Senator Imee Marcos on Sunday urged the government to ramp up COVID-19 testing as she expressed alarm that the new Omicron variant, first detected in South Africa, could spread worldwide and spur another series of hard lockdowns and travel restrictions in the Philippines.
Marcos said the governemnt and the private sector should consider taking up the World Health Organization’s (WHO) offer of a new blood-testing technology meant for free manufacture and easy use in rural areas to speed up the country’s COVID-19 testing capabilities.
The senator said acquiring new technology to increase the country’s testing capacity is needed “now more than ever” to reinforce the government’s national vaccination program that is still plagued by public hesitancy, insufficient cold storage and transport to island and mountain provinces, and a looming global shortage of syringe needles.
“Mass vaccination alone is not enough for pandemic control if new variants like Delta and Omicron keep emerging,” Marcos said in a statement.
“We need to get ahead of their spread through early detection and isolation, if we don’t want more blanket lockdowns and a further drag on our economy,” the chair of the Senate Economic Affairs Committee stressed.
The lawmaker pointed out that health experts are now preparing for a scenario that Omicron may render vaccines less effective, with numerous mutations detected in its spike protein that allows the virus to enter human cells.
She said noted that the new blood-testing technology developer, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (Spanish National Research Council), has signed a licensing agreement with the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool and the Medicine Patent Pool to waive its royalties until the last patent expires and to teach and train sub-licensees.
“The government and health industry players should acquire sub-licenses being offered for free to learn and manufacture this technology,” Marcos said.
“It’s a solution to vaccine inequity in low- and middle-income countries, in our poorer municipalities,” she pointed out.
WHO announced that rural areas that have basic laboratory infrastructure can use the new technology that detects COVID-19 antibodies activated by infection or vaccination, with results readable to the naked eye.
Marcos warned that though the country’s infection rate has gone down from a high of more than 26,000 per day in September to less than 1,000 the past week, “we are not immune to a pandemic resurgence now taking place in Africa and Europe.”
“With fewer COVID cases and Christmas approaching, our celebratory mood may throw caution to the wind. Let’s get those sub-licenses, increase our testing capacity, and guard our future,” the lawmaker reiterated.