Villanueva: Covid-19 SRA should also cover pharmacists in vaccine centers

SEN. Joel Villanueva took up the cudgels for pharmacists doing Covid-19 vaccine jab work, stressing they too should be receive special risk allowance (SRA).

“Pharmacists and other personnel in private drugstores who will serve as Covid-19 vaccination centers must receive the benefits granted to health workers under the 2022 national budget and other laws,” the senator stressed.

In a news statement issued on Wednesday, Villanueva asserted that“front line health workers fighting a gains tc ovid should be entitled to and receive every benefit that the government can provide. It is their right, and the very least we can do to honor their dedication to end the pandemic.”

The chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor reminded that “if the workers get infected while doing their work, they should get free medical care and receive monetary compensation. This is what the law and common decency tells us to do,” he stressed.

Moreover, Villanueva recalled that under the General Appropriation Act for 2022 passed by Congress, health-care workers who get sick with Covid-19 shall receive P15,000 in compensation for mild or moderate cases; P100,000 for severe or critical; and P1 million if resulting in death.

He added that while workers in private pharmacies are not demanding pay for “the valuable public service they will be doing, it behooves upon the government, however, to offer them some form of honorarium, prodding fellow lawmakers: Let us emphasize the ‘honor’ in the ‘honorarium,’ considering the risks they face at work.”

The senator suggested that the required funding “can be sourced from the P51 billion in the 2022 national budget for Covid-19 duty pay and medical care of public and private health-care workers.”

Villanueva recalled that some P9 billion of that amount is “immediately releasable,” adding that “the P42 billion can be financed by excess revenues or new loans.”

He noted that in a move to entice more people to get vaccinated, the Duterte administration tapped selected private drugstores as vaccination sites, with pharmacists administering the vaccine.

Hailing the move “as a good way of getting more people jabbed by making it easily accessible to the community and hopefully, not a daylong ordeal,” the lawmaker suggested that “the more professionals joining the bakuna brigade, the sooner we will be able to meet our goal of inoculating 100 percent of the target population by the first week of May, and the sooner they get back to a healthy working environment.”