Makati City Mayor Abigail Binay on Monday apologized over a viral video showing a volunteer nurse inserting a syringe but failing to inject the vaccine content to a female resident, saying it was an honest mistake which has been promptly corrected.
“It was human error on the part of the volunteer nurse that was immediately corrected,” she said in a statement.
“We acknowledge the video, it was a human error on the part of the volunteer nurse. It happened last June 25. June 26, the video was shown to us. We apologize to the public for this,” she added.
She said the female resident in the video has already been vaccinated as she asked the public for understanding for the volunteer frontliner.
“Volunteer frontliners have been working for more than a year now, and to be honest, it is really hard to get vaccinators now. Let us be more compassionate to the nurse who volunteered her time. The nurse is a human being who gets tired, the nurse apologized and this will not happen again,” Binay said.
She appealed to the public not to use the incident to throw accusations or to attack the credibility of the vaccination program.
The Department of Health earlier said they will investigate the case and coordinate with the respective local government unit concerned.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III likewise urged medical frontliners administering the COVID-19 vaccines to exercise more caution.
“There has to be an abundance of caution when injecting, and to see to it the entire content of the syringe has been injected,” Duque said.
Testing czar Sec. Vince Dizon described the incident as an “isolated case.”