The country's supply of vaccines against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) further increased with the delivery of 1,196,910 doses of Pfizer shots late Monday, Oct. 11.
A total of 272,610 doses of government-procured jabs arrived around 9:20 p.m. while 924,300 doses were transported around 4:15 p.m. from the donations of the United States government to the country through the COVAX facility.
Assistant Secretary Wilben Mayor, head of National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19's sub-task group on current operations, encouraged the local government units (LGUs) to increase their vaccination capacity so that the national target of inoculating 50 to 80 percent of the 77 million eligible population will be achieved by the end of 2021.
"We have enough supply of vaccines coming in projection of almost 100 million this October. Again, I encourage everyone to get vaccinated," Mayor said.
"We really ask local government officials, LGUs, and implementing agencies to increase their vaccination numbers so as to achieve the target 50 to 80 percent of the target population to be inoculated within this year," he added.
So far, more than 21 million doses of Pfizer have already been delivered to the Philippines, of which, eight million doses were procured by the government while 12 million doses were donations from the COVAX facility. Around 10 million doses of the COVAX-donated Pfizer shots came from the United States government.
"Right now, the United States has pledged to work with COVAX to provide enough vaccines to safely vaccinate one in five Filipinos. We're hoping that these government-procured vaccines will help with that," said US Embassy political officer Kevin Riley.
"We're going to assist the Philippines going forward. We've helped the Philippines... we've worked with them to fight global public health crises in the past and we're going to do that all throughout the pandemic," he added.
The country has a total of 87,690,960 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in its inventory where 49,673,491 doses have been administered nationwide.
As of Sunday, a total of 26,486,522 individuals have received their first dose while 23,186,969 others have been fully vaccinated.