The private sector is doing its share to ramp up the vaccination of Filipinos before they get infected with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
Presidential Adviser for Entrepreneurship Joey Concepcion announced that Go Negosyo has teamed up with SM Supermalls and Robinsons Land Corporation for the launch of close to 50 vaccination centers. The latest vaccination project seeks to provide easy access to more than 300 micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and close to 170,000 employees across the country.
"With this, I recognize the efforts of our partners, SM and Robinsons, for facilitating a speedy private sector’s vaccination rollout, and making it more accessible to our kababayans,” Concepcion, founder of Go Negosyo, said in a statement Tuesday, August 10.
“We need to do this as fast as we can, as we are aggressively rolling out vaccination efforts to prevent the transmission of the Delta variant across Metro Manila,” he added.
Concepcion said it was imperative to accelerate the vaccination drive to build a "wall of defense" against the fast-spreading coronavirus.
The country's active cases of infections have soared to more than 78,000 as of August 10 as authorities move to contain the spread of variants, including the highly transmissible Delta strain.
"With more and more cases being recorded, it has become a tight and dangerous race between the Delta variant, the government, and private sector’s efforts to vaccinate the unvaccinated. We need to slow down the acceleration of the Delta infections to buy us more time to inoculate the unprotected," Concepcion said.
"Delta’s viral load is 1,000 times higher in people infected and is 6 times more transmissible. We must prepare now and build our wall of defense by striving for herd immunity. If we do it now, we can save more lives and livelihoods," he added.
SM Supermalls President Steven Tan expressed commitment to the vaccination drive to ensure the protection of people against the coronavirus. "With our collaborative effort, we will be able to realize our goal of achieving herd immunity by year-end and bouncing back stronger and better in this pandemic," Tan said.
RLC President and CEO Frederick Go also offered the company's commitment to strengthen the country's vaccine rollout. “We, at Robinsons Land, are committed to doing our part in helping the country and our fellow Filipinos overcome this crisis. We will continue to support efforts to vaccinate the population at the soonest possible time," Go said.
The government has so far administered more than 24 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, including over 11 million fully vaccinated. The vaccination target is to inoculate 50 million to 70 million Filipino adults before the end of the year or early 2022 to achieve herd immunity.