A total of 5,180,721 doses of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccines have been administered under the Philippine government’s mass immunization program against the dreaded illness.
Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr., vaccine czar and chief implementer of the National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19, reported the breaching of the five-million jab milestone on Monday, May 31, even as he bared that the month-long vaccination output have shown a three-fold increase compared to March and April, or the first two months of the immunization drive.
"Sa totoo lang po natriple po ang output natin ng March at April na one million lang po tayo ng 40 days. Ngayon po natriple po natin na hindi pa umaabot ng end ng May ay tatlong milyon po ang ating nabakunahan (In all honesty, we tripled our outputs in March and April where we vaccinated only one million in 40 days. Now, we tripled it, the month of May has yet to end but we already vaccinated three million people)," Galvez said during President Duterte's pre-recorded public address on Monday night.
Aside from this, Galvez said the country has also achieved its target of inoculating one million people in one week.
"Gumaganda na rin po ang ating datos dahil two consecutive weeks na rin po na one million per week na po tayo (Our data is also showing improvements because we have been able to vaccinate one million per week for two consecutive weeks now)," he said.
The latest figures showed that a total of 1,010,816 individuals were inoculated from COVID-19 from May 24 to 30.
Galvez remained optimistic that the government will also hit its target of inoculating 58 to 70 million people to achieve "population protection," a new term he introduced to replace "herd immunity".
According to the NTF chief implementer, population protection is the reduction of deaths and hospitalization through ramped up vaccination.
The vaccine czar attributed the positive results in the vaccination program to the continuous arrival of vaccines from different sources, including the global initiative known as the COVAX facility.
Galvez said COVAX has committed to provide at least two million vaccine doses to the Philippines every month.
For the month of June, around 2.2 million doses of Pfizer vaccines and another two million doses of AstraZeneca jabs are expected to be delivered to the country via the World Health Organization (WHO)-led facility.
"Vaccine supply will be stabilized by month of July," Galvez pointed out.
At present, the country has a total vaccine supply of 8,329,500 doses.
COVAX, which seeks to provide an equitable access of COVID-19 vaccines to all countries, has donated a total of 2,749,050 vaccines to the country. The donations are composed of AstraZeneca and Pfizer jabs.
In return, President Duterte pledged to donate $1 million to the COVAX facilty so it could continuously bring vaccines to countries that need it the most.