The government is eyeing a monthly run of its mass vaccination drive against COVID-19, testing czar Vince Dizon said Friday, to fend off a possible surge in infections due to the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
The first two rounds of the mass vaccination program administered 10.2 million vaccine doses from Nov. 29 to Dec. 3, and at least 6.4 million doses from Dec. 15 to 22.
“This will be continuous,” Dizon said in Filipino at a briefing that aired Friday. “We need to intensify it and we plan to do that monthly.”
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), meanwhile, said the country may begin vaccinating children aged 5 to 11 by January as the country expands its inoculation coverage.
State regulators have authorized the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use to protect children from the threat of Omicron variant, which is spreading rapidly around the world.
The Philippines logged 310 new COVID-19 cases on Friday bringing the total case load to 2,838,032.
The positivity rate went up to 1.4 percent, based on test results of samples from 28,561 people on Dec. 22. The positivity rate was slightly higher than the 1.1 percent positivity rate recorded on Thursday.
Both are within the World Health Organization’s requirement target of under 5 percent.
FDA Director General Eric Domingo told ABS-CBN’s TeleRadyo the government may begin using the Pfizer vaccine for children in that age group in January.
The government will still have to procure the anti-virus jab for children, which is a lower dose than those for adults, he said.
Domingo said unvaccinated children were left vulnerable to Omicron, which is more infectious than other variants.
“Most omicron cases we’ve seen globally were mild but of course we don’t want it to spread. We’ve also noticed it spreads faster compared to the Delta variant,” he said.
State regulators had already granted an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine to children aged 12 and above.
There are some 13.5 million children aged 5 to 11 in the country, according to the Department of Health. Guidelines for the administration of COVID-19 vaccines for this age group have yet to be released.
As of Dec. 20, the Philippines has administered over 101 million COVID-19 jabs.
More than 44 million people are fully vaccinated while 56 million others have received the first dose. Meanwhile, some 1.1 million people have also received the booster shots.
There were 69 new fatalities, bringing the COVID-19 death toll to 51,050.
The Department of Health (DOH) also reported 227 new recoveries, bringing the total recoveries to 2,777,661. There were 9,321 active cases, of which 474 were asymptomatic; 3,295 mild; 3,382 moderate; 1,795 severe; and 375 critical.
Nationwide, 19 percent of ICU beds, 23 percent of isolation beds, 11 percent of ward beds, and 10 percent of ventilators, were in use. In Metro Manila, 20 percent of ICU beds, 19 percent of isolation beds, 16 percent of ward beds, and 14 percent of ventilators, were in use.
Senator Sherwin Gatchalian urged local government units to prepare to vaccinate children aged 5 to 11, saying this would boost confidence in safely reopening schools.
In a Senate panel hearing on the expansion of face-to-face classes held on Dec. 17, the DOH reported that 7.1 million minors aged 12 to 17 have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, with 2.7 million of them now fully vaccinated.
In other developments:More than 1.5 million doses of German-donated Moderna COVID-19 vaccines arrived in the Philippines on Thursday. “With the pandemic continuing, it’s very important to build on our strongest instrument which we have and it’s still the vaccination. The Philippines [has] a very good and well-functioning vaccination program,” said George Maue, economic counselor of the German Embassy, following the arrival of the vaccines at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. To date, more than 10 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines donated by Germany have arrived in the country.
The Philippines on Friday received an additional 1,405,170 doses of government-procured Pfizer-BioNTech through Asian Development Bank (ADB). The National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19 said the vaccine
doses arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 1 at 3:40 a.m. The country also received on Thursday 1,187,550 doses of government-procured Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca said Thursday that a third, or “booster”, dose of its COVID-19 vaccine Vaxzevria “significantly” lifted antibody levels against the Omicron strain in a laboratory study. AstraZeneca also revealed in other findings that its preventative moniclonal antibody treatment, Evusheld, “retains neutralization activity” against Omicron.