World Health Organization Coordinator for Essential Medicines Health Technologies Dr. Socorro Escalante (PNA photo by Joey O. Razon)
MANILA – The country is on track with the preparation for the introduction and distribution of potential vaccine against the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), a World Health Organization (WHO) official said Wednesday.
"Sa nakikita po namin (What we see), the Philippines is on track in terms of its preparation for the vaccines introduction and roll out including the distribution of the vaccines in the country," World Health Organization (WHO) Coordinator for Essential Medicines Health Technologies Dr. Socorro Escalante said in a Laging Handa briefing.
Escalante said the WHO has set up four criteria -- national deployment plan, regulatory process, cold chain, and safety monitoring -- to determine the readiness of a country for vaccines deployment.
"First, that the country has a national vaccines deployment plan, which we understand the Department of Health along with Secretary (Carlito) Galvez (Jr.) and other sectors are already developing and are in the final stage of development. The second one is the regulatory readiness, and is our FDA (Food and Drug Administration) ready to accept the applications of the vaccines?" she said.
On Dec. 1, 2020, President Rodrigo Duterte signed Executive Order 121 allowing FDA to grant emergency use authorization (EUA) to potential Covid-19 vaccines which would be made available in the country.
Escalante said the presence of a regulatory process would ensure that all vaccines coming into the country are safe, efficacious and of good quality.
As for the storage of the vaccines, Escalante noted that ultra-cold chain is important because this is the new technology of ribonucleic acid vaccines.
"We don't have a cold chain before, but we know the country already has some existing cold chain equipment even in RITM (Research Institute for Tropical Medicine) and even the government is ready to deploy the ultra-cold chain,” she said.
Escalante also underscored the importance of safety monitoring as all vaccines have the potential of resulting into an adverse event.
"After they've (vaccines) been deployed, so it is important to have that monitoring process and the FDA is already working on the protocol to monitor the vaccine," she said.
To date, FDA Director-General Eric Domingo said only Pfizer-BioNTech has applied for an EUA in the country for their vaccine on Dec. 23, 2020 and its application is still under review.
As for the vaccine clinical trials, Domingo said the FDA received three applications from Sinovac, Clover and Janssen. He said Sinovac and Janssen are still under review while Janssen has been approved to conduct clinical trial beginning this month.
Escalante said Covid-19 vaccination is a very complex intervention and the public needs to understand its objectives and how the government will distribute the vaccines.
"The reason why I'm saying this is because we would be expecting a lot of demand from the public, and because of the pressure of the public the government might get derailed from a very systematic vaccination plan," she said. "While the government is ensuring that the deployment of the vaccine will be systematic and organized, the public would need to support the organization and systematic distribution of vaccine in order for us not to lose direction and we'll be able to roll out vaccines in a proper way." (PNA)
