WHO’s Abeyasinghe: Philippines still short of protecting health workers vs. COVID-19 thru vaccine

The Philippines is still short of protecting its health workers with only 63% of them getting a vaccine against COVID-19 so far, a World Health Organization (WHO) official said Monday.

Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe, the WHO country representative to the Philippines, made the announcement as he appealed for immediate vaccination of health workers under the government’s COVID-19 vaccination program.

“At least 1.125 million doses have been administered and 63% of them are health workers. We need to still prioritize and ensure full coverage of medical frontliners,” Abeyasinghe said during the Laging Handa briefing.

“We are still short of protecting all frontline health care workers, and the current surge demonstrates that medical workers have to be fully protected so that they can work to care for the sick,” he added.

Based on government records, health workers and medical frontliners in the country are at 1.7 million, meaning it would take 3.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to fully protect them.

The health workers and medical frontliners are the first in line in the government's COVID-19 vaccination program which started last March 1.

The WHO official, however, noted that the lack of COVID-19 vaccine supply for low and middle-income countries is also a factor, given that majority of vaccines are being procured by rich countries

At the same time, Abeyasinghe appealed to high income countries to share the COVID-19 vaccine to those in need.

“We continue to urge countries to share vaccines and make available all technologies so other countries can join to increase the capacity of vaccine production,” he said.

Abeyasinghe noted that COVID-19 vaccine supply from global initiative COVAX facility will be delivered to the Philippines this month and in May, but that he cannot give a specific delivery date.

The Philippines has 3,025,600 doses of COVID-19 vaccines so far. Of this number, 2.5 million doses are Sinovac while the rest are AstraZeneca.

The Philippines has 141,089 active COVID-19 cases so far.

Of this number, 10,098 new cases were recorded on April 18. — RSJ, GMA News