Monday, March 1, 2021

VACCINE MISTRUST, SUPPLY WOES PLAGUE ROLLOUT. Inquirer Newsletter. March 2, 2021.

SHOT IN THE ARM Health Secretary Francisco Duque III administers the China-made CoronaVac to fellow doctor Eileen Aniceto of Lung Center of the Philippines as the government starts its COVID-19 vaccination drive in select public hospitals in Metro Manila on Monday. The first shipment of donated vaccines from the Chinese government is a shot in the arm for the country’s battle against the coronavirus pandemic while supplies from other manufacturers have yet to arrive. —NIÑO JESUS ORBETA

Regions

Cebu, Davao to roll out vaccines this week

The two leading cities in the Visayas and Mindanao will roll out their respective coronavirus vaccines this week, making them among the first local governments to do so outside Metro Manila. —Story by the Inquirer Bureaus

Business

Gov’t urged to include farmers in vaccine priority

The country’s food producers are pushing the inclusion of farmers and agricultural workers in the COVID-19 vaccination priority list after the Department of Agriculture (DA) confirmed that they would not be part of the first wave of inoculation. —Story by Karl R. Ocampo

Newsletter / Join us

Has this been forwarded by a friend? Subscribe now to the Philippine Daily Inquirer Newsletter and get your latest news and important updates on COVID-19.

Get here

Banner Story

VACCINE MISTRUST, SUPPLY WOES PLAGUE ROLLOUT

By Krixia Subingsubing

For government officials, the hundreds of COVID-19 shots given to health workers on Monday as the country launched a delayed vaccination drive were a promise of an end to one of the most stubborn coronavirus epidemics in Asia.

But the country’s failure to secure early supplies of better vaccines was not lost even among the health workers who willingly took the China-made CoronaVac shots that had been found to be only 50.4 percent effective among people like them who directly handled coronavirus cases and therefore were at high risk of catching COVID-19.

Most of them, including Dr. Eileen Aniceto, 59, chief of the Emergency Medicine and Outpatient Department of Lung Center of the Philippines in Quezon City, had signed up to receive the US-made Pfizer vaccine, which along with the vaccine of the US pharmaceutical company Moderna, had the highest efficacy rating among the candidate jabs for COVID-19, at 90 percent.

But after watching many of her patients die from the severe respiratory disease, Aniceto decided to line up for whatever vaccine arrived in the Philippines first.

“I saw a lot of patients who died isolated in their rooms, without their relatives by their side,” Aniceto, a pulmonologist, said. “[Dying alone] is worse than just dying.”

And so on Monday, Aniceto was first in line at Lung Center to take CoronaVac, 600,000 doses of which were donated by China to the Philippines and delivered by a Chinese military plane on Sunday.

Aniceto received the CoronaVac shot from Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, who is disqualified to get the jab made by China’s Sinovac Biotech, having surpassed the maximum age for it, 59. Duque is 64.

Around 20 other Lung Center workers, mostly members of the pulmonology department staff, took CoronaVac shots.

Dr. Vincent Balanag, executive director of Lung Center, said the hospital expected to receive 600 doses of CoronaVac, which would be given to 300 workers, within the week. —WITH REPORTS FROM JEROME ANING, JODEE A. AGONCILLO, DONA Z. PAZZIBUGAN, TINA G. SANTOS, MARICAR CINCO, MEG ADONIS, JEANNETTE I. ANDRADE, AFP AND REUTERS INQ

Editorial

Repugnant proposal

The notion that nurses can be bartered for vaccine shots appears but par for the course for an administration that has lent its ear more to generals and politicians than to health experts and frontliners during this pandemic.

Read full story: opinion.inquirer.net