My Saturday was spent on a series of webinars from Rotary matters, COVID-19 issues, and Musichikahan with Maestro Ryan Cayabyab and by the time it ended at 6 P.M., I was overwhelmed with emotions from excitement, sadness, anger, and happiness.
Happiness because my doctor niece received her negative swab results that morning, putting an end to our isolation since Thursday. Happiest was my granddaughter who was supposed to return home every Friday when school is out, but had to stay put until we get the results.
Happiness because the webinar session with Mr. C, as we fondly call Ryan, became a sing-along reunion of sorts among theater friends who’ve worked with him in his various musicals.
The morning webinars were with fellow Rotarians in our district and another that involved the entire Philippine Rotary leaders in the launching of our vaccination advocacy campaign.
The three main speakers for that webinar were former Health Secretary, Dr. Esperanza Cabral, PGH Director, Dr. Gerardo Legaspi and Microbiologist, Dr. Marilen Balolong. The Philippine Rotary has a marching order from Rotary International to help communicate the need to get vaccinated against COVID-19 as it has been doing in the campaign to end polio.
Dr. Gap Legaspi is known as the first Filipino who officially got vaccinated for COVID-19 if we do not count those soldiers and presidential guards who were inoculated with smuggled vaccines.
Dr. Cabral’s presentation focused on the need to overturn the public’s sentiments on vaccination per se which dropped by over 50 points since the dengvaxia controversy. Cabral showed a survey conducted in 2015 when 93% of the population believed that vaccines are important and 82% said vaccines are safe and effective. A year later, dengvaxia happened and surveys showed a huge drop to 32% and 21% respectively with regards to vaccine confidence.
With COVID-19, this gets worse because of low levels of trust in the public health system, misinformation about vaccines, and the procurement scheme of the national government.
So how do you overturn that distrust when we have a Health Secretary who is perceived to be unreliable, yet for some reason is being kept by the president and several generals who do not have medical expertise, yet are at the helm of one of the biggest public health issues in our lifetime?
It does not help that the national government kept on ramming Chinese-made vaccines when surveys showed them at the bottom of acceptance over Western-made vaccines. But at this point, I subscribe to the wisdom of medical experts that in the absence of choice, any vaccine is better than nothing.
This general distrust must be addressed by the government if they want their vaccine roll-out to be successful in order to attain herd immunity. A Pulse Asia survey taken on November 29, 2020 showed a 32% acceptance to be vaccinated. Two months later, in February 22, this went down to a mere 16 % which is a far cry if we aim to have 70% of the populace vaccinated.
There is also a need to communicate to the public that the COVID-19 vaccine will not prevent you from getting infected, but rather, will protect you from getting severely affected or even die. Just yesterday, I saw a post on a local media page hyping that a couple of hundreds of health workers got infected by the virus in Malaysia even after getting fully inoculated. We do not have to look at Malaysia because we too have several cases of infections among health workers after their first dose of the vaccine.
What is not being largely reported is how many percent are these infected workers from the entire workforce that have been vaccinated? How many still got hospitalized for severe infections and how many died?
Dr. Cabral presented a study from Israel’s Health Ministry which has vaccinated over 54% of their population, showed that this led to 98.9% effectiveness in preventing death and hospitalizations even among the elderly and COVID-19 infections declined by 95.8% among people who received both shots already.
During the open forum, the use of Ivermectin was asked from the experts. All subscribed that until there is a concrete study about its effectiveness, and as government public health doctors, they will not endorse the drug. In fact, Dr. Gap said that PGH already had a couple of toxicity cases involving Ivermectin.
Of course, there will always be skeptics about these studies and it does not help that our government health agencies like the DOH and the FDA are not in consonance with each other as well.
But I guess, the national government is in no rush to change these sentiments overnight because they don’t have the vaccines to roll out to the masses yet. While other countries are boasting of millions inoculated, we are in a couple of millions only, if not less.
Congress’ proposal to allow local government units to purchase vaccines directly was also thumbed down initially and all must be coursed through the national government – which with all the red tape may once again boil down to nothing.
But yesterday, in an interview over Vice Gov. Jeffrey Ferrer’s weekend radio program in Aksyon Radyo, Deputy Minority Floor Leader, Abang Lingkod Rep. Stephen Paduano said that this has been revived and may now be allowed provided that direct procurement of LGUs is transparent and justified.
About time. Let our officials walk the talk and prioritize vaccination over those nonsensical beautification projects.*