By Dolly Yasa
BACOLOD City – Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri appealed to the Inter-Agency Task Force and the Department of Health to vaccinate against COVID-19 as soon as possible economic and government frontliners categorized as A4 in the priority list.
“So many vaccines have arrived in the country thanks to the efforts of Sec. Carlito Galvez and Sec. Vince Dizon,” Zubiri said in a statement sent to Daily Guardian here during the weekend.
“However, a lot of these vaccines are just sitting in storage, with many vaccination centers reporting a lack of people to vaccinate, under the A1 to A3 categories. As a matter of fact, I have been told that some vaccination centers have allowed walk-ins so as not to spoil the defrosted and opened vaccines,” according to the senator whose roots is from Negros Occidental.
The government’s vaccination rollout, which began last February, is currently serving frontline health workers (A1), senior citizens (A2), and persons with comorbidities (A3).
Zubiri said that to date, the country has received over seven million vaccine doses of CoronaVac (Sinovac), AstraZeneca, Sputnik V, and Pfizer-BioNTech – all two-dose vaccines.
Only around 2.02 million people have received at least a single dose so far, with just over five hundred thousand receiving the full two doses.
“If some of our vaccination centers are empty right now, I think it’s time that we open them up for the next level in the priority list, our A4 frontliners—our essential economic workers and our uniformed personnel. This category is crucial for our goal of herd immunity,” he said.
“Frontline workers both in the private sector and in the government sector are easily prone to infection and thus need to be vaccinated soon. If we want to achieve herd immunity, we need to start vaccinating as many vulnerable people as possible.”
Zubiri said he supports the stand of Dizon and Galvez to start vaccinating the A4 group as they assured that all vaccination centers will be fully utilized, “so we can bring up our vaccinations to at least 100,000 individuals a day.”
“Of course, we have to continue our efforts of vaccinating our most vulnerable sectors, so we will keep reaching out to our health workers, senior citizens, and our persons with comorbidities,” Zubiri stressed.
There is also a need to ramp up the vaccination program to the provinces, as there has been a spike in cases in several areas outside the NCR Plus bubble.
Zubiri said many of these areas haven’t even started vaccinating their senior citizens yet because they’re yet to receive their allotment of vaccines.
“But with the new incoming batch of imported vaccines, we can now hopefully augment the stocks all over the Philippines.”
