Department of Health officer in charge, Maria Rosario Vergeire–Noy Morcoso/INQUIRER.net
Almost 400,000 doses of bivalent COVID-19 vaccines will arrive in the Philippines next week as the government moves to protect vulnerable sectors from new strains of the virus, according to the Department of Health (DOH).
DOH officer in charge Maria Rosario Vergeire said the shipment of 391,920 doses of the next-generation jabs from Pfizer would push through despite the World Health Organization’s (WHO) lifting of the global health emergency on COVID-19.
“Implementing units are being gathered this week so they can be given orientation on how to administer bivalent [doses],” she told a press briefing.
The DOH is also working to revive negotiations with the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) facility to get more bivalent vaccines after the first deal fell through, Vergeire said.
More than 1 million vaccine doses from the Covax facility were supposed to arrive in March, but its shipment was deferred after the government did not extend the state of calamity, resulting in limitations on vaccine authorizations.
The latest available DOH data showed that as of March 20, some 78.4 million people had been fully vaccinated in the Philippines, exceeding the government target. Over 23.8 million of them had availed themselves of the first booster shots, while 4.4 million had yet to get their second boosters.
Unvaccinated
Nearly half of those who died of COVID-19 this year were unvaccinated, based on the DOH data.
Of the 3,349 COVID-19 fatalities registered from Jan. 1 to May 14 this year, 1,425 of them, or 43 percent, did not receive any shots against the virus.
“This shows how important it is to get vaccinated,” Vergeire said.
No coronavirus deaths have been reported in the last two weeks, but that may be due to incomplete data as the DOH’s surveillance and reporting system transitions to a new monitoring system.
The country’s COVID-19 death toll has reached 66,453, while recoveries stand at over 4 million.
COVID-19 transmission continues to gain momentum at the national level, with a 28-percent increase in the daily average as of Tuesday, with 1,798 reported cases.
Based on the latest case bulletin, only 53 of 12,414 people who tested positive last week were either seriously or critically ill, while 437 of 4,185 patients were admitted in hospitals.
Vergeire warned against using the positivity rate, or the percentage of people confirmed to have COVID-19 based on RT-PCR tests, as the sole metric in determining risk because “only a few people get tested now.”
This, she said, would naturally push the positivity rate up. INQ