical services, would be given the vaccines first, he said.

He also said Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri had proposed that the Senate purchase the Sputnik V vaccine of Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute, while Sen. Panfilo Lacson suggested the Sinopharm vaccine from China as it was readily available and was only awaiting an emergency use authorization from the country’s drug regulator.