73% of Senate employees vaccinated against COVID-19 — Sotto
MANILA, Philippines — A majority of Senate employees have been inoculated against COVID-19, Senate President Vicente Sotto III said Tuesday.
"As of today, the Senate has all the employees vaccinated at 73%. In other words, 73% of the Senate is already vaccinated," Sotto announced during a plenary session.
The remaining 27% who are unvaccinated, he added, includes some senators. "[B]ecause ang usapan natin, huli tayo (our agreement was we would go last)."
Commission on Appointments and Senate Electoral Tribunal employees are scheduled to be vaccinated this Saturday, he added. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel said security guards and janitorial staff were also included in the chamber's inoculation campaign.
They did not mention the brands of the vaccines used and whether these were taken from the government's stockpile.
However, in March, Sotto said the upper chamber was trying to procure 5,000 coronavirus vaccines for its staff whom he said are frontline personnel in essential services but have no priority allocations under the government's vaccination program.
"It's not the Senate that will go first [but] our employees. Of course, frontline workers in the Senate will go first," he told state-run PTV in Filipino at the time.
He also said Senate leadership preferred vaccines from Russia's Gamaleya Research Institute and China's Sinopharm. Of these two, only Russia's Sputnik V has emergency use approval from local regulators.
Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. in a prerecorded pandemic task force meeting aired Tuesday said the government has administered a total of 3,001,875 jabs as of May 16, utilizing less than half of the 7.77 million doses it has received in total.
Since the government kicked off its inoculation campaign earlier this year, Galvez said 719,602 people have been fully vaccinated and over 2.28 million have received their first dose.
— Bella Perez-Rubio
The national government has so far secured two official deals for COVID-19 vaccine supplies in the Philippines, one with Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac and another with the Serum Institute of India.
Watch this space for bite-sized developments on the vaccines in the Philippines. (Main image by Markus Spiske via Unsplash)
Health Officer-in-Charge Maria Rosario Vergeire says the general population may now get their second booster jab.
"We're just waiting for the release of implementing guidelines, then we'll start rolling out our second booster for the general population," she says. — Gaea Katreena Cabico
Amid questions on vaccines being administered, the Department of Health assures the public all doses are safe and effective as the “process of extending shelf life goes through thorough stability studies.”
“The government ensures that every vaccine that is injected with an extended shelf life has gone through studies, and is still safe and effective against COVID-19,” it adds.
Government must increase vaccination capacity across the Philippines in anticipation of a surge of COVID-19 cases caused by the Omicron variant of the corona virus, Sen. Risa Hontiveros says.
She says local government units and the private sector can work together to put up more vaccination centers and deploy more vaccination teams to get more people inoculated against COVID-19.
"The active COVID cases have nearly doubled in three days. The positivity rate is almost four times the ceiling set by the World Health Organization. Huwag na nating hintayin na sobrang lumala pa ang sitwasyon bago tayo gumawa ng paraan para mapabilis ang ating pagbabakuna."
FDA chief Eric Domingo says that its agency has given emergency approval for the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.
The United States immunized around 900,000 children aged five-to-11 against Covid in the first week the Pfizer vaccine was authorized for them, a White House official says Wednesday.
Roughly 700,000 more have made appointments at pharmacies, White House Covid coordinator Jeff Zients tells reporters.
"The program is just getting up to full strength," he says, adding most of the shots were given in the last couple of days alone. — AFP
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