The Department of Health (DOH) on Friday appealed to local government officials to refrain from using the Covid vaccination program to advance their political agenda in the upcoming 2022 elections.
Smiling just a bit when she answered the question on “how to prevent local officials from taking advantage of the vaccination rollout,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire stressed an important point: the welfare and protection of the people should be of utmost importance.
“Kailangan isaisip ng buong bansa, kasama ang ating local government officials na isipin natin na ang ating ginagawang pagbabakuna ang para sa malasakit natin sa ating kababayan. Sa proteksyon ng sambayanang Pilipino [The whole nation, including our local government officials, should keep in mind that our vaccination activity is being done out of our concern for our countrymen. For the protection of the Filipino people],” Vergeire stated.
Vergeire urged local officials to set aside their personal “objectives” to make the vaccine rollout a success.
“Let’s us put emphasis on our focus: we want to ease up the burden that we are facing due to this pandemic,” she added.
Adverse effects
Vergeire, at the same time, disclosed that as of June 6, 2021, the overall percentage of reported “suspected” adverse effects from total doses administered is at 0.68 percent.
“Of these reported suspected reactions to vaccines, 98 percent are non-serious and only 1.89 percent were tagged as serious,” she said.
Vergeire added that all were given “appropriate care.”
Covid cases
As of 4 p.m. of June 18, 2021, the DOH, meanwhile, logged 6,833 additional Covid-19 cases, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 1,346,276. There were also 3,441 recoveries and 110 deaths.
Of the total number of infections, 4.6 percent (61,776) are active, 93.7 percent (1,261,115) have recovered, and 1.74 percent (23,385) have died.
Fourteen duplicates were removed from the total case count. Of these, 10 are recoveries and 1 is a death.
Moreover, 30 cases previously tagged as recoveries have been validated to be active cases and 60 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
All laboratories were operational on June 16, 2021 but 5 were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
Based on data in the last 14 days, the 5 non-reporting labs contribute, on average, 2.6 percent of samples tested and 4.4 percent of positive individuals.