The Philippines is now ranked fourth among the 10 Southeast Asian countries in terms of the number of citizens vaccinated against the COVID-19. The National Task Force against COVID-19 (NTF) was citing this data based on reports from international media as of April 21. The data shows that the Philippines has injected 1.6 million doses of its vaccine supply to 1.4 million Filipinos. This places the country behind Indonesia, which has administered 17.6 million doses; Singapore with 2.2 million, and Myanmar with 1.8 million.
This ranking, however, is not set against the population per nation. If population is to be considered, the Philippines should be ranked 7th in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as of the third week of April. This is based on the data from according Our World in Data. Based on its research, the 1.4 million Filipinos were injected with at least one dose of the vaccines so far. Therefore, it represents only 1.15 percent of the population.
Based on the same data, leading the ranking would be Singapore with 23.3 percent of its population injected with at least one dose, followed by Cambodia with 7.64 percent, Indonesia with 4.06 percent, Malaysia with 2.24 percent, Myanmar with 1.84 percent and Laos with 1.46 percent.
NTF policy chief implementer and vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. had said that the Philippines was averaging around 50 to 70 vaccinations a day because of the limited number of vaccines. As he was speaking at the Palace press briefing yesterday, Galvez vowed that the government should have an average of 120,000 inoculations per day by June once the bulk of vaccine supplies arrive.
“We can have an average of 120,000 vaccinations a day, but this also means we need to have a reserve of 3.3 million vaccines per month,” Galvez highlighted.
The Philippines started negotiating and purchasing for vaccines as early as October 2020, but the procurement and delivery have been torn by several issues such as indemnity clauses and supply scarcity in the global market. “We saw in the global market that even if you placed orders quite early, we saw that 80 percent (of the global supply) were gotten by big countries like the United States, India, China, United Kingdom and nations from the European Union,” Galvez explained.
At present, the Philippines is administering the China-made CoronaVac vaccine and the British AstraZeneca’s vaccine. Galvez said the country hopes to have and review the portfolio of at least seven vaccine brands this year, including Moderna, which experts said could be administered as a second dose, regardless of the brand of the first dose received.
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