MANILA, Philippines — Health officials and experts are discussing the proposal to redefine the meaning of full vaccination, an official said Monday.
There are calls to redefine the term “fully vaccinated” to include booster dose due to the slow uptake of additional shots.
“We are set to redefine these fully vaccinated individuals. But right now, we are still discussing this with our experts as to how we are going to have this validity for our vaccination cards so that we can be able to improve further our booster vaccination,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel.
Vergeire noted that other countries did not redefine the meaning of “fully vaccinated” and just used the term “up to date.” In the United States, an individual is considered up to date after getting their first booster.
“Whenever we do this redefinition of fully vaccinated, there are a lot of things, like our protocols, that will be affected,” Vergeire said.
“Say for example, the alert level system, you need a fully vaccinated target of individuals that you need to attain so you can be deescalated. If we shift to this kind of definition, the alert level system will be affected. Therefore, a lot of areas will be escalated to Alert Level 2,” she explained.
According to the health official, the topic of redefining full vaccination will be discussed in Tuesday’s IATF meeting.
Latest data showed that more than 66.6 million Filipinos have completed vaccination against COVID-19.
Meanwhile, only over 12.4 million individuals of 44 million eligible recipients have gotten booster shots.