COVID-19 PROTECTION | Philippines ‘falls short’ of protecting health workers through vaccination amid surge

COVID-19 PROTECTION | Philippines ‘falls short’ of protecting health workers through vaccination amid surge – WHO

April 19, 2021 , 04:53 PM

(April 19, 2021) – Health officials should speed up the inoculation of healthcare workers to protect them from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as infection cases surge, the World Health Organization (WHO) country representative said on Monday.

Rabindra Abeyasinghe said the government must make sure all health workers would be inoculated first to protect front liners as global supplies are limited.

He reiterated the importance of following the priority listing “to maximize the impact of vaccination as an additional tool in the entire COVID response.”

“We are still short of protecting all frontline healthcare workers and the current surge demonstrates that medical workers have to be fully protected so that they can work to care for the sick,” Abeyasinghe told the Laging Handa public briefing.

“We continue to emphasize that [we need to] work on a priority basis to protect frontline healthcare workers and then move gradually to the other groups that have been identified.”

More than 1.4 million doses have been administered across the country, which consisted of at least 960,000 health workers who had taken their first dose, according to the Department of Health (DOH). Only 191,982 frontliners have been fully immunized with two doses.

Health workers accounted for 63 percent of the total vaccine recipients, according to Abeyasinghe, who said it was not enough to protect them from the virus.

More than 16,000 health workers have been infected by the virus since the pandemic began last year, showing how vulnerable they are in contracting the disease.

But Abeyasinghe recognized the limited supply of vaccines also had a huge role to play in the slow inoculation of frontline health workers, as developed countries already took most of the supplies.

“We continue to urge countries to share vaccines, make available all technologies and share technologies so that other countries can also join in increasing the production capacity of vaccines,” Abeyasinghe said, “so that the vaccine distribution can be done more equitably and more quickly.”

Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr, in a speech to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, called out countries reportedly “hoarding” vaccine supplies which left developing countries like the Philippines struggling to secure enough supply for its population.

Galvez, a retired military general, said about 80 percent of the global vaccine supplies have already gone to rich nations, so there’s barely anything left for other countries.

“Hoarding the limited vaccines does not serve anyone’s interests and only hurts everyone and the global response,” Galvez said. “Similar transgressions run contrary to solidarities reached multilaterally that emphasized the importance of collective action.”

The country only has more than 3 million doses in its current stockpile, consisting of vaccines from Sinovac Biotech and AstraZeneca, which was coursed through the vaccine-sharing initiative of the WHO called COVAX.

Abeyasinghe said the next batch of vaccines from COVAX may arrive within this month and next month, but he was unable to provide a specific date of arrival yet.

Almost 980,000 AstraZeneca doses were supposed to be shipped into the Philippines this month as part of WHO’s commitment, but it faced delays due to India’s exportation policy that controlled the shipment of vaccines abroad as the South Asian country battles an alarming surge of cases.

But officials are still coordinating with other countries like Russia to augment the vaccine supply.

(Beatrice Puente/MM)

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