Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 2) — Western manufacturers declined the country’s offer to pay more in exchange for early delivery of their anti-coronavirus shots, vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said Tuesday.
Galvez did not name them but the Philippines is currently in negotiations with seven vaccine developers, including American pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna and British-Swedish firm AstraZeneca — the preferred brands of the country’s healthcare workers. Galvez also admitted difficulty in accessing during the first quarter vaccines made by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca due to tight global supply.
“Gusto nga naming taasan ang presyo para makakuha lang tayo ng early delivery pero sinasabi ng mga ibang Western manufacturers that is very impossible,” he said in a speech during the launch of Marikina City’s COVID-19 vaccination program.
[Translation: We actually are willing to offer a higher price just so we could have an early delivery of their vaccines, but some Western manufacturers were saying that is very impossible.]
He added that the top vaccine makers’ supply for the first quarter has already been secured by richer countries.
Galvex said what the Philippines is counting on now is a total of 5.1 million doses of vaccines for this month, where 3.5 million shots will be coming from the COVAX facility and 1.6 million shots from Sinovac.
China has already donated 600,000 doses of Sinovac’s CoronaVac and the Philippines is currently negotiating for the delivery of one million more Sinovac shots within the month. Officials earlier said they have secured 25 million COVID-19 vaccine doses from Sinovac.
The COVAX facility is a global initiative led by the World Health Organization which aims to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. The Philippines is set to receive between 5.5 million and 9.2 million doses from AstraZeneca and 117,000 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines from COVAX. It remains unclear when these vaccines will be delivered to the country.
On top of these, officials said last month that the Philippines can soon procure up to 20 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, which are expected to be divided between the government and the private sector.
Meanwhile, the government has also inked a deal to secure 30 million doses of the Covovax vaccine, which is developed by US-based Novavax but manufactured at the Serum Institute of India.
The Philippines has also procured a total of 17 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, through tripartite agreements involving the private sector and local government units.
Aside from supply issues, Galvez noted that they are finding it difficult to convince healthcare workers to get vaccinated with CoronaVac. Their reluctance stemmed from the vaccine’s reported efficacy rate of 50.4% in late-stage trials involving medical workers in Brazil. The Pfizer vaccine, one of the frontrunners in the COVID-19 vaccine race, has been found to be 95% effective in global trials with over 40,000 participants.
