DILG lauds local government strategies to expedite vaccination progress

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of the Interior and Local Government praised Monday what it said was the innovative efforts of some local governments in encouraging their constituents to get jabbed and increase vaccine confidence among the public.

As it currently stands, a number of city governments have begun rolling out vaccination opportunities for frontline and essential workers in their localities. Many other cities, however, have yet to start. 

In a statement, Interior Secretary Eduardo Año cited a number of "out of the box" strategies that he said helped support the government's vaccination efforts.

"We are pleased that LGUs are thinking of innovative ways or ‘out of the box’ strategies to enjoin their constituents to get the COVID-19 shots," he said. 

READ: Metro Manila cities kick off A4 vaccination

'Out of the box' strategies 

Año pointed to the example of local governments across the country, including those in: 

• In San Luis, Pampanga, a cow will be raffled every month starting July to qualified vaccinated residents under the local government's "Baka Para sa Bakuna" project
   
• In Sucat, Muntinlupa, residents who get vaccinated are eligible to join a weekly raffle where they can win 25 kilograms of rice.
   
• In Bulacan, Baliwag Pagbangon Census 2021 was conducted to prepare the municipality’s demographic profile for vaccination efforts and to assess the personal views of the residents on vaccines while in Biñan, Laguna, the LGU conducted a house-to-house vaccine registration of senior citizens and indigent families.
   
• In Taguig, residents are highly encouraged to enroll in TaguigTRACE to secure their vaccine registration and streamline the city government’s vaccination process while in Malabon City, individuals who register for vaccination are informed of their schedule and place of vaccination through SMS.
   
• The Provincial Government of Rizal engaged with the private sector for the use of cold storage facilities free of charge.
   
• In San Mateo, Rizal, the LGU was able to get free use of SM City San Mateo Cinemas 1-3 as vaccination centers.
   
• In San Quintin, Abra, they have arranged to store the vaccines in a freezer with the prescribed temperature at RHU San Quintin, Abra. The LGU has a generator set in case of power interruption.

“The out-of-the box initiatives by some LGUs can be replicated by other LGUs so they too can fast track their COVID-19 vaccination efforts. By taking giant leaps, we can all move forward towards achieving the added layer of protection against COVID-19 and its variants,” the former military general also said.

Per Our World in Data, the Philippines is still among the worst countries in the world when it comes to vaccine per population. 

LGUs urged: Hasten data encoding 

Interior Spokesperson Jonathan Malaya in the statement also urged LGUs to ensure regular updating of their respective COVID-19 data in the Vaccine Monitoring System to reflect "the true scope of the national COVID-19 vaccination program."

He also urged local governments to expedite encoding the needed information to the system so that the national government can make informed decisions on where to deploy the next round of vaccines or send additional manpower to help out in the vaccination program.

“It is very important that the information in your areas is updated so that the national government knows if you still have a supply of vaccines, how many people have been vaccinated and how many thousands will be vaccinated, or do we need to deploy more staff to help with vaccinations. in your areas,” he stressed.

In a report submitted by the DILG Central Emergency Operations Center, only 444 or 27.2% of the total 1,634 cities and municipalities have completed encoding their data to the VMS, with 1,190 LGUs failing to update their data.

Malaya said that failing to update information on VMS could lead to low vaccination level, inaccurate deployment of supply, or worse, vaccine irregularities like the alleged slot-for-sale.

To date, the Department of Health has recorded 1.27 million coronavirus infections in the country, 58,854 of whom are still classified as active cases.