Vaccination rate among health workers may go up when more COVID vaccines arrive —DOH, NTF

The Department of Health (DOH) and the National Task Force Against COVID-19 (NTF) assured the public that the current rate of COVID-19 vaccinations for healthcare workers is expected to go up exponentially once more vaccine shots arrive in the country by mid-second quarter this year.

In a statement on Saturday, the DOH and NTF said the current pacing of the vaccinations will improve once the national COVID-19 vaccination program is in full-scale.

“It is not logical to compute performance evaluation from the start of the mini roll out. We will be able to get our benchmark vaccination rate when we start our massive community roll out by May and June,” NTF chief implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. said.

The Philippines began its COVID-19 vaccination program on March 1 after the arrival of 600,000 doses of Sinovac vaccines, which was immediately followed by 487,000 doses of vaccines from AstraZeneca.

On March 7, another batch of 38,400 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines arrived in the country.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said the vaccination of healthcare workers will be steadily paced to ensure that hospitals remain fully operational and have sufficient staff, considering that the health workers being vaccinated are also the ones who perform duties at the hospital.

“In anticipation of local and systemic reactions that can occur as a result of vaccination and may render some vaccinees unable to report to work, hospitals needed to spread out the vaccination of their staff," he said.

"Hindi puwedeng lahat sabay-sabay because we need to ensure na meron tayong sapat na bilang ng medical frontliners para magpatakbo ng ospital,” he added.

("We can't vaccinate them all at once because we need to ensure that we have enough number of medical frontliners to run hospitals.")

Both Duque and Galvez pointed out that the initial rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines is only a preparatory phase of the full-scale vaccination program. They said the lessons from this phase will be used for the vaccination of the larger portion of the population.

"We are only in the second week of our roll out, but the experience we are gaining from this phase will help us once supply of vaccines becomes steady. As of latest count, we have already deployed almost 90% of our available doses," Galvez said.

"We are confident that we will be vaccinating much more once our vaccines arrive, but while we wait for our turn to get vaccinated, I want to emphasize that we cannot let our guards down. Vaccination is only one of our strategies to beat this virus, but our adherence to MPHS is still the best," Duque added. —KG, GMA News