Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said the government has so far raised $1.126 billion from multilateral financing for the purchase of 105.65 million doses of vaccines.
This will comprise more than half of the 194.89 million doses that the government is expecting to receive to cover 100.5 million people.
Apart from multilateral financing, Dominguez said the government’s fund for vaccines will also be sourced from this year’s national budget. This would also be on top of the cost of the purchase of vaccines that will be shouldered by the private sector or the local government units, and donors.
“We have signed agreements to purchase 15.5 million doses at the cost of $176.5 million,” Dominguez said during the House hearing on the proposed 2022 national budget.
“We have also received a total of 48.8 million doses in terms of donations. Now, the total amount of vaccines, coming in including 24.9 million doses purchased by the private sector with their own money is a total of 194.8 9 million doses, that are scheduled to arrive this year. And this is good enough to vaccinate 100.5 million Filipinos,” he added.
Dominguez also said the country’s vaccine supply has already reached 48.5 million doses and the Philippines has successfully administered 31.1 million vaccine shots as of August 24.
“This consists of 17.8 million for the first dose and 13.3 million for the second shot. In the remaining months of the year, we expect the arrival of an additional 147 million doses,” he said.
The finance chief said the government has so far secured $19.6 billion dollars in bonds, loans, and grants from foreign lenders during the pandemic.
The bulk of the amount is for budget support at $11 billion, followed by program loans at $7.7 billion.
The rest of the amount was comprised of previously contracted financing ($200 million), project loan financing ($26 million), and other loan financing ($673 million).
Finance Undersecretary Mark Joven, who heads the DOF’s International Finance Group, told BusinessMirror that the $19.6 billion in COVID-19 response financing that the government secured already included budget support for 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.