The Manila City government has announced the city's 19th vaccination site — the Manila Prince Hotel located in Ermita, Manila.
Manila Mayor Francisco "Isko Moreno" and Manila Health Department (MHD) chief Dr. Arnold 'Poks' Pangan hailed the addition of the Manila Prince Hotel as a vaccination center to help in the rapid rollout of vaccines to residents following their inspection visit to the hotel facility on Friday (May 14).
Also present at the site inspection were Manila City Engineer Armand Andres, Manila City Architect Pepito D. Balmores, and Manila Prince Hotel liaison officer Marvin Kim Tan.
Domagoso reiterated the need to speed up the mass vaccination against COVID-19.
"Once you have vaccines, you have to deploy them fast. Vaccination should be faster than infection. Yan talaga ang policy namin sa simula pa lang. Hindi na talaga namin pinapatagal sa storage (This is our policy from the very start. We don't prolong it in the storage)," he said.
The local chief executive also expressed his gratitude to the national government and said that the city government will continue to support "all their efforts in the fight against COVID-19."
The City of Manila through the MHD and its six district hospitals have deployed a total of 151,659 vaccine doses for the A1, A2, and A3 priority groups, as of Thursday (May 13).
The COVID-19 vaccines available in the city and allocated by the national government are those from the COVAX facility (AstraZeneca and Pfizer), Sinovac's CoronaVac, and Russia's Gamaleya Institute (Sputnik V).
The city government is still waiting for the arrival of 800,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from British–Swedish multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca which are expected to arrive in either June or September.