BY ADRIAN P. NEMES III
The General Alliance of Workers Association is calling on the national government to increase the allocation of Covid vaccines of Negros Occidental to accommodate more workers in the ongoing rollout.
GAWA Secretary General Wennie Sancho said they already submitted their letter-request to Department of Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, who is also the chairperson of the Inter-Agency Task Force.
Sancho said the vaccine allocation in the province is not enough, leaving the vulnerable workers in danger and unprotected from Covid.
He reiterated that they are fervently appealing to the national government for urgent and additional vaccines for Negros Occidental, including Bacolod City.
Sancho also said that this current surge of transmission in Bacolod had caused an awareness that the way to combat the continued transmission of the virulent virus is only through vaccination and the observance of health protocols.
In a statement, GAWA said the workers need to be vaccinated so that they could already go back to work and no longer be afraid of getting infected. “Our workers need the vaccine so that we could help the government achieve herd immunity,” it added.
GAWA has about 5,000 members province-wide, who are working both in the industrial and agricultural sectors, with some of them belonging to the essential workers’ category.
As of yesterday, the national government has not given a go signal to start the inoculation of essential workers in Negros Occidental, who are under the A4 category in the priority list of the vaccination rollout against Covid-19.*