Senator Risa Hontiveros on Thursday, March 18 thumbed down a proposal of the National Task Force for COVID-19 to use the China-made Sinovac-vaccines to senior citizens reminding them that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already made a clear recommendation it is not for senior citizens when it issued an Emergency Use Approval (EUA).
(Joseph Vidal / Senate PRIB / FILE PHOTO)
“Giving Sinovac to our senior citizens is intentional malpractice. Nakakagalit ang ganitong pagpupumilit ng NTF (NTF’s insistence is annoying),” Hontiveros said in a statement.
“Huwag sana maging pasaway ulit sa sarili nating national policy (Let’s not backtrack from our own national policy),” she said, when asked about the NTF’s plan to vaccinate the nine million senior citizens using Sinovac, as announced by NTF chief implementer Secretary Carlito Galvez, Jr.
“This is another reckless and hypocritical proposal by the NTF and our highest government officials,” she said.
Hontiveros said the government should do away with a “that will do” attitude, which eventually compromises the people’s health.
“Our officials seem at peace with the ‘pwede na’ (that will do) at ‘basta nagawa’ (as long as its done), which is why one year later, we’re the only country in the whole Southeast Asia that has an upsurge in cases,” she lamented.
“We will take even more steps backwards if we force the most vulnerable sector in the pandemic to take a vaccine that is not recommended for them. Let’s start walking in the right direction before things get worse,” she stressed.
In a similar note, Hontiveros said the government should commit to a serious timeframe for the complete vaccination of healthcare workers, as only 12.7 percent of the 1.7 million health workers have been vaccinated so far, as per NTF’s report.
She noted the government’s vaccination rollout is paced without any urgency given the infection surge. “We cannot take our sweet time with vaccination. We have to have real deadlines and concrete goal posts so there is no room for failure,” she said.
She also said the COVID-19 vaccine tracker she proposed and which would be rolled out soon is a good first step. Likewise, she said the government should set higher standards to fulfill its goal of eliminating COVID by 2022.
“The administration has a toxic relationship with the Filipino people because it has no real sense of the word ‘commitment’, “ she pointed out.
“Let’s take the timeframe seriously and vaccinate all our healthcare workers,” she said.