Go Negosyo founder Joey Concepcion hopes that Department of Health (DOH) officer-in-charge (OIC) Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire will reform the Health Technology Assessment Council (HTAC) to accelerate Covid-19 booster vaccinations in the country.
Concepcion said this as he reiterated his call for the HTAC to allow second booster vaccinations to more Filipinos.
In a statement, the former adviser for the Duterte administration hoped that Vergeire, as her first act as DOH Officer-in-Charge, would reform the HTAC and clarify its role concerning other government bodies.
The HTAC guides the DOH on the coverage of health interventions and technologies to be funded by the government,
"It would be an opportunity for her to initiate important reforms from within the department, starting with a formal audit of HTAC's lapses, especially the ones that caused delays in the public health emergency response," Concepcion said.
Concepcion added that by acting on the bottlenecks, Vergeire would pave the way for better pandemic response in the future, especially when reformulated vaccines that are resilient to newer variants will be available as second booster shots.
"It cannot be business-as-usual in a life-and-death situation like the Covid pandemic. There is so much riding on this," he said.
Concepcion suggested following the lead of countries that have studied the merits of second boosters.
American health officials are planning to allow second Covid-19 boosters for all adults, with the US Food and Drug Administration making second boosters a high priority to include those outside their previous recommendations for persons 50 years and older and those 12 years and older who are moderately or severely immunocompromised.
This is not the first time Concepcion called out the HTAC for being too slow to act on critical Covid vaccine recommendations. He said its inability to act on time will have dire consequences on the country's economic recovery, now made more urgent with rising inflation and worldwide disruptions caused by the protracted conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Second booster vaccinations were allowed in the Philippines only in mid-May, two months after the US updated its guidelines to include even those as young as 50.
The Philippines allows second Covid booster jabs only to seniors 60 years and up, healthcare workers, and immunocompromised persons.
Members of the private sector Advisory Council of Experts (ACE) earlier said that a pandemic could not afford the usual procedures for routine vaccines.
The ACE is a group comprising some of the country's foremost authorities on medicine, public health, economics, and research and data analytics.
The group recommended "the use of the weight-of-evidence approach, which considers whole-of-society needs, vaccine deployment challenges at the ground level, age-related issues such as vulnerability versus schools being able to return to normal, the emergence of variants, and many other factors."