Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, January 21) — The government is negotiating with 18 logistics companies to make sure that no COVID-19 vaccines, either free or procured using public funds, will go to waste due to improper storage or transport services, vaccine czar Carlito Galvez said Thursday.
“Ito ay bahagi ng paghahanda ng gobyerno sa mga darating na bakuna. This is to ensure we have zero wastage para makasiguro na ang bakuna ay makarating sa ating kababayan,” Galvez told a briefing.
[Translation: This is part of our preparation for the arrival of vaccines. This is to ensure zero wastage to make sure the vaccines will reach our fellow Filipinos.]
Galvez did not mention which companies they are in talks with. But the cold storage facilities of pharmaceutical firms Unilab and Zuellig Pharma, and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine “could potentially be used in the first wave of COVID-19 vaccine rollout,” Department of Health spokesperson Maria Rosario Vergeire said in the same briefing.
Unilab could store five million doses of COVID-19 vaccines that need to be kept at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius like the anti-coronavirus shots made by AstraZeneca, Novavax, and Sinovac, Galvez said.
Zuellig has storage units capable of keeping over 600 million doses of vaccines that have temperature requirements of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius. It also has available freezers for 6.5 million vaccine shots with more stringent temperature requirements of -70 to -80 degrees Celsius. Some of its freezers are ready for use of 40 million jabs that need to be stored at -15 to -25 degrees Celsius.
RITM, meanwhile, has cold rooms for more than one million shots of vaccines that have storage requirements of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius, -20 degrees Celsius, and -70 to -80 degrees Celsius, Galvez said.
With these, the vaccine czar assured that the country has “adequate storage capacity for all types of COVID-19 vaccines.”
DOH’s vaccine distribution plan
Vergeire said the manner by which vaccines would be distributed depends on their storage requirements.
Suppliers of vaccines requiring storage in units at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius and -20 degrees Celsius would deliver the products to RITM, which serves as the government’s centralized vaccine hub.
From RITM, the shots will be transferred to regional warehouses. From there, the DOH and its logistics partners will deliver the jabs to local governments, which would allocate vaccines to hospitals and other health facilities, where the shots will be administered to eligible recipients.
Those with -70 to -80 degrees Celsius requirements will be sent to private centralized vaccine hubs. A private distributor will bring them to hospitals that have the capacity to store them.
The country seeks to buy 148 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from seven frontrunners in the COVID-19 vaccine race to immunize 50 to 70 million Filipinos this year. The Philippines may also receive free doses of vaccines from the global COVAX facility, with initial doses to be delivered in the first quarter of the year. COVAX aims to ensure equitable access to coronavirus vaccines.
