Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 30) – President Rodrigo Duterte wants to speed up the vaccination of health workers so the national government can proceed in inoculating other sectors in the COVID-19 vaccine priority list.
“They must go now. They must look for a way to have the vaccine ahead of time,” Duterte said during the weekly Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases meeting on Monday.
Some 1.7 million medical frontliners in private and public health facilities are at the top of the national government’s vaccine priority list. Some 668,018 health workers have been vaccinated as of Monday afternoon, vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said.
Duterte emphasized that medical professionals who are not actively engaged in COVID-19 response are not part of the priority list .
“Let’s be frank. The 1.2 million doses that arrived today will just be enough for the frontliners the health workers and all those connected with the efforts in fighting COVID-19,” the President said, referring to the China-made Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine doses which the government bought and arrived in the country on Monday.
Next in the vaccine priority list are senior citizens aged 60 years old and above, whom Galvez said will start to be vaccinated by April 1. Some local government units in Metro Manila have already started to inoculate their elderly residents.
Also part of the national government’s vaccine priority list are persons with comorbidities, frontline personnel in essential sectors identified by the IATF, and other members of the indigent population.
Duterte suggested merging all categories so the national government can begin vaccinating the rest of the population.
The country started to inoculate healthcare workers last March 1 using the donated doses from the Chinese government and the World Health Organization-led COVAX facility.
