Gov’t looking for P75B to fund teens’ jabs, booster shots
MANILA, Philippines — The government is looking for P75 billion to be able to vaccinate teens and buy COVID-19 booster shots for up to 85 million Filipinos next year, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said on Thursday.
President Duterte’s Administrative Order No. 41, which directed various agencies to find savings from the P4.1-trillion 2020 national budget whose validity was extended up to the end of this year, was aimed at reallocating funds as more Filipinos needed to be vaccinated, according to the finance chief.
Dominguez, who heads the administration’s economic team, said they would still have to determine how much budget savings AO 41, issued on Wednesday, would yield.
The government had set aside P82.5 billion for vaccine procurement and rollout this year. Of the total, P70 billion would come from unprogrammed appropriations from loans and excess revenues.
About P58 billion of that are borrowings from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the World Bank; P2.5 billion from the budget of the Department of Health (DOH); and the P10 billion released to the DOH in February under the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act, or Bayanihan 2 law.
The government deemed that P82.5 billion would be enough to buy over 140 million doses for the two shots needed by about 70 million adult Filipinos for the country to achieve herd immunity.
In anticipation
Medical authorities did not recommend inoculation for those under 18 years old, but after some countries announced that they would also vaccinate teens, the Philippines was expected to follow, Dominguez said.
“We are anticipating an additional expenditure of about P20 billion to vaccinate the approximately 15 million kids aged 12 to 17,” he said.
“As we are also anticipating acquiring booster shots for next year for about 85 million teenagers and adults, we will be needing another P55 billion [for a total of P75 billion],” Dominguez added.
“To fund this but still maintain an acceptable fiscal deficit, we most likely will need to reallocate funds,” he said.
Dominguez said a “conservative” estimate would entail starting vaccination among teenagers this year, but health authorities would decide on this.
Last month, he said the national government planned to wind down its budget deficit starting next year to bring the gap back to pre-pandemic levels amid rosier economic prospects seen to boost government revenues.
The government ramped up spending especially for COVID-19 response while revenues remained weak since last year due to the prolonged pandemic-induced recession. As a result, the Philippines’ fiscal deficit—the balance of expenditures over tax and nontax collections—ballooned beyond the usual under-4-percent annual rate before the pandemic struck.
The Development Budget Coordination Committee had programmed a deficit equivalent to 8.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year. That would mean a record P1.78-trillion gap, with P2.88 trillion in revenues exceeded by P4.66 trillion in expenditures expected by yearend.
Stimulus spending
Economic managers initially rejected additional stimulus spending without first finding funding sources, as they wanted to keep the budget deficit in the middle of the pack among economies with similar investment-grade credit ratings as the Philippines to keep borrowing rates low.
The government increased borrowings to finance its war chest against COVID-19, taking advantage of low-interest rates in commercial markets as well as concessional financing from bilateral and multilateral sources.
But the economy slid to its fifth-straight quarter of recession during the first quarter of 2021—the longest since the Marcos-era debt crisis in the 1980s. GDP shrank by 4.2 percent year-on-year during the January-March period, the government reported this week.
Amid sluggish mass vaccination and lacking fiscal stimulus, most private-sector economists believe GDP cannot grow by 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent this year as the government had targeted, and the Philippines would be the region’s economic laggard.
‘Crawl, walk, run’
Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr., who is in charge of the national vaccination program, said the daily vaccination rate was picking up. On Thursday, it was 83,000, up from 67,780 in the previous week, he said.
The government and private businesses will open up more vaccination sites to speed up the pace, particularly in the National Capital Region, and increase it further to 150,000 shots daily, Galvez said.
“There’s [what they call the] ‘crawl, walk, and run’ [approach]. Right now, we are in the middle of ‘crawling’ and ‘walking,’” he said.
Following concerns raised by some in the medical sector that the expiry dates of the shots might overtake the slow pace of inoculations, Galvez promised not to let a single dose of the vaccines from the COVAX international vaccine pool go to waste.
He said 2.2 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine were arriving within the month and another 20 million AstraZeneca doses would follow.
About 1.5 million AstraZeneca doses, which arrived on May 8, are due to expire on June 30.
“Do not worry,” Galvez said. “We are expecting we can use them all up by June 15.”
The DOH had ordered all available AstraZeneca shots to be administered as the first of two doses.
Galvez said direct flights for the incoming Pfizer doses to Cebu and Davao were arranged to avoid “double-handling” and to minimize the risk of wastage from a long and complex supply chain.
Interior Undersecretary Jonathan Malaya on Thursday said the slow vaccination pace in the provinces was due partly to vaccine hesitancy.
“But in Metro Manila, vaccine demand has gone up among the population,” he said.
Malaya said the Department of the Interior and Local Government was calling on local governments to encourage more people to get vaccinated through, among others, town hall meetings or talks by medical experts.
—WITH REPORTS FROM MARICAR CINCO AND LEILA B. SALAVERRIA
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