More news about how the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines is being handled by the public and the government.
The government says they will once again fail to meet their vaccination targets the third time around.
Down to its last 2 days, the Philippines' third nationwide COVID-19 vaccination drive may fail to reach its target, due in part to low public urgency for booster jabs, the Department of Health said on Thursday.
Extended until Friday, the "Bayanihan, Bakunahan" program has so far vaccinated around 2.6 million of its 5 million target, said Health Undersecretary Myrna Cabotaje.
(It's still slacking a bit... It needs to be sped up. We might not reach the 5 million target.)
(The uptick is not yet that quick, especially for the booster. They see this as important, but the so-called urgency is lacking. They do not see that they should get the booster immediately.)
The Philippines has so far fully vaccinated about 61.9 million of its 109 million population. At least 9.3 million have received booster jabs, Cabotaje said.
What is the use of getting a booster when its effectivity does not last?
The efficacy of third doses of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines wanes substantially by the fourth month after administration, a new study by the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday.
Though it's now well documented that vaccine efficacy goes down after two doses, relatively little has been published on the duration of protection after a booster.
"The finding that protection conferred by mRNA vaccines waned in the months after receipt of a third vaccine dose reinforces the importance of further consideration of additional doses to sustain or improve protection," the authors concluded.
"Additional doses." It will never end. It will be booster after booster. Face masks are not going away either. Not until the pandemic is officially over.
The wearing of face mask will remain mandatory until the COVID-19 pandemic is over, National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19 chief implementer Carlito Galvez Jr. said Thursday.
Interviewed on Super Radyo dzBB, Galvez, who is also the country's vaccine czar, said there are no discussions yet regarding the dropping of the face mask policy as it would be the last policy to be lifted.
(So far we have not discussed the dropping of the face mask policy. We have not discussed anything like that. As I've told the media, the last thing we will remove is the face mask because that is our last defense against COVID-19.)
(So our recommendation is that as long as the pandemic is not yet over and we can't say that COVID-19 is totally eliminated, we can't remove the face mask policy.)
This is a crazy policy. COVID is never going away. It will never be totally eliminated. That means masks will be staying on forever in the Philippines while in the rest of the world people can walk around freely.
Did you know that the vaccines are still not fully authorized but only emergency use authorized?
The skepticism among Filipinos may be alleviated if the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccines in the country are given full authorization, a health expert said on Monday, Feb. 21.
Health reform advocate and former National Task Force (NTF) against COVID-19 medical adviser Dr. Anthony “Tony” Leachon said that it is now the time to give “full authorization” to the COVID-19 vaccines being used in the country’s inoculation drives.
(We call the attention of DOH and FDA. Giving full authorization to the vaccines will remove the vaccine hesitancy and it will assure the people that it is no longer an experimental jab because of its full approval),” said Leachon in an interview over DZRH on Monday, Feb. 21.
Leachon added that the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) status of COVID-19 vaccines is one of the reasons why vaccine hesitancy persists.
(Vaccine hesitancy persists because we are still in the EUA. In America, Pfizer and Moderna were already given full product certificates. We should do that in the Philippines as well),” he added.
Giving the vaccine full authorization would not make it any more effective or safe. It would be just another dirty trick to get the public to take an experimental drug for a virus that is hardly deadly unless one is already very sick.
The National Task Force Against COVID-19 wants to take vaccination to the people.
The Philippines will shift its focus to conducting house-to-house and mobile COVID-19 immunization drives as fewer are going to centers to get jabbed, the government’s vaccine czar said.
Carlito Galvez, who also heads the National Task Force Against COVID-19 and is the presidential peace adviser, said the vaccine uptake in the country has dropped to less than 500,000 doses daily from one million.
He also mentioned the low turnout during the third round of the government’s massive COVID-19 vaccination push. Authorities were able to vaccinate around 3.44 million individuals from February 10 to 18, failing to meet the target of inoculating five million people.
"We have reached the saturation point or what we call the inflection point for our vaccination centers. We now need to visit barangays and go house-to-house to raise our daily output," Galvez said during a briefing aired late Monday.
No doubt this is where the list of unvaccinated residents every barangay was ordered to submit to the DILG will come in handy.
The number of COVID cases continues to drop and along with it the number of areas under lockdown.
Only 226 areas were under granular lockdown as of Monday, significantly fewer than in the past two weeks, as COVID-19 cases continued to decrease nationwide, according to Interior Secretary Eduardo Año.
Of the total, only 28 are in Metro Manila. Most of the other areas, a total of 129, are in the Cordillera Administrative Region, and 61 are in. the Ilocos Region.
“It’s good news to see the decrease in our cases. And we can also see the decrease in the number of places that are being put under granular lockdown,” Año said in Filipino during the taped weekly “Talk to the People” briefing with President Rodrigo Duterte.
“Currently, only 14 cities and municipalities — or 109 barangays — are under granular lockdown,” he added.
In all, 267 households and 343 individuals are affected by the lockdowns.
Cases are decreasing and so are lockdowns. But face masks will remain until there is zero COVID.
The no vaccination, no ride policy in Manila did not last long but one group decided to sue and that case is still making its way through the courts.
While the “no vaccination, no ride” policy was implemented by the government when the National Capital Region (NCR) was under COVID-19 Alert Level 3 last January and subsequently lifted last Feb. 1 when NCR was deescalated to Alert Level 2, a partylist group still challenged before the Supreme Court (SC) the constitutionality of the policy.
In a petition filed on Wednesday, Feb. 23, the PASAHERO partylist told the SC that the policy and other government measures allegedly discriminate Filipinos who are unvaccinated against COVID-19.
It told the SC that “the ban on unvaccinated passengers from using public transportation was effective for a period of less than a month, a duration too short for the issues subject of this Petition to be fully litigated.”
It also said: “Moreover, there is a reasonable expectation that the Petitioners will again be subjected to the same ban of using public transportation. The nature of COVID-19 as a disease which constantly evolves has compelled the Philippine Government to revert back to a more stringent Alert Level 3, as shown by the government’s actions in the past three months.”
On legal grounds, the petitioners told the SC that the measures “violate their most basic right to life, liberty and property, and to their right to travel.”
“No person should be denied their fundamental rights by reason of their personal choice to not get the COVID-19 vaccine,” they said.
Thus, they said, the measures are “patent nullity and unconstitutional” for they violate Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution “in that the Filipinos were deprived of their right to life and liberty without due process of law.”
Also, they said the “no vaccination, no ride” policy “caused serious and grave hardships to Filipino who are unvaccinated.”
“This case involving the most basic right to refuse any invasive form of medical treatment, including the introduction of a vaccine, poses serious questions for the public welfare and is demanded by the broader interest of justice,” they said.
“Even though one can argue that vaccines are safe and will aid in preventing serious symptoms on the part of the vaccinee, a greater principle involving the right to choose which medicines to take or inject, takes precedence over such policy,” it added.
Hopefully the court will not toss out this petition as "moot" but will issue a definitive ruling on the constitutionality of this measure.
