Joe Biden
MANILA, Philippines — As the United States continued to pick up its vaccination pace, Filipino-American healthcare groups urged US President Joe Biden to bump up the delivery date of the 20 million doses of Moderna, which the Philippines purchased from the American drug company.
They also asked the US Congress to donate or loan some 3 million excess vaccines to the Philippines, as it did earlier with Mexico and Canada.
“We are cautiously optimistic that we are seeing the light of the pandemic tunnel in the United States. However, the COVID situation in the [Philippines] continues to worsen,” read a letter from the Virginia-based nonprofit US Medicare in the Philippines and partners Philippine Humanitarian Coalition, the Philippine Medical Association of Metro Washington DC, the National Federation of Filipino American Association and the Philippine Nurses Association of America.
The groups held an online forum on Monday and set another one this week with Philippine Ambassador to the United States Jose Manuel Romualdez as they discussed the COVID situation in the Philippines, with over 146,000 active cases and close to 15,000 deaths so far.
They said they wished to underscore to the Biden administration the long-standing relationship between the United States and Philippines being “a loyal partner and national security ally.”
China vaccines
“(W)e appeal to you to authorize the early humanitarian release of the 20 million Moderna vaccines … Please consider an initial export release of 5 to 10 million vaccines this April—rather than in June or July. Your early decision will save thousands of lives in the Philippines,” read the letter signed by their representative Eric Lachica.
The Philippine government and the private sector signed a tripartite deal with Moderna in March.
On Sunday, the Philippines took another tranche of 500,000 doses of purchased CoronaVac from the Chinese Sinovac and which Carlito Galvez Jr., who handles vaccine procurement for the government, said would be deployed mainly to the Visayas and Mindanao.
The country expects another 1 million doses of Sinovac and 500,000 doses of Sputnik V from the Russian Gamaleya Research Institute this month.
The government said 1,139,644 Filipinos had been partially or fully inoculated either with CoronaVac or AstraZeneca as it also prepared the logistical and storage requirements of Sputnik V.
Meanwhile, Health Undersecretary Rosario Vergeire, during a briefing on Monday, urged caution in comparing vaccine efficacies after China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention said its locally made vaccines showed low protection from the virus.
“Our experts always say it’s very dangerous for people to be comparing the efficacies across these different vaccines [but] we have to look at clinical trials conducted,” Vergeire said.
Vergeire said no current vaccine claimed to fully stop virus transmission but “almost all vaccines right now in the global market [have high] efficacy against severe disease.” INQ