Vaccines work, but we need to inoculate more people — FDA chief

Health Usec. Eric Domingo of the Food and Drug Administration. INQUIRER.net file photo

MANILA, Philippines — The country still needs to procure more vaccines and inoculate more Filipinos in the fight against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Director General Eric Domingo said Friday.

In an interview with INQUIRER.net’s INQside Look, Domingo was asked to assess the country’s vaccination efforts.

“ I think we’re all unanimous in knowing—even everybody naman in government knows that we need to vaccinate more people. So far we’ve vaccinated one million people but there are 108 million Filipinos. We need to go up to 70 million at least to get some form of herd immunity,” Domingo said.

“So we really need to get more vaccines and make them available here. The vaccines work, the adverse events are very rare compared to the benefits we will get. But we just need to vaccinate a lot more people,” he added.

Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque earlier said over a million Filipinos have already received their COVID-19 vaccine as of April 11.

Roque said 1,007,356 individuals already got their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine while 132,288 people already got their second dose.

JPV