The national government received another 500,000 doses of procured CoronaVac vaccines from Chinese manufacturer Sinovac Biotech on Sunday afternoon, April 11.
Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr., chief implementer of the National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19, accepted the Chinese vaccines during the arrival ceremony at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 2 in Pasay City.
A Philippine Airlines (PAL) A330 commercial plane with registry number RP-C8789 fetched the Chinese vaccines from Beijing and arrived at NAIA Terminal 2 at 5:18 p.m., ahead of its scheduled arrival at 5:55 p.m.
From NAIA, the vaccines were loaded into two refrigerated vans and transported to Metropac Cold Storage facility in Marikina City prior to its distribution to hospitals.
The delivery of the 500,000 doses of Sinovac vaccines were fewer compared to the original target supply earlier set by the government. Last April 6, Galvez said the country was expecting the delivery of 1.5 million Sinovac doses for this month.
With the recent delivery, the country has now obtained 3,025,600 vaccine doses. Around 1.5 million doses were already deployed to hospitals nationwide.
The delivered vaccines are expected to be allocated in high-risk areas where there is a surge of coronavirus disease infections including the National Capital Region, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal (NCR Plus).
A total of 25 million doses of Sinovac vaccines were secured by the government from China which would be delivered in batches.
The first batch of procured Sinovac vaccines, consisting of one million doses, was delivered last March 29.