Now the country has more coronavirus vaccine supply, Vice President Leni Robredo thinks it could be time for her to get vaccinated.
Robredo herself will fall under the A3 category, or persons with comorbidities, since she is hypertensive, but she refused to get the vaccine in April because its supply was still lacking at that time.
And besides, the Office of the Vice President (OVP) has more staff who go down to communities than her for COVID-19 response.
“Ako, baka mapabakuna na ako. Ngayon kasi nakita ko sa balita, parang all in all, mayroon na tayong mga 7 million shots available, o 7 million na iyong dumating (I might get vaccinated. I saw in the news, all in all, we have 7 million shots available, or 7 million which have arrived),” she said over dzXL.
“So ngayon kung marami lang supply, pipila na ‘ko (So now if we only have a lot of supply, I will line up),” Robredo added.
The vice president, however, didn’t give an exact date when she will get inoculated as well as her preferred COVID-19 vaccine.
Robredo said she is willing to receive her COVID-19 jab as long as the vaccine to be administered on her has an emergency use approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Since March, the government has started to roll out the vaccines it received from China’s Sinovac and soon after, the doses from British drugmaker’s AstraZeneca and Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines.
The Philippines’ number of COVID-19 vaccine doses is now at 7.5 million following the arrival of the second batch of two million AstraZeneca vaccines through the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVAX facility last weekend.
READ: PH gets over 2M AstraZeneca vaccines as supply jumps to 7.5M
Right now, the country also has 15,000 doses of Sputnik V which have been distributed in Metro Manila. About 193,000 Pfizer-BioMTech vaccines are due to arrive today.
Robredo said they have prepared a priority list of OVP personnel for COVID-19 vaccination. Among them are the persons with comorbidity and those who do community work because they are more exposed to the virus.
“I do community work but not as active like our other staff. For example, we have local affairs division. They are the ones bringing food in communities. The drivers, our EMS team, should be vaccinated. Our Swab Cab team should go first than me. So we are taking care of it,” she said in Filipino.