San Juan rolls out first batch of Pfizer vaccines

MANILA – The San Juan city government on Wednesday started inoculating residents with its allocation of Pfizer coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) vaccines.

Mayor Francis Zamora said the local government has initially received 11,700 doses of Pfizer vaccines from the national government.

A total of 5,850 San Juaneños will get the Pfizer jab, he added.

This is part of the first batch of 193,050 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine secured by the government through the World Health Organization (WHO)-led COVAX Facility, which arrived in the Philippines on Monday night.

Zamora said they have already prepared the logistical requirements for Pfizer vaccines that require a temperature of minus 60 to minus 80 degrees Celsius.

“We opted to rent ultra-cold freezer instead of buying one, since it is much more economical and allowed us to spend our budget wisely and use the savings for other Covid-related activities,” Zamora told reporters.

He said the city government will use an MDF-C8V1-PK ultra-low freezer that. It also has a new cooling circuit that enables a filterless structure and can store up to 12,000 vaccine vials.

“This Japan-made freezer also comes with a system for high and low-temperature alarm as well as power failure alarm to ensure that the vaccines will not be compromised and wasted,” he added.

Another storage is on standby should the city receive more doses from the Department of Health (DOH).

Zamora assured the city government has also set plans to avoid possible vaccine wastage.

“Medyo may sensitivity ang bakunang ito. Ang kada dose niyan ay parang ginto. Ayaw natin ‘yan sayangin at gusto nating mapakinabangan. Kaya nag-training din po ang ating health officers para masigurado ang tamang handling ng Pfizer vaccine at mapanatili ang mataas na efficacy (This type of vaccine is quite sensitive. Each dose is like gold. We don’t want to put it to waste and we want it to be useful. We also trained our health officers to make sure that vaccine handling of Pfizer is correct and to maintain its high efficacy),” he said.

A total of 13,085 San Juan residents have been inoculated against Covid-19, of which 8,620 residents have received the first dose while 3,801 are now fully vaccinated.

Zamora said the vaccine confidence in the city is increasing day by day.

“Overall, the residents have good vaccination experiences here in San Juan. The word-of-mouth increases the public confidence on Covid-19 vaccine,” he said.

Zamora noted that “registrants for the city-wide vaccination program is not a problem.”

“San Juan was previously vaccinating 600-800 individuals daily, this can be ramped up to over 1,500 per day with the arrival of these vaccines and can be further increased to around 3,000 a day in multiple sites once the city gets it 100,000 doses of city-procured AstraZenca vaccines,” he said.

To date, more than 60,000 residents have already signed up for the city’s immunization campaign.

San Juan city was able to bring down its active cases to 268 on May 11 from its highest recorded cases of 1,226 last April 12.