The Philippines was eyeing for COVID-19 vaccination by March 2021 in the “best case scenario”, according to Duque.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III on Monday said that the Philippines may start vaccinating its citizens with the COVID-19 vaccine around March or April 2021.
When asked when the vaccination may start, Duque said in an interview on ANC’s Headstart that they had done some scenario analysis under the leadership of vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. and he thought the “best case scenario” would be about the end of Quarter 1 of 2021 or about the start of Quarter 2 of 2021.
“A lot of factors will have to be taken into consideration to be able to more definitively set schedules for actual distribution, deployment, and inoculation of our people within our priority list,” Duque said.
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Duque added that the government was looking to build a portfolio of different COVID-19 vaccines depending on the availability and evaluation of a panel of experts.
He said in the list were those from AstraZeneca, Gamaleya, Sinovac, Sinopharm, and Johnson & Johnson.
COVID-19 vaccines from those companies required a “much less sophisticated and a bit higher cold storage temperature”.
Duque also said that Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine demanded -70 degrees celsius storage, which the country didn’t have at the moment.
However, Duque said that he heard from Galvez that the company “might be willing to provide” the cold storage facility in order to ensure the COVID-19 vaccine’s effectivity.
In addition, Duque said that the distribution then will depend on the requirement of every COVID-19 vaccine that would be rolled out.
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Since the Philippines had been doing vaccination drives for decades, Duque said that it would “piggyback” on existing systems.
“We need to enhance the capacity because there has never been in the history (a time when we had to vaccinate) a huge number of people, at 60 to 70 million people. It will take time to do it,” Duque said.
Moreover, Duque said that the government would also need to train more people in order to do the vaccination in a larger scale.
In response to Senator Bong Go, Duque committed to being one of the first recipients to receive COVID-19 vaccine in order to urge the public to get themselves vaccinated.
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