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Manila Bulletin devider Philippines devider National devider DOH,NTF: Vaccination to 'rise exponentially' once additional vaccine supply arrives

DOH,NTF: Vaccination to 'rise exponentially' once additional vaccine supply arrives

Published Mar 13, 2021 09:14 pm

Government authorities said that the pace of the COVID-19 vaccination is expected to pick up once the bulk of the country's vaccine supply arrives.

This was assured by the Department of Health (DOH) and the National Task Force against COVID-19 (NTF).

“The current pace of the COVID-19 vaccination for healthcare workers is expected to rise exponentially once bulk of the government-procured doses, as well as those from the COVAX Facility arrive by mid-second quarter of this year,” the DOH and NTF said in a joint statement on Saturday, March 13.

The agencies said that the current pace of the vaccination program for healthcare workers “will not be the pace the vaccination will go once full-scale implementation of the National COVID-19 Vaccination Program has been initiated.”

“It is not logical to compute performance evaluation from the start of the mini roll out. We will be able to get our benchmark vaccination rate when we start our massive community roll out by May and June,” NTF Chief Implementer and Vaccine Czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. said.

“We are only in the second week of our roll out, but the experience we are gaining from this phase will help us once supply of vaccines becomes steady. As of latest count, we have already deployed almost 90 percent of our available doses,” he added.

Galvez said that the “lessons learned from this phase will be beneficial once vaccination has been ramped up to cover the rest of the priority populations.”

DOH Secretary Francisco Duque III said it is expected that the vaccination of medical frontliners “will be steadily paced.”

“(This is) in order to ensure that hospitals are fully operational and their hospital staff sufficient at any given time, considering that the same healthcare workers being vaccinated are the ones maintaining the integrity of the health system,” he said.

“In anticipation of local and systemic reactions that can occur as a result of vaccination and may render some vaccinees unable to report to work, hospitals needed to spread out the vaccination of their staff,” he added.

As of March 12, the DOH said that 114,615 individuals were already vaccinated against the viral illness.

The country’s vaccination program started last March 1. The Philippines has so far received 1,125,600 COVID-19 vaccines.

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