MANILA, Philippines – Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. on Thursday allayed public concern that the two million doses of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine from the COVAX facility will expire before they could be used in the government’s mass vaccination program.
Galvez said the deployment and administration of these doses have been planned and that vaccination sites have already been advised to use up these jabs by June 15.
The vaccine czar issued the statement following reports that the British-Swedish vaccine doses that recently arrived in the Philippines are nearing expiration.
“We believe iyong AstraZeneca, we can manage that considering that our daily inoculation right now is 83,000, and it will further increase over the days considering we are increasing our capacity,” he said in an event in Makati Medical Center.
“When we computed on the daily output that we have, kaya natin imanage ang Astrazeneca. By June 15, we are expecting matatapos po lahat po iyon,” he added.
Galvez said that based on the plan of the Department of Health, the 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine expiring on June 30 will be used as first doses while the over 500,000 doses set to expire in July will be administered as second doses of those previously vaccinated.
The Department of Health (DOH) earlier said that its vaccine operations center has prepared mechanisms for the immediate rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.
The DOH also said that vaccine candidates against coronavirus have a relatively short shelf life.
“We’ll be giving these vaccines as first dose because WHO (World Health Organization) has committed that they will be providing the vaccine for the end of May or first week of June,” Health Undersecretary Mari Rosario Vergeire said.
“Almost all vaccines ngayon walang mahahabang expiry date,” she added.
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