Health Secretary Duque has announced to have sealed the deal for 25 million doses of coronavirus disease vaccine from Chinese firm Sinovac, initial batch expected by next month.

The Philippines has secured some 25 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from Chinese firm Sinovac, with the initial batch expected by February, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III announced Sunday, January 10.

According to Duque, the subsequent batches are expected to arrive until the end of 2021, to complement those from British firm AstraZeneca.

Citing a report by Mai Bermudez on GMA’s “24 Oras Weekend” on Sunday,
Duque said “we sealed the deal with Sinovac for 25 million with early 50,000 doses by February, 950,000 by March and 2 to 3 million in succeeding months ’til December with 25 million doses. This is in addition to AstraZeneca as confirmed by Sec. Galvez.”

COVID-19 policy chief implementer and vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. last week said the Philippines targets to vaccinate some 50 to 70 million Filipinos from COVID-19 this year.

“We hope to close the deal with these companies this month,” Galvez said, as other government officials earlier said the country would have already had the shipment this January if not for Duque who dropped the ball and failed to submit the necessary documents.

In response, Duque earlier said that “there is no such this as dropping the ball” as he said negotiations are still ongoing.

The Philippines has already allocated PHP73.2 billion for the procurement of the vaccines, with PHP40 billion coming from multilateral agencies, P20 billion from domestic sources, and PHP13.2 billion from bilateral agreements.

Meanwhile, the private sector has committed to procuring as much as 6 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from British pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, half of which will be donated to the Philippine government.

Aside from this, the Philippines over the weekend signed the term sheet to secure 30 million doses of the Covovax vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII), in partnership with Faberco Life Sciences Inc.

(Source: GMA News)