THE Philippines received on Sunday night, June 27, 2021, the first batch of Moderna vaccines and another batch of Sinovac vaccines against coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19).
The total volume of vaccines delivered to the country increased to 17,455,470 doses.
Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. said the shipment consisted of 249,600 doses, of which 150,000 were procured by the national government while 99,600 doses were purchased by the private sector led by the International Container Terminal Services Inc.
Galvez said a total of 20 million doses of the Moderna mRNA vaccine are expected to arrive in the country within 2021. Of the total, 13 million doses were procured by the government while the rest were purchased by the private sector.
Hours after the arrival of the Moderna shipment, another batch of one million doses of the Sinovac vaccine also arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
The Philippines has received 12 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine, 2.556 million doses of AstraZeneca, 2.4 million doses of Pfizer, 249,600 doses of Moderna and 180,000 doses of Sputnik V.
Unicef Philippines has yet to clarify whether 2,340 doses of Pfizer were actually delivered to the Philippines during the last Covax shipment.
As of June 27, the Department of Health said more than 10 million doses have been administered to over 7.5 million individuals nationwide. More than 2.5 million have also received the second dose.
In Cebu, the Mandaue City Government resumed its vaccine rollout to inoculate individuals under the A1 (medical frontliners), A2 (senior citizens), A3 (persons with comorbidity), A4 (other frontliners) and A5 (indigent residents) priority groups on Monday, June 28.
It received an allocation of 4,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine on Friday, June, 25.
Dr. Debra Catulong, medical officer of the Vaccination Operations Center (VOC) of Mandaue City, said they had a special inoculation for 83 uniformed personnel on June 25.
Now, they only have 3,917 doses of the Sinovac vaccine that will probably be used up in two days, she said.
She said they don’t know when the next delivery from the DOH 7 will be.
With the number of vaccines allocated to Mandaue City, Catulong said it will take them time to inoculate 70 percent of the population to achieve herd immunity even though the national government had projected that the country will achieve it by the end of the year.
So they assume that future allocations will be in the hundreds of thousands, which was what the DOH 7 had told them, she said.
In case those hundreds of thousands of vaccines do arrive, Catulong said the City is capable of accommodating and administering them to residents who are willing to be vaccinated.
She said the City will still observe the scheduling system and the vaccine rollout will be non-stop.
In case the four vaccination sites will not be sufficient, Catulong said they will open more.
As of last week, 41,359 individuals have received their first dose while 5,931 individuals are fully vaccinated.
In Cebu City, 71,325 individuals have received their first dose while 25,677 individuals are fully vaccinated, based on records of the City’s VOC.
The Project Balik Buhay Covid-19 Vaccination Initiative has also vaccinated 39,681 health care workers, senior citizens and persons with comorbidities from the three highly urbanized cities of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu and Cebu Province as of June 25.
Meanwhile, Cebu City’s vaccination sites at the University of Cebu (UC) Banilad campus, UC Senior High School campus, Robinsons Galleria, SM Seaside City and the New Normal Oasis for Adaptation and a Home complex are temporarily closed after the City used up its supply of vaccines last week.
City Councilor Dave Tumulak, who had been tasked by Mayor Edgardo Labella to monitor vaccination sites, said the City will resume vaccination as soon as it receives a new delivery of vaccines. (TPM / SunStar Philippines / KFD, PAC / PJB)