(Eagle News) – More than half a million AstraZeneca vaccine doses arrived in the country on Friday, Aug. 20, further boosting the country’s vaccine supplies which now reached more than 46.5 million doses.

The China Airlines flight carrying 582,500 AstraZeneca jabs procured by local government units and the private sector through the “A Dose of Hope” project arrived on Friday afternoon, August 20, as scheduled.

The latest delivery brings to 2,309,100 the total procured AstraZeneca doses secured through tripartite agreements have arrived in the Philippines.

Josephine Romero, A Dose of Hope Project Lead, said 80 percent of these newly delivered 525,800 AstraZeneca doses will go to LGUs, while 20 percent will be allocated for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).

National Task Force Against Covid-19 Chief Implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito G. Galvez, Jr. thanked the private sector and LGUs who procured the vaccines.

-Over 8 million AZ doses by the end of August-

Lotis Ramin, country president of AstraZeneca Philippines, said there will be more than 8 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses delivered from COVAX, donations and the tripartite agreement by the end of August.

“The delivery of more than 8 million vaccine doses from COVAX, donations and this tripartite agreement by the end of this month recognizes our continuous efforts to help Filipinos regain a sense of normalcy and achieve economic recovery,” Ramin said.

“AstraZeneca is committed to continue working with the national government, local government units and the private sector to support the national mass vaccination program. We will continue to come together as one, to vaccinate more Filipinos as our country’s best COVID-19 defense,” she added.

Presidential Adviser for Entrepreneurship and Go Negosyo founder Joey Concepcion said that the second batch of AstraZeneca vaccine doses this month procured by the private sector and our LGU partners total to 1.15 million doses.

He said that this was “very timely , as we are aggressively rolling out vaccinations to help prevent the transmission of the Delta variant.”

Concepcion said that they want to help the government by securing these vaccine deliveries. He said the private sector would also use the vaccines for their employees.

“We want to help the government so that we can execute vaccination rollouts in the fastest and most efficient way possible. Allowing us to execute, we could focus on the vaccination of our employees, the LGUs could focus on its constituents, and the national government could focus on the rest that are not covered,” he explained.

We need a fast and almost perfect rollout and the private sector, with the arrival of these vaccine doses from AstraZeneca, can now do that for its employees,” Concepcion added.

Aside from the procured jabs, the country also received 1,124,100 doses of AstraZeneca from the Japanese Government, while 4,584,000 doses came from the COVAX facility, and 415,040 were donated by the UK government, according to the National Task Force against COVID-19.

“To date, the country has received a total of 46,522,890 COVID-19 vaccine doses from different manufacturers,” the NTF said.

(Eagle News Service)