Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. (File photo by JOSEPH VIDAL / Senate Public Relations and Information Bureau)
MANILA, Philippines — Only 9 percent of vaccinees have missed the second dose of their COVID-19 shot, vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said on Saturday following an earlier statement by a doctor also involved in the government’s pandemic response that more than a million have yet to get their second jab.
In a statement late on Friday, Galvez, the chief implementer of the National Task Force Against COVID-19, said only 113,000 out of more than 1.25 million vaccine recipients missed their second dose, which was “clearly and significantly lower than the one million being cited by a certain health expert.”
Dr. John Wong, an epidemiologist working under a subtechnical working group on data analytics for the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF), estimated on Thursday that around 1 million—or more than half of some 2.1 million individuals who received their first dose—had yet to return to their inoculation for the second dose.
Different vaccine brands have different intervals between the first and second shots, ranging from 21 days to 12 weeks.
Citing his data, Galvez said 1.25 million individuals have been fully inoculated with the CoronaVac vaccine made by Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech.
He said 2.5 million doses have been administered on those individuals, out of the 5.5 million doses of CoronaVac vaccines which will be completely administered in June.
COVAX pool
As for the vaccines donated through the COVAX global pool, the second dose of the AstraZeneca shots is also scheduled this month, Galvez said.
The initial 525,000 AstraZeneca doses which arrived in March were all administered as a first dose that month. The vaccine allows a comparatively longer interval of eight to 12 weeks after the first dose.
The allotment for the second jab will be from the COVAX donation of 2 million AstraZeneca doses which arrived in May.
Also coming from the COVAX pool is the initial batch of 193,050 Pfizer doses which arrived in May.
Galvez said half of those shots were already administered as a first dose that month, with the second half to be used as a second dose this June.
With regards to the Sputnik V vaccine donated by Russia last month, 15,000 individuals received the first and second components in a three-week gap. The first dose and second dose of the Sputnik V vaccine are called Component 1 and Component 2.
A second delivery of 50,000 Sputnik V components arrived on May 30 and are due to be administered as Components 1 and 2 this June.
Valid reasons
The 113,000 individuals who did not get their second dose on time had valid reasons for being unable to do so, Galvez added.
These include being exposed to a COVID-19 case and needing to undergo quarantine. Others had medical complications which arose at the vaccination site.
“Contrary to what others may think, we believe that those who received their first shot will come back to get their second shot and complete their vaccination,” he said.
The Department of Health is encouraging individuals who missed the second dose of their inoculation to avail themselves of that dose in two to four weeks.
“Our experts say you can give that allowance of two weeks to four weeks for you to provide the second dose for an individual,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said at the Laging Handa briefing.
“But we want to give a timeline for the second dose so that our countrymen would not be delayed [in completing their vaccination]. So we’re putting this from two weeks to four weeks for them to get vaccinated,” she added.