"History will not be kind to those incompetent officials."
"History will not be kind to those incompetent officials."
For the nth time, Malacanang gave Health Secretary Francisco Duque a pass. Lucky guy. Maybe the Palace is right that what happened with the Pfizer vaccine is no big deal. What does it matter if the vaccine is delayed for six months? It only means that the virus will kill more Filipinos. Did the effort to procure 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine for January 2021 fail because Secretary Duque dropped the ball? Duque denies it and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez is insisting that there is no fiasco because the negotiations are still on.
Duque, in a statement to the press, also said that when he was given the documents, he was given no deadline and that if there was any error, it was on the side of caution. What caution? All that he had to do was to sign a confidentiality non-disclosure agreement. Why would it take him three weeks to sign such a document? Maybe he followed the warning of Senator Aquilino Pimentel who I did not realize is a logistics expert. Every country on earth knows that there is a mad scramble to procure a vaccine because there is a long queue for the items. It was fortunate that the United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo agreed to use his considerable clout to help us procure the Pfizer vaccine for delivery by January. Now, we are at the back of the line instead of being in front.
I would think that any delivery agreement that our officials will sign with regard to any vaccine is premised on the fact that the vaccine is safe, effective and more importantly approved for use by competent government authorities from the country of origin. So, it should not have taken Duque that long to sign that document. This is not the time to be taking our own sweet time requesting for a lot of documents to study when almost every country that has money have been negotiating for early delivery of the vaccine when ready. Maybe the good Secretary simply forgot the old saying that the early bird catches the worm. Let us hope that this dropping of the ball – or perhaps dribbling of the ball is the better term – has nothing to do with some sectors in government favoring a particular vaccine like the Sinovac vaccine which cost $20 more than the Pfizer vaccine.
From the daily stream of reports that we are reading, it appears that the bulk of whatever vaccines that we will procure will come from China with 30 million doses. I wish however, that Secretary Galvez can come out once and for all with a statement naming the vaccines that his team has decided to buy. Pfizer and Moderna were already given emergency use authorization. AstraZeneca does not yet have authorization but already, we have an agreement to buy 2.9 million doses and Galvez wants another 20 million doses of it. Why could we not have done the same thing with Pfizer?
The fourth is Sinovac with Sputnik V from Russia being the fifth.
In a report last Monday, Secretary Galvez is in negotiations with representatives of Covovax of India to purchase another 30 million doses. Covovax is still undergoing its third phase trials and therefore not done yet. This suggests that the vaccines will be administered by about September. What is taking them so long to make a decision? I wish however, that they will choose vaccines that the public will have confidence in. After all, it will be the people’s arms that will be injected. We must remember what happened because of Dengvaxia. The people lost their trust in vaccines. This is why it matters what vaccines to buy so that people will be willing to be injected.
If there were mistakes in the last ten months in the handling of this pandemic, the government cannot afford a fiasco in the vaccination program this time. Sometime in the future when this pandemic will be history, a more objective assessment will be made on how the government responded to this 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Now is not the proper time. For one, the pandemic is not yet over. The daily infection numbers are still high and continuous to kill a lot of people but this no longer seems to alarm us. We have gotten used to it and the fear factor is gone notwithstanding frequent warnings.
Everybody seems to have adjusted to pandemic life. This is why it is so important to be able to get a vaccine at the earliest possible time instead of July or August 2021 in order to save as many lives as we can. If we bungle the effort, history will not be kind to those incompetent officials responsible.
