1.5M vaccine shots daily eyed in Q4

The National Task Force against Covid-19 (NTF) urged local government units (LGU) to ramp up its vaccination throughput by raising the daily jab rate from 700,000 to 1.5 million.

“Our goal is for LGU to inoculate 70 percent of their eligible population with at least one dose by November. We cannot scale up our national vaccination output if we just settle with our current jab rate,” NTF chief Implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito G. Galvez Jr. said.

Galvez made the statement after the country administered 724,294 doses of Covid-19 vaccine on Friday, far from the average daily jabs of 400,000.

The NTF identified highly-urbanized cities (HUC) and regions that would take the lead in pushing the country’s daily vaccination output to 1.5 million doses following the influx of vaccine supplies from various manufacturers and the opening of the vaccine rollout to the general population including minors.

“With the steady arrival of bigger Covid-19 vaccine shipments, our LGU must work double time to realize President Rodrigo Duterte’s directive, and that is, to continue to ramp up their vaccination rollout,” he said.

To date, the Philippines has received a total of 94,678,340 doses of Covid-19 vaccines since February.

Of these shipments, more than 58.7 million doses were procured by the government, 24.3 million doses were donations from the World Health Organization co-led COVAX facility, 7.9 million were purchased by LGU and the private sector, and 3.6 million doses were donations from bilateral partners.

Priority areas

During the meeting with governors and mayors last week, Galvez, along with Interior Secretary Eduardo Año, Health Secretary Francisco Duque, III, and Deputy Chief Implementer and testing czar Secretary Vivencio Dizon relayed the president’s directive for local chief executives to scale up their vaccination rates.

Dizon named 50 cities across the regions that will be prioritized in the government’s vaccine deployment.

According to Dizon, these HUC outside the NCR were given daily vaccination targets of at least 500,000 jabs daily which they need to hit and sustain by October, and then reach a daily jab rate of 800,000 by November.

“We will prioritize HUC and regions with high impact to the economy. But it doesn’t mean that other areas in the countries will not be given vaccines,” he said. “All of them will receive a lion’s share,” he added. Dizon explained that the NTF and the Department of Health conducted an assessment of LGU and developed a selection criteria for LGU that were later on identified as priority areas.