The Taguig City government has suspended vaccinating people with the first dose for two weeks due to lack of new supply of vaccines.
“As directed by the National COVID-19 Vaccine Operations Center (NVOC) Advisory No. 62, amid the delays in the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines, Taguig City is temporarily suspending the online and group scheduling for first doses, and prioritizing the administration of second doses for the next two weeks,” the city government announced Wednesday.
It added, “By prioritizing second dosers, Taguig City is set to fully vaccinate 50,000 Taguigeños or eight percent of the total population of the city this week. Rest assured that the administration of COVID-19 first doses will resume as soon as vaccine supply stabilizes.’’
As of July 6, Taguig has vaccinated 276,368 individuals with the first dose, or 40.6 percent of the target population of 680,000.
The NVOC notified local government units that the arrival of the Sputnik V component II vaccines and delivery of Sinovac’s CoronaVac will be delayed.
National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID 19 chief implementer Sec. Carlito Galvez Jr. said Sinovac told the Philippine government that CoronaVac deliveries in July will arrive starting in the second half of the month.
The Philippines expects a first delivery of 2.5 million CoronaVac doses out of the six million doses of the vaccine slated to arrive this month.
Galvez told LGUs not to use as first dose the CoronaVac vaccines intended for the second dose.
“With this development, we advise all LGUs who have Sinovac vaccines in their inventory to ensure that the allocation for the second dose should be used as the second dose,” said Galvez.
He asked “for the patience and understanding of the public. Though we have already secured the volume needed by the country, there are still other factors that may delay production and deliveries that cause this slippage.”
“Rest assured that despite the two-week delay in the delivery of these Sinovac doses, our vaccine rollout will not be affected and will proceed nationwide, we should also understand that Sinovac also exhausted its supply for us. Last June, Sinovac delivered more than its contracted supply with a total of 6.5 million doses instead of 4.5 million doses,” he added.