MANILA, Philippines — Virus epicenter Metro Manila will get the biggest share of the latest shipment of AstraZeneca COVID-19 shots, the Department of Health said Monday.
A quarter, or 501,600, of the more than two million AstraZeneca vaccine doses that arrived in the country over the weekend will be distributed in Metro Manila, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a briefing.
Central Luzon and Calabarzon will also get substantial portions of the additional COVID-19 jabs, with 261,600 and 254,400 vaccine doses, respectively.
“The 'NCR Plus' bubble has the biggest allocation because we know that it is our focus so that we can have herd containment here in the epicenter of this disease,” Vergeire said.
The health official said the government is “ready to deploy” additional AstraZeneca shots across the country as she maintained that the benefits of getting the vaccine outweigh the risks.
The latest shipment was the second batch of AstraZeneca vaccines delivered to the country through the COVAX facility, after the delivery of 525,600 doses in March.
This brought the total number of vaccine doses in the country to around 7.5 million.
A day before the arrival of the jabs, the DOH announced the AstraZeneca vaccine can again be used by people aged 18 and above. Authorities had temporarily halted the administration of the shots to those below 60 years old due to concerns over very rare blood clots after inoculation.
Some 193,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine from the COVAX facility are also expected to arrive in the country Monday.
The Philippines has one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in Southeast Asia, and is counting on a massive inoculation campaign to end it.
Vaccination in the country has been slow with a little over 300,000 people being fully vaccinated since the immunization program began in March.