House leader backs health-care workers in vaccination blunders

FILE PHOTO: A woman holds a small bottle labeled with a “Coronavirus COVID-19 Vaccine” sticker and a medical syringe in this illustration taken October 30, 2020. REUTERS

A House official has backed health-care workers involved in the country’s COVID-19 vaccination program amid videos that caught failed inoculation attempts on camera.

House Assistant Majority leader and ACT-CIS Rep. Rowena Niña Taduran said health workers have nothing to gain if they do not fully inject a vaccine dose into a recipient.

“What will they do with the uninjected vaccine? Vaccines like the mRNA vaccines are considered spoiled if not used immediately if these were prepared for injection and mixed with a diluting solution,” she said.

In a statement on Friday, Taduran said it was “impossible for health-care workers to deliberately fail to inject the vaccine on patients.”

“Other vaccines only have a six-hour shelf life if the needle already punctured the vial containing the vaccine,” she said.

“Health-care workers also get tired and commit mistakes. We encourage vaccine recipients to keep a watchful eye on the procedure being done to them so that mistakes can be corrected immediately,” Taduran said.

She made the remarks amid videos showing health workers who failed to push the plunger on the syringe, which meant the vaccine was not successfully administered on the recipient.

The Department of Health (DOH) said it would investigate a possible “breach of vaccination protocol” in the incidents caught on video.

The agency also gave assurance to the public that it is taking the reported incidents seriously and that it will make improvements in vaccination protocols to prevent the failed inoculation attempts from happening again.

The DOH also reminded health workers implementing the vaccination program to “take extra care and attention during inoculation.”

The DOH on Friday denied that vaccinators are replacing COVID-19 vaccine doses with water.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said at an online press briefing that they had gotten no such reports, contrary to earlier claims of Senate President Vicente Sotto III.

“Regarding Senator Sotto’s remarks, we have not gotten any reports that that’s happening,” Vergeire said in Filipino.

Sotto earlier called on the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases to look into what he called “vaccination boo-boos.”

Sotto made the call after a video of a failed vaccination in Makati City was widely shared online. It showed the vaccinator failing to press the plunger to complete the vaccination of the person in the video. INQ