Have faith in science

The controversy that envelops the anti-dengue vaccine Dengvaxia, and the Filipinos’ distrust in any product made in China contribute to the difficulties faced by the government in convincing the people to have themselves inoculated with CoronaVac.

Global health experts, however, say any vaccine is better than no vaccine at all.

Hello, March! Hello, hope!

The first summer after a “canceled year” started with a promise of recovery with the arrival of 600,000 doses of the CoronaVac anti-Covid vaccine at end of February.

It’s a paltry number, but the government was trying to create a hoopla after its rollout yesterday as it still needs to build public confidence in vaccines. It’s what the government needs to address.

Two things have caused the Filipinos’ eroded trust in vaccines.

The first could have been avoided, but faulty politics had scoured our countrymen’s faith in science — in the manner they look down at politics and politicians — when former President Noynoy Aquino used the anti-dengue Dengvaxia jabs to advance the presidential bid of his bet in 2016.

’Twas no wonder the Dengvaxia issue helped pull down then Liberal Party candidate Mar Roxas. Aquino’s rivals had also wrung it badly until it dried in their hands, yet they continued to squeeze it until it was their time to cry. Now, who’s crying to regain trust in vaccines?

The second is the people’s distrust on anything China-made. China, to many, is the land of knockoff products and low-class imitations.

That was the old China. But the China we are facing now is a different country. This China is the country that plans to host more than 40 space launches this year. This count excludes its success in sending its rocket to Mars’ orbit and the various other space explorations it made while the world was battling a pandemic.

It’s a big statement from the third country

to have independently sent humans into space. Yes, China did.

By 2022, China would have its own artificial moon with an aim to illuminate city streets after dark, with scientists saying that it could be eight times more luminous than the actual, original moon.

Now we need not talk about clone shoes and bags anymore. Erasing this negative notion against China, however, will not be an easy task. Even President Rodrigo Duterte could not seem to easily convert his popularity to an immediate support to the CoronaVac.

It also does not help the President’s spokesperson, Secretary Harry Roque, had publicly stated the Chief Executive prefers to be given shots of Sinopharm, yet another China-made vaccine, but one that has shown a 79 percent efficacy rate that is lower than Pfizer or Moderna, but it’s better than the 50.4 percent recorded in Brazil for the CoronaVac.

It’s the Sinovac vials that we have now, however. And the Department of Health has to work harder to convince the population that any vaccine is effective than having no shot at all.

Health experts, however, agree that any vaccine is humanity’s best chance to survive the pandemic.

None of these vaccines, on their own, are enough to inoculate a global population of some 7.8 billion people. The pharmaceutical companies will need to work together to cover all populations.

Covid-19 continues to threaten to upend human life and has claimed nearly 2.5 million lives while directly affecting economies that lessen our quality of living.

What we have now is a global economic calamity. This slowdown raises the questions of how and when we could go back to normality.

Even with the combined efforts of countries that have produced the currently available anti-Covid vaccines, Bloomberg’s tracking says the latest vaccination rate of 6,730,633 doses per day — on average — would still take more than four-and-a-half years to cover 75 percent of the population with a two-dose vaccine.

This gamble on vaccines which had taken just months to produce — the quickest in history — would pay off like a miracle despite the agonizing wait some countries are going to endure.

It’s not just the Philippines that is waiting to join the first 103 countries, which have long rolled out their vaccination programs. But trust the process because the world is relying on just one, whatever name each vial possesses.

“Bloomberg’s tracking says the latest vaccination rate of 6,730,633 doses per day would still take more than four-anda-half years to cover 75 percent of the population.

“Erasing this negative notion against China, however, will not be an easy task.