Around 9.5 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were delivered last week, marking the highest number of transported life-saving jabs to the country since February 2021 when the supplies started arriving.
Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said Monday night, Sept. 20, that a total of 9,586,270 million doses were delivered from September 13 to 19.
"We are very happy with the developments in our vaccine acquisition efforts especially with the recent deliveries," he said.
The deliveries last week included five million doses of Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine on Sept. 13 and 19; 2.77 million doses of Pfizer on Sept. 15 and 19; 661,200 doses of AstraZeneca on Sept. 17; 961,000 doses of Moderna and 190,000 doses of Sputnik V on Sept. 18.
This week, around seven million doses of COVID-19 vaccines will be transported to the country, according to Galvez.
The deliveries are off to a good start with the arrival of 561,600 doses of Pfizer that arrived around 9:20 p.m. Monday. The vaccines were donated by the United States government to the Philippines through the COVAX facility.
"It's the latest installment in a series of vaccine donations through COVAX," said US Embassy Charge d'Affaires Heather Variava during the arrival ceremony at Terminal 3 of Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA). The US government pledged around 10 million COVID-19 vaccines to the Philippines which would be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2021.
In total, the vaccine supply in the country now reached 64,942,000 doses. Of these, a total of 41,414,015 doses were administered nationwide.
Around 22.85 million individuals have received their first dose while 18.56 million others have been fully vaccinated. The fully vaccinated persons represent 24.06 percent of the 77 million adult population that are targeted to be inoculated by the government by year end.
In the National Capital Region (NCR), 84.47 percent of its target population have received at least one dose while 66.37 percent have been fully inoculated, according to data from the National Vaccination Operations Center (NVOC).
Other areas throughout the country have started to scale up their vaccine rollout since the national government implemented its recalibrated vaccine deployment strategy, where the bulk of the allocations are deployed to provinces and regions with high number of cases.
The Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) has now fully vaccinated 26.64 percent of its target population while Davao Region (Region XI) has completely inoculated 22.40 percent of its residents.
CALABARZON which covers Cavite, Batangas, Rizal, and Quezon provinces (Region IV-A) and Central Visayas (Region VII) have fully vaccinated 21.35 percent and 20.85 percent of their populations, respectively.