House to house vaccination pushed
HOUSE Assistant Majority Leader and Quezon City Rep. Precious Hipolito Castelo on Saturday urged the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) on pandemic response and the Department of Health (DoH) to undertake house-to-house vaccination through local government units (LGUs).
“With the expected arrival of millions of doses of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease-19) vaccines this month and next month, the IATF and the DoH have to ramp up vaccine rollout to inoculate as many Filipinos as possible and as fast as possible,” Castelo said.
One way of scaling up vaccination “is to seek people from house to house and offer them the vaccine,” Castelo said.
“The government can persuade many of those who are hesitant to take the jab to get vaccinated if LGU teams knock on their doors and explain the benefits of taking it,” Castelo said.
Castelo noted that a recent survey showed that six in 10 Filipinos or 60 percent of the population were hesitant or afraid to be inoculated against the new coronavirus and its more infectious variants.
“We can speed up vaccination and achieve herd immunity and return to normal life at the soonest possible time if we do immunization through home-to-home visits and other means to get our people to take the vaccine,” Castelo stressed.
Earlier, Castelo proposed vaccinations by LGUs and homeowners’ associations in private villages, and home immunization in the case of housebound persons like those with physical disability or bedridden.
The IATF and the DoH has allowed both measures to ramp up vaccination.
She said many of those who have not been vaccinated yet are not really hesitant or afraid to take the vaccine.
“They do not want to go to barangay vaccination centers because of overcrowding. They fear they might get the virus there. They will take the jab if offered in their homes or villages, which is what we have observed in some of the subdivisions in our district where inoculation has been allowed,” Castelo said.
Castelo said the national government and LGUs, with the cooperation of volunteers, have the manpower and logistics to do house-to-house and village inoculation.
