The Bacolod City government’s tripartite deal with AstraZeneca is a contractual obligation that must be honored, the spokesman of former Bacolod Mayor Evelio Leonardia, said on Tuesday, July 12.
Mayor Alfredo Abelardo “Albee” Benitez said on Monday that he will try to the best of his ability not to pay for the 434,000 doses of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines ordered by the previous city administration that Bacolod did not receive.
“If Mayor Albee decides not to pay the balance with the supplier, that’s his call. At the end of the day, he will be the one to deal with the pharmaceutical firm now as the new local chief executive,” Dr. Chris Sorongon, Leonardia’s spokesperson, said in a press statement.
More than 300,000 of the 434,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines have expired at the Department of Health (DOH) cold storage facility in Metro Manila and the rest will expire at the end of the month, Benitez said.
An AstraZeneca representative who met with him recently said that the city government owed them a balance of P98 million for the 650,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines ordered by the Leonardia administration, Benitez disclosed.
Based on the report of the City Health Office only 216,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines arrived in Bacolod that were fully utilized, and the Leonardia administration had paid AstraZeneca an initial P65 million, Benitez said.
The tripartite agreement entered into by the city government with the Department of Health and AstraZeneca, upon the prodding of the Duterte administration when vaccine supply was a scarcity, is a contractual obligation that must be honored, Sorongon said.
Sorongon, however, said it is the call of the new city administration under Benitez if it will not honor the stipulations contained in the contract.
“To set the record straight, no vaccine expired at the Bacolod storage facility. The expired vaccines he was referring to are with DOH central facility of which we have no control of and form part of the multi- lateral agreement between the national government, represented by DOH, AZ and Bacolod City,” said Sorongon, who had also served as deputy director of the then Emergency Operations Center Task Force against COVID-19.
Benitez in his press conference had also said that the vaccines that had expired where at the DOH cold storage facility in Metro Manila and not in Bacolod.
At least 27 other cities and provinces in the country entered into a similar tripartite deal as Bacolod with AstraZeneca at a time when there was very limited supply of vaccines worldwide, Sorongon said.
With encouragement and initiative from the national government to assure constituents of ample supply of vaccines, LGUs that had the financial capability, turned to AstraZeneca, he said.
COVID-19 vaccines of all brands delivered by the DOH to Bacolod had been administered by the Emergency Operations Center and medical frontliners of the COVID-19 Vaccination Council, resulting to a 136 percent vaccination rate for Bacolod, the highest in Western Visayas as certified by the DOH, Sorongon said.
“The procurement of the vaccines through the tripartite agreement was facilitated by the national government. It was done at a time when there was no assurance of supply coming from the national government thus, as part of the emergency powers granted to chief executives and the necessity and urgency to make Bacolodnons safe from COVID, the LGU entered into this multi-partite agreement to buy vaccines,” Sorongon said.
“Any forward thinking manager and seasoned crisis managers would do the same. We were among the first outside of Metro Manila to do this. Had we not resorted to this, I doubt it if Bacolod had achieved its very high vaccination rate as it has today,” Sorongon added.
Sorongon also dismissed claims that there was over estimation of the volume of vaccines to be procured.
“We based the computation to the target population of Bacolod City, assuming that there will not be enough vaccines or there will be delayed deliveries from the national government,” he said.
It appears that the previous administration miscalculated and an over order of the vaccines was made, Benitez said on Monday.
Gov. Eugenio Jose Lascon on Tuesday said that the Negros Occidental provincial government only purchased 50,000 doses of AztraZeneca vaccines so the province had no problem.
The provincial government had kept its order at a minimal after the national government assured that it would provide vaccines to the provinces, Lacson said.
Sorongon said he cannot disclose other details of the tripartite deal because the city is duty-bound to adhere to the stipulations contained in the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) it signed with AstraZeneca.
“All other details beyond these were disclosures made by the current administration, not by the previous administration,” he said.*