"Herd immunity is a distant goal."
"Herd immunity is a distant goal."
The vaccine rollout of the government seeks to achieve herd immunity by year-end. Unfortunately it seems this is unattainable. Duterte himself admitted as much.
While it is true that vaccines from Sinovac, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Gamaleya and Moderna would soon be available, herd immunity is a distant possibility because of intervening factors like government inefficiency. Many local government units seem incapable of hastening the rollout process.
President Duterte himself and the IATF lowered the target from 60-70 million to 50 million out of 110 million Filipinos.
For one thing, many LGUs have not adopted a system of speedy and orderly rollout of vaccines. Some, like Manila, Makati, Taguig, Quezon City and Pasig have systemized their vaccine rollout, there are LGUs like Paranaque, having only one or two vaccination sites.
In Paranaque, for example, it has only the MOA (Mall of Asia) and the SM Sucat as vaccination sites.
Take this from a Paranaque resident who attempted to walk into the MOA last Monday for vaccination. She sent this note through Facebook:
“DO NOT ATTEMPT to walk-in at a vaccination site when there is a maximum capacity listed. Today, we wasted five hours at the[mall] Ayala to try and get Pfizer shots. It was chaos at its best. No one organized the lines. There were more walk-ins than scheduled people. So everyone was in a 4-5 kilometer queue snaking along the entire parking lot. No one knew which line was for what.”
Bad deal for those who actually had an appointment slot, because they fell in line with the hundreds of walk-ins. They probably missed their slot today. Those who went without an appointment, like us, thinking it would work, were wrong, So wrong.
I think it worked for other walk-ins in the past because there was no maximum capacity for the doses. Today, the max was for 2,000 doses only. So as long as they had vaccines available, walk-ins could be accommodated.
In the end, we just fell in line to get ourselves scheduled, hopefully for a shot this week. Of course, to us it was like roulette. No one knows if they would enter the names we wrote on their list (manually) , or the names would ever make it into some database for scheduling.
We can do better, Paranaque!
I saw one of those chaotic vaccination rollout photos, and the mob, without any notion of social distancing, made it all worse. My gulay, this is what I mean by LGUs without a system to make things orderly and fast, thinking the vaccine rollout a big joke.
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Here’s a list of news for the IATF to consider.
Health reform advocate Dr. Anthony Leachon suggested to the IATF some easy to-do measures to ramp up vaccination, especially that AstraZeneca vaccines are expiring starting next month.
He said LGUs should also be allowed to switch some vaccine doses, and that those administering should not make them wait until the Chinese vaccines are depleted before getting UK-made jabs.
The health expert also said covered but well-ventilated parking lots can be used as temporary vaccination. This includes drive-through sites.
Leachon said the private sector can easily take up the slack in vaccination given its resources and the IATF should allow work-in factory inoculation with government supervision. He said the government can also give the expiring AstraZeneca vaccines to the private sector in exchange for the ones benefited by businesses that are arriving next month.
This is a sensible suggestion for the IATF from somebody who knows a lot about the COVID-19 crisis. Until now, I have been wondering why Leachon resigned from his job as IATF consultant. Duterte should start asking questions.
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Without realizing it, presidential spokesman Harry Roque has given the opposition ammunition in next year’s local and national elections by claiming that the opposition would find it difficult to find faults of President Duterte and people under him insofar as government response to the COVID-19 pandemic is concerned.
The truth of the matter is that Duterte and his people under him have had shortcomings in dealing with the pandemic. The fact that amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Duterte and the IATF are always trying to balance the safety and health of the nation with the need to jumpstart economic recovery, knowing full well the first consideration should be the health and safety of people, like during the height of the COVID-19 upsurge. In short, Roque gave the opposition ammunition to attack and criticize the Duterte administration. Roque politicized the government response.
There have been a lot of shortcomings on the part of the Duterte administration on the vaccine procurement and rollout.
In other words, Roque has become a problem for Duterte and his administration.