Anti-vaxxers ask SC to stop ‘no vaccine, no ride’ rule
GRANDMA KNOWS BEST | A nurse vaccinates a senior citizen who ignored claims against COVID-19 vaccines. (File photo from Philippine Daily Inquirer)
MANILA, Philippines — A group skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines has asked the Supreme Court to declare as unconstitutional the government’s “no vaccine, no ride” policy for those taking public transportation while Metro Manila was under alert level 3.
The party-list group Passenger and Riders Organization Inc. (Pasahero) and two taxpayers — Marcelo de la Cruz Jr. and Leonardo Lituania, who said they were unvaccinated — said the Department of Transportation (DOTr) order violated the “constitutional right to travel of ordinary Filipino citizens” who were free to choose whether or not to be inoculated against COVID-19.
“No person should be denied their fundamental rights by reason of their personal choice to not get the COVID-19 vaccine,” the petitioners said.
Greater principle
“Even though one can argue that vaccines are safe and will aid in preventing serious symptoms on the part of the vaccinee, a greater principle involving the right to choose which medicines to take or inject takes precedence over such policy,” they added.
Pasahero, De la Cruz and Lituania urged the high tribunal to nullify the DOTr’s Department Order No. 2022-001 dated Jan. 11, the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases’ (IATF) Resolution No. 148-B series of 2021, and the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority’s Resolution No. 22-01 series of 2022, saying these “allowed the discrimination of unvaccinated individuals.”
The DOTr order banned those without vaccine cards from taking public transport in Metro Manila during alert level 3, to limit the movement of unvaccinated individuals during a surge in COVID-19 cases due to the Omicron variant.
According to the Department of Health (DOH), most of those who ended up hospitalized due to COVID-19 were unvaccinated.
Doubts
The “no vaccine, no ride” policy was implemented on Jan. 17 then shelved on Feb. 1 when Metro Manila returned to alert level 2 as coronavirus cases started going down.
Despite this, the petitioners asked the Supreme Court to issue a restraining order against the implementation of the policy, saying that “COVID-19 cases [could] spike anytime, triggering again the enforcement of the ‘no vaccine no ride’ policy.”
In their 41-page petition, the group expressed their doubts about COVID-19 vaccines.
“The use of vaccines is not without complications to certain individuals and even the presence of such risk is enough to dissuade some people from the use of COVID-19 vaccines,” they said, adding that getting vaccinated “has always been a personal choice of the person.”
Protection outweigh risks
As of Feb. 19, the DOH said that out of 133,659,314 doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered in the country, 4,041 serious adverse effects following immunization (AEFI) were reported. Of these, 1,611 cases resulted in death.
But the DOH said the protection from COVID-19 vaccines from severe illness or death outweighed the risk of serious adverse effects.
“For every 1 million COVID-19 cases, an estimated 15,200 resulted in deaths. In comparison, for every 1 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered, only 0.03 deaths have been assessed as being casually associated with the vaccines themselves,” it added.
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