MANILA – The Philippines, which had one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Southeast Asia, began its inoculation campaign on Monday, while the government struggled to reassure a cautious population with foreign vaccines.
President Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday urged the public to get vaccinated while greeting a Chinese military plane carrying 600,000 doses of the vaccine developed by Sinovac, a private Chinese company. The Philippines, a nation of more than 100 million, is among the last countries in Southeast Asia to receive any coronavirus vaccine, but plans to vaccinate 70 million people this year.
“For my fellow Filipinos, please let go of your fears,” said Duterte. “These vaccines are supported by science and deliberated by our specialists.”
But the 75-year-old president did not say whether he would receive the Chinese vaccine, saying he was waiting for his doctor’s advice. Philippine regulators, who issued emergency use authorization for Sinovac injections last week, recommended that it not be administered to healthcare professionals or people aged 60 and over, citing uncertainty about its effectiveness rate among these groups.
In an effort to boost confidence, a group of cabinet officials, health professionals and others were publicly vaccinated at six hospitals in the Manila metropolitan area on Monday, the Health Department said on Twitter.
The Philippines has secured 25 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine to be delivered by the end of the year. Regulators have also approved the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, but the first doses of Pfizer are not expected to arrive by the end of this year, and more than 500,000 of the AstraZeneca vaccines expected to arrive on Monday have been postponed, officials said.
Duterte accused wealthy western nations of preventing countries like the Philippines from guaranteeing the doses they need.
Also on Monday, the Philippine government said Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned company, had applied for emergency use authorization for its coronavirus vaccine.
But recent research has shown that almost half of Filipinos are unwilling to receive any coronavirus vaccine, mainly for safety reasons. In a protest on Friday, staff at the Philippines General Hospital in Manila expressed doubts about the Sinovac vaccine, which has been shown in studies to have an efficacy rate of just over 50% among healthcare professionals, compared with more than 90% for the Pfizer vaccine.
On Monday, they demanded that the Sinovac vaccine undergo another evaluation by a government panel after receiving a last-minute emergency approval.
Vaccine hesitation in the Philippines also stems from a previous vaccine scare. In 2017, a dengue immunization program was suspended after injections developed by the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi were found in rare cases to cause a severe form of the disease. When the program was discontinued, more than 830,000 children had been vaccinated and the vaccine was associated with dozens of deaths.
Health professionals and officials say the Dengvaxia scandal often arises in conversations with people reluctant to receive a coronavirus vaccine. Dr. Joshua San Pedro, co-chair of the Coalition for People’s Right to Health, said there was “persistent distrust and trauma” with the episode.
“We must talk to people, especially those who remain alienated by a health system apparently only for the privileged,” he said.
Gwen Palafox Yamamoto, mayor of the city of Bani, in Pangasinan province, said that many fear that the new vaccines have not been tested enough.
“We have been explaining the benefits of the vaccine and how it can help bring normalcy back into their lives,” she said. “They reject Covid-19 as a simple fever and prefer to take the risk than to die from an unproven vaccine.”
It does not help that many are concerned about vaccines developed by China, which has a complicated relationship with the Philippines, which includes a territorial dispute in the South China Sea.
“They just don’t want a ‘made in China’ label,” said Yamamoto.