DOH: Booster shots for health workers to deprive others of 1st jabs

FILE PHOTO: Health Secretary Francisco Duque III

MANILA, Philippines — While expressing support for providing COVID-19 booster shots to healthcare workers, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III emphasized the need to vaccinate a larger percentage of the country’s population first.

“I am pushing for it. It’s just that our All Experts Group, they are all saying that we have to ensure that a bigger percentage of the population must receive the primary series of the vaccines,” Duque told ABS-CBN News Channel’s Headstart on Thursday.

“Many have not received even just one [dose]. So if we’re providing booster shots to health-care workers—which I support—this will rechannel [the vaccines] and lead to disenfranchisement; there will be no equity,” he explained.

Duque also said areas outside Metro Manila still had low vaccination coverage, noting that senior citizens and persons with comorbidity who had yet to be vaccinated should be inoculated first before providing booster shots since they are more vulnerable to the severe form of COVID-19.

The Department of Health (DOH) and its advisers earlier decided not to authorize COVID-19 booster shots for healthcare workers for now.

“To date, evidence is insufficient and inconclusive to support the administration of booster doses,” the Health Technology Assessment Council (HTAC) said in a statement during the DOH’s online consultative meetings with healthcare workers in September.

Likewise, World Health Organization (WHO) representative to the Philippines Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe on Thursday said the WHO did not have a recommendation yet for booster shots for the general population.

He said the organization’s recommendation early this week for third doses for immunocompromized people and the elderly was not similar to the booster shots that some countries were currently administering or planning to give to their general population.

Abeyasinghe said the WHO-recommended third dose was just an “extended primary course” for people with immunocompromized conditions who have been unable to develop full immunity.

“This is specifically for those who are at risk because of their immunocompromized conditions, who are unable to develop and sustain the required level of protection from the primary course of two doses of one brand,” he said. “For these individuals, the WHO is now recommending an extended primary course which included a third dose.”

The WHO said it was also looking at the “evolving evidence” from individual vaccines and had some initial concerns about the capacity and the immunogenicity—or the ability to provide immune response in the human body—of some vaccine brands.

The result, he said, was the recommendation that elderly people who received either Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccines be made eligible to get a third dose of the same vaccine brand within one to three months of the completion of the first two doses.

This, Abeyasinghe explained, would “potentiate” or maximize the vaccine’s immunogenicity.