Administration lawmakers have proposed that health care workers and immunocompromised individuals be provided with booster shots of anti-COVID-19 vaccine for additional protection from the deadly disease.
Led by former Speaker and Taguig-Pateros Rep. Alan Peter Cayetano, the Lower House members filed on Monday a resolution urging the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases to positively consider the proposal.
House Joint Resolution No. 40 was filed by Reps. Maria Laarni Cayetano (2nd District, Taguig City); Michael Defensor (Anakalusugan Partylist); Dan Fernandez (1st District, Laguna); Raneo Abu (2nd District, Batangas) ; Jose Antonio Sy-Alvarado (1st District, Bulacan) and Cayetano.
“Nearly two years into the pandemic, the Philippines has struggled to vaccinate more than a small fraction of its population due to shortages in supply,” the lawmakers said in the resolution.
They added that the extra protection against CoVID-19 should be provided for the most vulnerable due to their line of duty of physical compromise, adding that it is a “moral imperative and a practical necessity to prevent the collapse of our healthcare system.”
“It is vital to protect our healthcare workers, so that they may, in turn, take care of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients. With hundreds of hospitals in the country nearing full capacity and our healthcare workers having to attend to more patients and extending working hours as a result of recent rise in positive cases, we cannot afford a further shortage of our health manpower as a result of our healthcare workers being infected with the virus,” HJR 40 stated.
Cayetano and his colleagues noted that the World Health Organization (WHO) has found that 23,611 Filipino healthcare workers have tested positive for the virus as of the end of August.
“Despite government programs inoculating frontline healthcare workers as early as six months ago in March 2021, immunity for health workers has not been achieved,” they stated in the resolution.
The resolution also cited a study conducted by Chinese researchers on the antibody prevalence in those vaccinated with Sinovac, the most widely used COVID-19 vaccine brand in the Philippines, “which found that effectivity declines below a key threshold around six months following the second dose.”