53.3M of over 91M vax doses already administered: NTF

MANILA – The Philippines has received more than 91.5 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines with a total of 53,315,069 doses have been administered nationwide, the National Task Force (NTF) Against Covid-19 said on Wednesday.

The National Covid-19 Vaccination Dashboard showed 28,620,352 were used as first doses while 24,694,717 were given as second doses.

The average daily jabs administered in the last seven days stood at 405,588 doses compared to 420,069 jabs recorded during the previous week.

During President Rodrigo Duterte’s taped Talk to the People aired on Tuesday night, NTF chief implementer, Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr., reported that larger vaccine deliveries continue to pour in this month.

In October alone, Galvez said the Philippines has received over 20 million doses.

“This is the biggest arrival since most of our vaccines that we received last month is only 19 million. So the achieving of 100 million doses delivery before the end of October is on track,” he said.

He said the supply is no longer an issue as of this moment.

“We have more than 38 million doses in our warehouses,” he added.

The government, he said, is targeting to scale up the nationwide daily vaccination rate of up to 1.5 million doses to fulfill its promise of “achieving a happy Christmas this year.”

It also wants to raise its target vaccination coverage from 70 percent to 90 percent of the country’s eligible population, he added.

“We will be opening the general population, then the pilot of children vaccination, and we are ramping up the vaccination of students, teachers, and tourism personnel, OFWs (overseas Filipino workers), and seafarers,” Galvez said.