Department of Health (DOH) officer-in-charge Maria Rosario Vergeire on Monday appealed to the personal sector to not procure doses of COVID-19 bivalent vaccines but to keep away from additional vaccine wastage.
“We are strongly advising the private sector at this point to just rely on the national government’s procurement so that we can prevent further wastage of our vaccines since we still have a lot of these monovalent vaccines in the country which we can use as boosters for our population,” Vergeire mentioned in an interview on CNN Philippines.
The personal sector is allowed to acquire the second-generation vaccines focused in opposition to the Omicron variant by way of the mechanisms of the nationwide authorities, primarily based on the present legislation.
But Vergeire famous that round 26 million COVID-19 vaccines stay unused. Of these unused vaccines, round 16 million doses are within the nationwide warehouse, whereas 10 million have been distributed to numerous native authorities models.
That’s on high of the 24 million doses which have already expired.
Meanwhile, the DOH is anticipating round a million doses of bivalent COVID-19 Pfizer vaccines donated by the COVAX facility to reach by the tip of March.
For this preliminary donated batch of bivalent vaccines, Vergeire mentioned the precedence shall be healthcare staff, senior residents, and other people with comorbidities.
So far, the Food and Drug Administration has already issued an emergency use authorization for the bivalent vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer.
There are 73.8 million Filipinos who’ve been totally vaccinated in opposition to COVID-19 at current, whereas 21.3 million have acquired their booster photographs. -Giselle Ombay / VAL, GMA Integrated News
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
