117K Pfizer vaccines under COVAX to arrive in second or third week of Feb. —WHO exec

World Health Organization (WHO) country representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe on Monday said 117,000 doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine under the COVAX facility will arrive in the second or third week of February.

“The COVAX has promised that they deliver approximately 117,000 doses within the second or third week of February. These vaccines will be Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines,” he said in a press conference.

Aside from this, 5.5 to 9.2 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine are expected to arrive in the country either in late February or early March.

However, Abeyasinghe said AstraZeneca’s vaccine is still under evaluation for Emergency Use Listing (EUL), and the evaluation can be finished in two to three weeks.

“We are potentially looking at some quantity of those AstraZeneca vaccines also reaching the Philippines either late February or early March,” he said.

On Sunday, vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. announced that the Philippines will receive at least 5.6 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca’s vaccines within the first quarter of 2021.

“The vaccines under COVAX can now inoculate our healthcare workers, medical-related personnel, and other frontliners,” Galvez had said.

The Philippine government aims to secure around 148 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to inoculate some 50 to 70 million this year.  —KBK, GMA News