Registration for COVID vaccination in Valenzuela slow, mayor says

Online registration traffic for COVID-19 vaccination in the City of Valenzuela is sluggish, Mayor Rex Gatchalian said Wednesday.

In a forum, Gatchalian attributed the low number of residents who are willing to receive the vaccines to some reservations of his constituents.

“The survey is ongoing. But, informally, talagang marami kaming constituents who are not...”

“I'll give you an idea. The portal has already been open for two and a half weeks. But we've already registered around 14,000 to 15,000 individual accounts, meaning ganun kabagal,” he added.

According to him, some residents want to see their neighbors and the mayor to go first in the inoculation.

He said the city has secured 640,000 doses of anti-COVID vaccine from AstraZeneca for 320,000 recipients, which is around 71% of the city's total population.

Experts from World Health Organization (WHO) said the vaccination of 65% to 70% of a population can already achieve herd immunity in a given population.

According to WHO, herd immunity or population immunity is a concept used for vaccination in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.

Meanwhile, Quezon City mayor Joy Belmonte said only 37,899 out of 74,793 residents who answered the survey said they were willing to be vaccinated.

According to her, 10,819 residents refused to get vaccinated while 26,725 said they were undecided.

Due to this, the city government launched a vaccine confidence campaign to convince Quezon City residents to get inoculated.

Health experts earlier said that Filipinos’ trust and confidence in vaccines may be the next challenge in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Over and above the issue of safety, we’re dealing with a bigger issue of trust and vaccine confidence,” Department of Health (DOH) technical advisory group member Dr. Anna Ong Lim said.

Earlier, the results of an OCTA Research survey showed that only 25% of Metro Manila residents were willing to get vaccinated.

A separate survey by pollster Pulse Asia showed that 47% of Filipinos were not inclined to get a COVID-19 jab, mostly due to safety reasons.

According to the DOH, an intensified information dissemination on the benefits of getting a COVID-19 vaccine can increase vaccine confidence up to 85%. —LBG, GMA News