Philippines now 3rd in ASEAN in vaccine jabs administered —Galvez

The Philippines is now third among ASEAN nations when it comes to the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses given, vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. said.

Data presented by Galvez in a meeting with President Rodrigo Duterte and several Cabinet officials on Monday night showed that the Philippines has already administered 1,477,757 vaccine doses, just behind Indonesia's 15.8 million shots and Singapore's 1.6 million jabs.

The data presented by Galvez was based on Bloomberg data and reports from Foreign Service Posts as of April 14.

Galvez also reported that 1,279,223 people have been given at least one shot of the vaccine. Broken down, this means 965,960 health workers have been inoculated, with 198,534 already having received two jabs; and 132,948 senior citizens as well as 180,315 persons with co-morbidities have received a first shot.

Galvez said that among the ASEAN nations, only Vietnam and Brunei started their vaccination rollouts later than the Philippines (on March 8 and April 3, respectively), but that now the Philippines is in third place ahead of Malaysia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Brunei in terms of shots given.

The Philippines is also now in 41st place out of 173 countries administering vaccines, and in 14th place out of Asia's 47 countries, Galvez added.

The Philippines started its COVID-19 vaccination program on March 1 following the delivery of the Sinovac shots donated by the Chinese government.

So far, COVID-19 vaccines available in the country are those from Sinovac and AstraZeneca.

Further, Galvez said 500,000 Sinovac doses and 20,000 Gamaleya doses are set to arrive on April 22.

On April 29, the country will also receive 500,000 additional doses of Sinovac and 480,000 Gamaleya shots.

By the end of April, Galvez said 195,000 doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine from the COVAX Facility might arrive.

In May, four million vaccine doses are expected to arrive in the country, consisting of two million Sinovac shots and one to two million Gamaleya jabs.

In June, the Philippines will receive seven to eight million vaccine doses, consisting of 4.5 million Sinovac shots, two million Gamaleya jabs and 1.3 million AstraZeneca doses. — BM, GMA News