The vaccination campaign against Covid-19 has been further expanded as the national government now allows the inoculation of employees in their workplaces.
The program, dubbed as “Jabs in Job Sites”, was launched by the National Task Force (NTF) Against Covid-19 on Tuesday, March 8, at the Teleperformance business process outsourcing (BPO) company in Makati City.
Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. led the launching of the program where around 200 to 300 BPO employees were scheduled to be vaccinated with their booster shots. There are around 57,000 employees of Teleperformance in the Philippines, according to its management.
He said the new strategy to scale up the vaccination program was done in preparation for future surges of cases.
“Since March 1, the Metro Manila and 38 other places were already on Alert Level 1 which is the start of our preparation for the new normal. We are now at a crossroad of having that path for the new normal and we want to make sure that we will not go back to the surges,” Galvez said.
“But we cannot say when the next surge is going to happen. What we need to do is to have an additional wall of protection,” he added.
“We have seen that the vaccination sites have been saturated so we need to bring the vaccines closer to the people and employees,” he stressed.
Under the new program, the government will start allocating vaccine supplies to "target" companies with sizeable number of employees so they can start inoculating their workers through the help of the Department of Health. To recall, Galvez had said that vaccination sites on the ground habe now been vacant since many people are now fully vaccinated but few are returning for their booster shots.e
The government and the private sector agreed that the new strategy will help keep the economy quickly recover since the vaccines were made more available for the economic frontliners while Metro and Manila were placed under Alert Level 1.
Under the said alert level, more economic activities were opened up by the government to enable the economy to bounce back from the devastating effects of lockdowns during the past two years.
Administering booster shots to economic frontliners, Galvez explained, will help raise their immunity from acquiring severe symptoms, getting hospitalized, or dying.
“Most people have been complacent since they already got the primary doses. But we are appealing to the people that in order to have a higher wall of protection of immunity, we need to be boosted,” Galvez noted.
So far, the government has fully vaccinated 63,690,890 individuals but only 10,554,093 have received their booster shots.
The Jabs in Job Sites program was part of the preparation of the government for the conduct of the fourth National Vaccination Days on March 10 to 12.
The massive vaccination drive aims to raise the jab rate nationwide since it reached a “dramatic decline” last month.