Another one million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccines will be arriving in the country this month.
During the public address of President Rodrigo R. Duterte Thursday night, Chief implementer of the government’s national policy on Covid-19 Carlito G. Galvez Jr. disclosed the Vaccines Global Access (Covax) facility increased the country’s allocation of Pfizer vaccine from 1.2 million to 2.2 million.
“We will get the 2.2 million [doses] this May from Covax,” Galvez said.
The decision of the Covax facility comes after government has successfully deployed the 193,050 doses of Pfizer vaccines to qualified local government units (LGU) earlier this week.
Compared with other Covid-19 vaccines, the jabs from Pfizer is much harder to distribute since it requires to be stored minus 80 degrees Celsius to retain its efficacy.
To address the issue, the government limited the distribution of the Pfizer vaccines in cities with necessary cold storage facility.
Galvez said aside from the Pfizer vaccines, he said the Covax facility will also be sending almost 2 million additional AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine by next month.
“This will be for the second dose of those who got the first 2 million [AstraZeneca) doses,” Galvez said.
Galvez said they are set to secure an additional 7 million Covid-19 doses by May, and another 10 million jabs next month.
“So our inventory [of Covid-19] vaccine by the end of June is 21,829,050 [doses],” Galvez said.
He said this will be enough for the government to expand the list of its vaccine beneficiaries to also include economic frontliners.
Currently, the priority beneficiaries in the government’s vaccination drive only include health care workers, senior citizens, and those with comorbidities.