MANILA, Philippines — The current global supply of Western vaccines is not enough and even the Philippines’ orders are being delivered in small quantities, Malacañang said on Tuesday after the president’s daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte, suggested that the government buy more of these instead of Chinese brands.
Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque also vouched for the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines, citing expert opinions that these provided protection against severe symptoms and death from COVID-19.
Mayor Duterte had asked the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) to consider buying more US-made Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as she disclosed that many Davao City residents did not like the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines from China.
Roque, who also speaks for the IATF, said the Philippines would be hard put to get more Western vaccine doses even if it wanted to.
“On behalf of the IATF, who wouldn’t want a Western brand? The problem is, we’re not getting the supply. We ordered 40 million (Pfizer doses), but as you can see, they come in trickles, and what’s arriving are COVAX-supplied, which are donated,” Roque said in a press briefing.
The Philippines is not alone in the situation of having difficulty getting non-Chinese brands, he added.
Speaking at the Malacañang briefing, molecular biologist and OCTA Research fellow Nicanor Austriaco said the current mix of vaccines deployed in Davao City, mostly Sinovac doses, had an effectiveness of 86.5 percent and prevented 97.5 percent of deaths.
“So it’s very important to tell our countrymen that the current vaccines in the Philippines… [are] still incredibly powerful at protecting Filipinos against the Delta variant,” Austriaco said.
He said it was better to get vaccinated now with any brand than not get any vaccine at all in order to have protection against severe disease and death.
“There is no promise you will get Pfizer and Moderna since the United States is about to start a booster program for Pfizer and Moderna and we don’t know how that will impact the worldwide supply,” he added.
Tally
Infectious disease expert Edsel Salvana also noted that Sinovac and Sinopharm have an emergency use listing from the World Health Organization, which means the international body found these effective and safe.
As of Sept. 20, the Philippines has 64.9 million doses, according to data from the National Task Force Against COVID-19.
More than half or 36 million are CoronaVac made by China-based Sinovac Biotech, while 15 percent or 9.6 million doses are Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines and 14 percent or 9.2 million doses Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
Other vaccine brands available in the country are Moderna (5.3 million), Johnson & Johnson-Janssen (3.2 million, administered as a single-dose vaccine), Sinopharm (1 million), Sputnik V (570,000), and Hayat-Vax COVID-19 or the Sinopharm vaccine produced in the United Arab Emirates (100,000).
Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr., who is in charge of the mass immunization program, said the delivery of vaccine doses would ramp up in the next few weeks and by the end of October, the country would receive a total of 100 million doses since it launched its vaccination program.
Galvez said the Philippines would get 20 million doses before the end of September or by the first week of October.
In 29 weeks of vaccination beginning March 1, the government reported that 22,970,212 Filipinos had been inoculated, including 18,823,718 fully vaccinated individuals.
This translated to 21 percent of the country’s estimated 110 million population having at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine and 17 percent who have been fully vaccinated.
Among the eligible population, or Filipinos 18 years old and above, the percentage of those who were fully vaccinated was 26.6 percent.
NCR situation
Chair Benhur Abalos of the Metroplitan Manila Development Authority on Monday said he was hopeful that the eligible population in the National Capital Region would be completely vaccinated by the end of the year.
In his televised report to President Duterte on Monday, Abalos said that as of Sept. 19, about 6.58 million or 67.13 of the eligible NCR residents have been fully vaccinated.
This is expected to hit 7.84 million residents or 80 percent by Oct. 19, and 8.77 million residents or 89.53 percent by Dec. 19.
The eligible population comprises around 9.8 million adult persons or 70 percent of NCR’s 14 million people. Vaccinating half of the 14 million is projected to result in population protection while vaccinating the 9.8 million and more is believed to bring about herd immunity in the metropolis.
With Metro Manila remaining under alert level 4, Abalos said 1,002 places in NCR were under granular or small-scale lockdowns, covering some 3,093 families as of Sept. 20.