BY ADRIAN P. NEMES III
“We will check on this,” executive director Em Ang of the Emergency Operations Center said on allegations that there were individuals, who have been vaccinated although they did not belong to the priority groups in the vaccination rollout.
Ang said they have not received any reports regarding the matter because the barangays have not sent their reports yet on the vaccination rollout in the barangay and clustered centers.
She said individuals who will be inoculated based on the priority guidelines of the Inter-Agency Task Force should be those who belong to A1 or frontliners and health workers, A2 – senior citizens, and A3 – persons with comorbidities.
The EOC has not set the schedule yet for those who belong to the A4 category or essential workers, such as teachers and media practitioners, as the IATF has not released the guidelines yet.
Ang explained that those who have been vaccinated although not in the priority groups could be in the substitution list. She said they may have been inoculated because those who were scheduled for vaccination failed to show up.
She emphasized that the vaccines need to be utilized within six days after arrival and could not be discarded.
Bacolod Vice Mayor El Cid Familiaran had said the city has no more vaccines because the vials delivered recently were already consumed.
BACOLOD IN CASE STUDY
Meanwhile, Mayor Evelio Leonardia said that, in the midst of this health crisis, “We are somehow placated that our city was chosen among the only four in the country for the case study to capacitate local government units in addressing the Covid-19 crisis, and coping with the new normal.”
The project, called “Planning for Greater Resiliency, Addressing Pandemics/ Biohazards and Public Health Emergencies and Its Impacts on Most At-Risk Populations”, is a joint project of the Department of Interior and Local Government, Department of Health, and the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund.
Leonardia said they are happy because the expertise of these institutions in this particular field will surely redound to the benefit of their constituents in Bacolod. “It should put us ahead in this race against the pandemic,” he added.
He said the Planning and Development Research Foundation will also conduct case studies to provide index coping of experiences, sectors, resources, capacity issues, and innovations in the purview of the roles of LGUs.
The cities were chosen on the basis of the four major geographical regions: Muntinlupa for the National Capital Region, Baguio City for Luzon, Iligan City for Mindanao, and Bacolod City representing the whole Visayas.
WORLD BANK CHOICE
Leonardia said, “We are proud to belong to this select group, especially that the World Bank has also recently designated us among the few pilot cities in its “Technical Assistance Program on Green and Resilient Development in Select Secondary Cities in the Philippines” project.*
