Malacañang said it is not surprising that the Philippines fell to last place in a ranking of best and worst places to be in a pandemic, saying rich countries were hoarding vaccines to the detriment of poorer countries.
In a press briefing, Palace spokesman Harry Roque said the Philippines is a “classic case in point, where inoculation is highly dependent on the availability and stability of vaccine supplies”.
According to a Bloomberg report, Southeast Asian economies continued to populate the ranking’s bottom rungs in September, with Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines in the last five, while countries which topped the list are developed countries such as Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark.
Roque repeated President Duterte’s assertion during a speech to the UN General Assembly that rich nations were hoarding life-saving vaccines, while poor nations waited for trickles.
He said vaccines are key towards defeating COVID-19.
The ranking also included vaccination coverage, severity of lockdowns and restrictions, progress on restarting travel and easing border curbs, case fatality rate, and the overall mortality throughout the pandemic.
Roque said that the Philippines in “numerous occasions has advanced its position on the universal access to COVID-19 vaccines” because the “pandemic will not end unless the coronavirus is defeated everywhere through vaccination.”
At present, the Philippines’ case fatality rate is at 1.51 percent after recording 37,686 deaths out of the 2.5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began.
Bloomberg’s COVID Resilience Ranking put the Philippines at the bottom of 53 countries.
“The Philippines faces a perfect storm in that it’s grappling with the more ferocious Delta variant at the same time as it works with an inadequate testing regime and sees disruptions to its economy and people’s livelihoods as the pandemic continues to rage,” Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg said the Philippines scored low on all four of its metrics related to reopening, had a vaccine coverage of 20 percent which was among the lowest, and had implemented one of the most stringent lockdowns.
Flight capacity is down 74 percent below 2019 levels and the Philippines’ borders remain sealed to visitors, Bloomberg noted.
The Philippines also underperformed in terms of COVID containment, posting the second-worst positive test rate at 27 percent.
“The metric indicates the government is only testing the sickest patients for COVID and that there’s likely high levels of undetected infection in the community,” Bloomberg said.
The country is also “unlikely to meet” its goal of inoculating all adults, or 70 percent of the population this year, it added.
