The country’s daily inoculation capacity has reached 83,000 daily and will increase in the coming days, thus assuring soon-to-expire vaccines will be fully utilized before the due dates.

Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. on Thursday, May 12, allayed concerns that AstraZeneca vaccines will just go to waste.

“We believe we can manage the AstraZeneca vaccines considering our daily inoculation capacity right now is at 83,000 and we will be increasing it over the days,” he said during the rollout of Pfizer vaccines at the Makati Medical Center.

The government will also activate more vaccination sites.

“When we computed on the daily output that we have, we can still manage AstraZeneca. By June 15 we can finish that,” he assured.

Galvez said 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca, which will be administered as first doses, will be expiring on June 30 and the other 525,600 doses in July.

“Wala tayong problema (We don’t have problems with that), do not worry. Our logistics can manage that because we have been rehearsing our rollout for a long time and we have been simulating this, I can tell you that before June 15, we can finish using 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca,” he said, partly in Filipino.

More Pfizer vaccines

Another 2.2 million doses of Pfizer vaccines are also set to be delivered before the end of May.

An arrangement was made with the United Nations Children’s Fund to cascade the US-made vaccines directly to destination provinces in the Visayas (Cebu) and Mindanao (Davao) to avoid double-handling of the jabs.

“Huwag ho kayong mag-alala. Since February pa kami nagre-rehearse dito sa (Don’t worry. We have been rehearsing [the handling of) Pfizer vaccines and we don’t see any problem. Let’s have confidence with the DOH’s (Department of Health) national vaccination operation center,” he said.

So far, the Philippines has 3,688 vaccination sites activated across 17 regions.

Some 2,539,693 doses have already been administered – 2,025,038 doses of which were allocated for first doses and 514,655 as second doses.

The government has already deployed 83 percent, or 6,408,640 doses out of the 7,762,050 doses in the stockpile.PNA