Three million doses of Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine arrived at Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 2 on Sunday night, Oct. 24 -- marking the 100th shipment of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) shots received by the country.
Of the latest shipment, two million doses were bought by the government while one million doses were donated by the People's Republic of China. The life-saving jabs landed on NAIA Terminal 2 around 6 p.m. via Philippine Air Lines (PAL) flight PR359.
Sec. Carlito Galvez Jr., vaccine czar and chief implementer of the National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19, emphasized the significance of the recent shipment to the national vaccination program. He noted that the first batch of vaccines that arrived in the country were from Sinovac's donation of 600,000 shots on February 28.
"I would like to emphasize that this is the 100th shipment of vaccines in the country and coincidentally, it is also the Chinese donation along with the purchased vaccines. Remember that the first vaccine arrival was also a donation from China last February 28. We would like to thank the Chinese government and Sinovac. Xie Xie (Thank you)," Galvez told reporters at the airport.
Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian expressed hope that the Chinese vaccines will help the government further bring down the cases in the coming weeks.
"This demonstrates the kind of friendship from the Chinese government and Chinese people to the Philippine government and Philippine people. We're happy to see that the confirmed cases in this country is going down, is decreasing with very hard and professional working of the Philippine government and the people," the Chinese diplomat said.
"We hope that the vaccines from China will further continue to bring further down the cases here and bring back the normal life at an early date," he added.
The country has so far received 97,678,340 doses of COVID-19 vaccines, of which, 55,715,693 doses have already been administered nationwide.
A total of 25,711,980 individuals have been fully vaccinated, representing 33.33 percent of 77 million eligible Filipinos that are targeted to be fully jabbed by the end of 2021 to achieve herd immunity.
Meanwhile, 30,003,713 individuals have received their first dose.
From the vaccine inventory, nearly 50 percent are Sinovac shots with 44.5 million doses. Of these, 41.5 million doses were purchased by the government while three million doses were donated by the Chinese government.