More than 13,000 medical workers of large hospitals under Metro Pacific Hospitals Holdings Inc. were inoculated using the Sinovac and AstraZeneca vaccines that arrived in the country and around 10,000 more will be vaccinated in the coming days.
In a statement, the company said health workers from Makati Medical Center, Asian Hospital and Cardinal Santos Medical Center were inoculated since the vaccines arrived in the country.
“There remain several formidable problems for our country to solve, whether it’s ensuring the health and well-being of our people, or sustaining the economy during such a turbulent period,” Manuel V. Pangilinan, chairman of the hospital group, said in a statement.
“But the first step to solving many of them is the same: the successful rollout of safe and effective vaccines. We are the largest private hospital group in the Philippines, and it’s important for us to help the country’s vaccination drive as much as we can. And that begins with getting our hospital workers inoculated.”
Augusto Palisoc Jr., president and CEO of the hospital group, said the company is still perfecting some of its inoculation procedures and is making sure it can source enough vaccines for its hospitals in all areas of the Philippines.
“We’ve been prioritizing the safety of our hospitals ever since the pandemic began. But we’re glad to see thousands of our employees, doctors, and outsourced personnel receive added protection from the virus. We’re also looking forward to our patients regaining the confidence to come to our hospitals again, given that they’ll be interacting with frontliners who are mostly vaccinated,” Palisoc said.
The Pangilinan-led group Metro Pacific Investments Corp. and its logistics arm MetroPac Movers Inc. helped in the storage of the initial 487,000 vials of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines and the 600,000 doses of the CoronaVac vaccine from the Beijing-based biopharmaceutical company Sinovac.