About 10,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been wasted since the country began its immunization campaign in March, a figure the Department of Health (DOH) said Monday was within the global standard.
“When we look at the number of vaccines that were already provided to the population, which is about 40 plus million already, [and] comparing [this] to 10,000, this would yield a very, very small percentage,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in an online briefing.
Vergeire said a wastage rate of 5 percent is acceptable based on the guidelines set by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“The 10,000 [vaccine doses lost] were still within the acceptable range,” she added.
Logistics issues and “unforeseen events” such as power outages and storms were among the causes of wastage, she said.
The Philippines has so far administered 41.41 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, with 18.56 million Filipinos now fully vaccinated, the government said.
The private medical cold-chain company Pharmserve Express Inc. (PEI), meanwhile, said no vaccines were wasted while they were stored, packed, and distributed to local governments since April 2021.
PEI President Andrian Perez issued the statement after the DOH acknowledged that 10,000 doses of vaccines had been wasted since the government began its inoculation program.
Health Undersecretary Myrna Cabotaje said the “biggest wastage” was recorded in a storage facility at a major vaccination site in Filinvest, Muntinlupa City, due to change in temperature in that facility.
The number also includes the vaccines that were damaged during a fire in South Cotabato and the jabs that were spoiled after a freezer was left unplugged in North Cotabato. There were instances in which some vials were dropped or had no labels.
Also on Monday, the Commission on Human Rights expressed support for prioritizing health workers in the administration of COVID-19 booster shots.
“Breakthrough infections in the Philippines which stand at 0.0013 percent of 9.1 million fully vaccinated individuals may seem infinitesimal. However, there is no denying that more and more frontliners are increasingly at risk of breakthrough infections in the midst of the highly transmissible Delta variant which has rapidly become the dominant Covid strain in the country,” the CHR said in a statement.
“Equipping medical frontliners with the right amount of protection is crucial to sustaining the efforts in the fight against this pandemic,” the commission added.
The DOH on Monday said there is no recommendation yet regarding the vaccination of minors 12 to 17 years old against COVID-19.
Interviewed on Unang Balita on Monday, Vergeire said that experts are still studying the possibility of vaccinating minors against the disease.
“We still can’t recommend vaccination of minors as it is still being studied by our experts, who are looking into the safety side as well as the equity side of it,” she said in Filipino.
Vergeire pointed out that though minors can still contract the disease, the risk of severe infection and death is still more common with adults.
The Philippines, meanwhile, thanked the United States government for its continuing support in the country’s response to fight COVID-19, after Manila received an additional 2,020,590 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
The Philippines on Sunday also received 3 million doses of Sinovac, bringing the total number of life-saving shots delivered to 62,359,810 since February.