Local governments will no longer be allowed to announce the brand of coronavirus vaccines being administered to people coming for inoculation, according to the Philippines’ Health Department.
“What we’re going to enforce now is brand agnostic,” Undersecretary Myrna Cabotaje said following reports of hundreds of people assembling at a site in Manila after they found Pfizer shots will be given there.
From now on, only people already in line at a vaccination site will be told which shot they’ll get and “if they do not like the vaccines that are given during that time, then they go to the end of the line,” Cabotaje said.
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On Tuesday, residents lined up outside of the Manila Prince Hotel as early as 2 a.m. for a chance to get one of the 900 Pfizer jabs that the local government announced could be given to walk-ins.
Manila Mayor Isko Moreno told CNN that the preference for the Pfizer vaccine may have been why people chose that specific site out of the nearly 20 in the city.
The Philippines, which has the second-highest COVID-19 infection rate in Southeast Asia, has seven vaccines in its arsenal, but the rollout has been slow. Today less than 1 percent of the population of 108 million has been fully vaccinated.
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China’s Sinovac vaccine, which has an efficacy of about 67% according to a recent study done in Chile, makes up the bulk of the doses available in the Philippines. Meanwhile, only about 200,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine — with an efficacy of 95% — are available, and none of the vaccine produced by Moderna.
Health experts say various factors have led to low confidence among people towards vaccine efficacy. This includes waiting out higher efficacy vaccines, rampant misinformation, bad messaging from the government and fresh memories of the troubled 2016 rollout of the dengue fever vaccine DengVaxia that put thousands of children’s in danger. (AW)
