Senate panel to probe 44 million COVID-19 vaccine doses wastage

MANILA, Philippines — The Senate Blue Ribbon committee is geared to scrutinize what happened to the 44 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine that were wasted, according to Sen. Francis Tolentino.

Tolentino, who chairs the Senate Blue Ribbon committee, said the scrutiny would be done through an executive session as the Department of Health (DOH) raised the issue of the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the vaccine manufacturers.

“We will hold an executive session to discuss what happened in the 44 million doses wastage… We will investigate which are these 44 million doses, the fund, the brands and where they were sent so that in the future, the government will have the right policy so that it will not happen again,” Tolentino said in English and Filipino during an interview aired over dwIZ radio.

The senator presided over the Senate Blue Ribbon committee on the motu proprio investigation into the non-disclosure by and/or refusal of the DOH to release the details of the vaccine procurement contracts on the pretext of a supposedly existing NDA.

He noted that the funds would also be discussed as former finance secretary Carlos Dominguez III claimed that funds used in buying vaccines that expired were not government money.

Among reasons for the wastage are expiration or beyond the shelf life and short lifespan devices.

Tolentino also said that with the committee hearings, the DOH committed to submit to the Commission on Audit (COA) all the necessary documents for audit.

He added that the solicitor general, the statutory counsel of the government, will be part of the next procurement of the COVID-19 vaccines to help scrutinize the deal, especially those with an NDA.

“Because they will buy the bivalent again, I said to do the process with a lawyer, the government, the SolGen, so that the contract can be reviewed,” Tolentino told Senate reporters shortly after the hearing.

Asked whether there was any irregularity in the COVID-19 procurement, he responded that he has yet to see the contract.

The senator noted that there would be two more executive sessions to “make everything transparent for the people to know why the 44 million doses were wasted.”

DOH officer-in-charge Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire told the panel that the DOH inventories indicated that the bulk of the wastage came from the procurement made by the private sector.

“For vaccine wastage and the bulk of the 44 million received, of these in our inventories, mostly comes from the procurement of the private sector, which is around 44.82 percent of their procured vaccines and coming from the local government units, which is around 33.34 percent of their procured vaccines,” Vergeire said.

“If we look at our current inventories, the national government procurement was only 2.97 percent out of the total number that we have procured, which is around 134 million doses that we have procured, only around 2.9 million have expired. From this the estimated amount of wastage among the national government procured vaccines corresponds only to P1.99 billion if we are to equate or estimate this at P500 per dose,” Tolentino said.

Vergeire clarified, though, that the DOH does not have any issue with being subjected to audits for these vaccine procurements.

“We are very much willing to be subjected to audits. In fact, the Department of Health specifically communicated officially to the Commission on Audit for this specific audience that can be done for our national vaccine deployment program,” she told the panel.

She clarified, however, that the DOH has been one of the many government agencies that handled the COVID-19 vaccine portfolio from the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, but various agencies handled various aspects based on their mandates and technical expertise.