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Friday, March 29, 2024

Poorest of the poor will be first in line for vaccine

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Poorest of the poor will be first in line for vaccine"We cannot afford any more lockdowns without risking total economic collapse."

 

President Duterte is hell-bent on securing a supply of COVID-19 vaccines for all Filipinos once they are available. 

In fact, the President has approved making advance payments to private companies now in the homestretch of the race in developing vaccines that will stop coronavirus infection worldwide.

And to be able to make the procurements, the Philippine government intends to borrow US$9 billion or P433.3 billion from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

Such sense of urgency that the chief executive shows something we wish concerned government agencies, particularly the Department of Health (DOH) under Secretary Francisco Duque, should have demonstrated at the onset of the coronavirus threat in January.

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Unfortunately, the nincompoops acted more like fence-sitters when the epidemic spread like wildfire from Wuhan, China with at least three of its infected residents arriving as tourists in the Philippines in February. 

It was not until mid-March when the country’s health authorities fully woke up to the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, and urged the President to declare the state of public health crisis. 

We hope that this time around, the poorest people will be given the priority for vaccination, as PRRD promised.

It’s disgusting to recall that, even with the miserably limited number of RT-PCR testing kits, VIP government officials and politicians, were the first ones to get tested at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) in March.

The VIPs’ swab specimens had to be sent to Australia for molecular laboratory processing at public expense.

While there was lack of testing kits and no mass testing then, RT-PCR testing has become a lucrative business with excessive fees that most people cannot afford.

Now after eight months of community quarantine, we have registered 419,000 COVID-19 infections, including 8,123 deaths or an average of 1,000 deaths per month.

The total of confirmed COVID-19 cases will have reached nearly 500,000 by year’s end.

Despite the semblance of the so-called “flattening of the curve” and the encouraging number of recoveries, more and more people are catching the dreaded virus.

Also notable is the fact that COVID-19 cases are now widespread in the regions outside Metro Manila where there are lack of testing, isolation facilities and treatment centers.

We can never discount a second wave or a resurgence of massive transmission of the disease which our ailing healthcare system can no longer absorb.

We cannot afford any more lockdowns without risking total economic collapse. 

I believe this is why the President wants so badly the assurance of the country’s access to the availability of the forthcoming vaccines in the international market.

Mr. Duterte must know we have no choice but to reopen the economy to recover from bankruptcy and joblessness. 

Otherwise, more impoverished Filipinos are going to end up dead, not from COVID-19, but from hunger.

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