“Making Covid-19 vaccination mandatory will be wrought with challenges considering that vaccination is voluntary in nature and will require consent of the individual,” said DOH 7 chief pathologist Mary Jean Loreche to SunStar Cebu.
Loreche made the comment after Health Secretary Francisco Duque III reiterated the call of the National Government for Congress to come up with a measure that will make the Covid-19 vaccination mandatory.
She, however, said public health safety and prevention programs would need to be considered as the Covid-19 pandemic and crisis continues for more than two years now.
“This now becomes a difficult issue to resolve. What we can do is to call on every citizen on their patriotic duty to help end this crisis by having themselves vaccinated,” Loreche said.
Duque earlier reported to President Rodrigo Duterte during the latter’s Talk to the People Address that the government has already done all means to push for vaccination against the coronavirus in the country.
Duque cited the government’s effort of making the Covid-19 vaccines more accessible to people, such as in clinics, pharmacies, transport terminals, barangays and even through house-to-house vaccination campaigns.
He said measures such as the “No Vaccination, No Ride” policy in public transport and “No Vaccination, No Entry” policy in the establishments have been imposed to somehow compel the public to get inoculated. But these have been criticized for these violated human rights.
While he noted that making Covid-19 vaccination mandatory would be controversial, Duque has expressed his hopes that Congress or the Senate would understand why they had purchased millions of vaccines—and that is to protect the public.
Out of the over 244 million vaccine doses delivered in the country, around 25 to 27 million are about to expire in July. Duque said majority of the near expiry vaccines were donated through Covax, a worldwide initiative aimed at equitable access to vaccines.
The Health secretary told the President that the vaccine wastage was only 1.54 percent as of April 3, 2022, the allowable wastage rate.
Duque said this was far below than the 10 percent indicative wastage rate used by the World Health Organization (WHO). (SunStar Philippines)