PH Receives 500K more Sinovac Doses

500,000 more doses of CoronaVac, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine of Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinovac Biotech, arrived in the Philippines on Thursday at around 7:35 a.m. via a commercial Cebu Pacific flight.

The arrival of the additional government-procured doses brings the current national stockpile of the Sinovac vaccine to 5.5 million.

Among the Philippines’ welcoming committee during the arrival of the vaccines were Health Secretary Francisco Duque and Chief of Presidential Protocol and Presidential Assistant on Foreign Affairs, Undersecretary Robert Borje.

To this day, the Philippines has received vaccines from almost every major pharmaceutical firms that developed COVID-19 vaccines.

The country has so far received:

• AstraZeneca – 2,556,000 doses
• Pfizer – 193,050 doses
• Sinovac – 5.5 million doses
• Sputnik V – 30,000 doses

This brings the total vaccines received by the country to 8.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines.

Meanwhile, the Philippines has breached the three-million mark in the country’s vaccination program, according to National Task Force Against Covid-19 (NTF) chief implementer and vaccine czar Carlito Galvez, Jr.

The NTF reported that a total of 3,299,470 vaccine doses have been administered, of which 786,528 are fully vaccinated

The next batch of vaccines delivery the Philippines is to receive will be coming from the COVAX facility, where 2.2 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, along with two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine are expected to arrive on May or June 2021.

This comes as the government continues to procure more COVID-19 vaccine doses for the vaccination of 70 million this year to achieve herd immunity. (GFB)