MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines will conduct a study that will look into the real-world effectiveness of vaccines against COVID-19, the Department of Science and Technology said Tuesday.
DOST Undersecretary Rowena Guevara said a P100-million project will follow vaccine recipients for a year to determine the effects of COVID-19 vaccines in a real-world setting.
“While the Department of Health is vaccinating people, we will select participants and monitor what happens to them after the vaccination for about a year or so,” Guevara said in Filipino during a briefing.
“It will answer questions on the effect of ethnicity [on vaccines]… Second, the most important question we want to answer is: what is the efficacy of these [vaccines] over time?” she added.
The DOST aims to begin the study in June. Around 1,000 participants are expected to take part in the research, although the figure is still subject to approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
Guevara said researchers will study the vaccines available in the country by the time the project starts. Dr. Nina Berba, head of infectious disease control at the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital, will lead the study.
READ: 3 more COVID-19 vaccine developers apply for clinical trials in Philippines
So far, only four brands are being used in the government’s vaccination drive: Sinovac Biotech, AstraZeneca, Gamaleya Research Institute and Pfizer-BioNTech.
The department will also study the possibility of pairing two different vaccine brands and the use of booster shots.
Only 949,939 people have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 since the start of the inoculation campaign in March, while over 3.1 million have received their first dose.