Based on the government’s prioritization for vaccination, A1 to A3 covers healthcare workers, senior citizens, and persons with comorbidity, while the A4 covers frontline personnel in essential sectors including transportation workers such as bus drivers, conductors, MRT personnel, jeepney drivers, etc.
Given that mobility and transportation are the key components of the economy and basically, of how we live on a day-to-day basis, it is not much of an argument that transport workers should be on the priority list for vaccination from the COVID-19 virus.
The fact, though, is that with little of the vaccines that are available for the first three tiers on the list, we do not see many of our transportation brothers and sisters receiving the vaccine in the weeks or maybe months to come.
It is noteworthy to consider at this point the latest initiative of the Quezon City government to highlight this need on the part of transportation workers. They are actually out there in the streets, on person-to-person contact with the general populace and who if, infected by the virus, could be by themselves virus spreaders in land, sea and air. Last May 1 or Labor Day, the QC government set up a drive-thru COVID-19 vaccination site for transport workers with the aim to vaccinate over 200 tricycle drivers and food delivery riders.
According to QC Mayor Joy Belmonte, “Our objective is to expedite vaccination because they ferry people every-day. To make it faster, they can just pass through and get vaccinated. They do not need to wait one and a half hours. It will not be operational the whole time. If a certain number of transport drivers are booked for a certain day, once we allow the A4 category to get vaccinated, then we will activate the drive-through.”
As the good mayor said, the vaccination of a handful of transport workers is an expression of the city’s ambition to get the city’s transport workers vaccinated once the A4 category is opened by the COVID-19 Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF). I would like to commend the mayor’s initiative, though symbolic at this point, but something that the rest of Metro Manila mayors and local government unit (LGU) executives throughout the country should also take note.
In a related matter, Mayor Joy also announced that Quezon City will allow the private sector to use the COVID-19 vaccines allocated by the national government so that private companies can tap their own doctors and nurses in vaccinating their employees. She said that in her initial talks with the private sector, “we found out that a lot of these corporations have their own doctors, nurses, and while we are not yet vaccinating A4s, we are vaccinating until A3, eventually we will move to essential workers,” she said in a television interview.
I think that Mayor Joy hit the nail on the head when she reached out to the private sector regarding the upscaling of vaccination among the general population which is the only way the country can really take control of the spread of the virus which is currently still on the rampage.
Involving the private sector is the key in the success of the vaccination drive by the Biden administration in the United States which has jabbed about half of the US population in the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th US President.
In the US, companies and private institutions such as nursing homes, clinics and hospitals as well as pharmaceuticals such as Walgreens Company, CVS Health, Walmart and Rite Aid Corp have been mobilized to get the vaccines into the arms of Americans. The question is: how come the IATF has not thought of that? And here is our QC mayor initiating the discussion which should be happening at the highest levels of government months ago.
Without doubt, we have in the Philippines long established and internationally recognized pharmaceuticals such as Zuellig, Mercury Drug, United Laboratories, Makati Medical Center, etc., that should have played more prominent roles in the country’s vaccination drive. That vaccination has remained solely in the hands of IATF and through the LGU’s have constricted our ability to procure the vaccine, to distribute it in huge numbers and to apply it in the most efficacious and speedy manner to the masses of our people.
To date, there have been 1,809,801 individuals vaccinated against COVID-19 in the country, nearly two months since the government rolled out its vaccination program. Or about 900,000 vaccine jabs on people’s arms a month. The government aims to inoculate 70 million Filipinos to reach herd immunity.
At the rate things are going under the present system, it will take about 77 months for the government to reach its target or about 6 years from now – in 2027. In the meanwhile, hunker down and keep yourself safe – til the country is vaccinated.
