Victorias Milling Company, Inc. announced that over 2,000 of its employees and service providers are scheduled to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in the coming months.

VMC President Minnie Chua said they’ve already submitted the names of their employees who agreed to sign-up for vaccination, including those who are not directly employed by the company but are outsourced.

Chua said that “the safety and well-being of our people will always be our top priority. As such, the vaccination program is necessary to protect their employees and their families from getting severely affected when infected by the virus. The program will also help in restoring normalcy in our operations and allow us to continue serving our planters.”

“We’ve had a few employees who contracted the virus and thankfully, they are now fully recovered,” she said, adding that some employees also lost family members to COVID-19.

This, Chua said, is one of the greatest challenges the company faced and “we are thankful that despite the restrictions and protocols we’ve established, the employees and our clients cooperated.”

She admitted that there was initial hesitation from almost half of the workforce when they broached the idea of mass vaccination.

But after a week of advocacy and testimonials from those who got infected or lost loved ones, over 90 percent of our employees signed-up for the vaccination program.

“We are thankful to our chairman emeritus, Lucio Tan, and the LT Group for initiating this program to procure vaccines for its employees,” Chua said.

She added that mechanics are also being drawn up to allow employees to access vaccines for their families and households.

VMC said there has never been a more challenging period for the company than during this COVID-19 pandemic.

“It is important to note how VMC was able to surmount all the challenges it has faced since 1919 when it was established. Given this track record, I am confident that our company will continue to thrive as it engages in a global campaign to address the problems that the entire world is facing right now,” VMC Chairman Wilson Young said.

Thus, despite the difficulties brought about by the pandemic, VMC still posted a positive growth and this, Young said, was largely due to the VMC Sustainability Team that was established to effectively implement sustainability programs that increased performance levels in our various business segments.

“Keeping the business running as we face health and economic risks--and while we put in place our sustainability programs and actions--is definitely one of the highlights of the previous year. For one thing, we have proven that it can be done and that cooperation allowed us to achieve our targets,” Young said.

He noted that, “the crisis in not yet over and the pandemic still looms above us like a dark cloud. But as we have done in the past year, we will continue to push forward this 2021 despite the challenges and I am again looking forward to a new period of cooperation to attain our goals.”