Bureaucratic mess or negligence of duty?
Our government officials are acting so slow in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. A case in point is Senator Panfilo Lacson’s disclosure of Health Secretary Francisco Duque III’s failure to act with dispatch on the confidentiality disclosure agreement (CDA) required by Pfizer for the Philippines to secure vaccine supply from the company. As a result, the chance to secure 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine was snatched by Singapore from the Philippines.
Duque justified his hesitation of getting the vaccine on the ground that the technology used in producing the vaccine has “never been tried or tested,” and it is his duty to “ensure the safety of the vaccines.” It would have been easy to accept Duque’s ratiocinations had other countries also suffered from the same situation of waiting in agony for the pandemic to end with no available vaccine yet.
The UK and the US have already started their war against COVID-19 with the vaccine produced by Pfizer using mRNA technology. By invoking prudence on vaccine procurement, Duque is impliedly saying that the UK and the US are doing their vaccination programs recklessly. These countries, which have invested significantly in science and technology, are fully aware of the new technology’s risks. But given the extreme necessity to revive their economies and restore normalcy to their citizens’ lives, they have made a calculated risk.
Beneath Duque’s defense of prudence lies an ugly bureaucratic mess. He admitted that it took four months from the time Pfizer provided the Philippine government with an overview up to the time he signed the agreement. Add another two months for the Executive Secretary to determine that it should be the DOH that should sign the document.
Senator Lacson described Duque’s reluctance to secure the Pfizer vaccine as “indifference”. Some criticized this inaction as colossal irresponsibility. Whatever is the appropriate description, there seems to be a combination of a bureaucratic mess and negligence of duty that led to an opportunity lost.
But there is a more intriguing part of the country’s vaccination program against COVID-19 since there seems to be an express lane for vaccine approval and procurement of Sinovac’s CoronoVac even if it is still undergoing the third and crucial stage of testing its efficacy while Pfizer has concluded its trials that its vaccine has shown 95-percent efficacy.
Aside from being trampled in the stampede for the COVID-19 vaccine, the Filipino people are also trapped in the bureaucratic mess aggravated by our government officials’ dubious motives of giving an advantage to a favored manufacturer. Aside from worrying about the unknown side effects of a new vaccine, there is something more that we should worry about the vaccines that will be made available here by the government: a vaccine tainted with corruption is scarier than one produced using new technology.