Cebu City mayor appeals for ‘fair share’ of vaccines from national government

FIRST DOSE – Senior citizens in Cebu City start receiving their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in the second week of April but it was halted on April 23 when the city ran out of vaccines. —PHOTO FROM THE CEBU CITY PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE FACEBOOK PAGE

CEBU CITY—Mayor Edgardo Labella has appealed to the national government to give this city a “fair share” of the COVID-19 vaccines so it could resume inoculating its senior citizens.

Labella, in an interview, said the number of elderly people in the city who expressed intent to be vaccinated had increased but there were no vaccines available.

“More and more senior citizens in the city are now willing to be inoculated. They are just waiting for these (vaccines) to arrive,” he said.

Labella said he already informed vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. to allow the city to purchase the vaccines using its own budget but the latter assured him that the national government would continue to provide free vaccines to Cebu City.

At least 28,000 senior citizens in the city have so far registered online for the vaccination program but only about 5,000 have received the first of the two doses of the vaccine.

The vaccination in the city was halted after it ran out of the vaccines on April 23.

The mayor said the city was asking for a share from the 500,000 additional doses of CoronaVac, the vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd., that arrived in the country on April 22, and from the some 150,000 doses of Russia-made Sputnik V vaccines that were also set to reach the country soon.

Eagerly waiting

“May we respectfully request that Cebu City be given a fair share of the vaccines as our senior citizens are eagerly waiting to be vaccinated,” Labella said, addressing the Department of Health (DOH).

On Thursday, the DOH in Central Visayas reported that 1,218 prelisted senior citizens in the cities of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu had been injected with the first dose under the Project Balik Buhay (PBB) vaccination drive.

For the whole Central Visayas, composed of the provinces of Cebu, Negros Oriental, Siquijor and Bohol, 9,176 senior citizens have received the first dose of the vaccine, said DOH regional spokesperson Dr. Mary Jean Loreche.

Loreche said the DOH in the region did not get additional vaccines apart from the 30,000 AstraZeneca and 148,560 Sinovac jabs that were already distributed to different vaccination sites in the region. —NESTLE SEMILLA