Philippine Ambassador to the United States Jose Manuel Romualdez
PH joins requests for COVID-19 vaccine donations from US
THE Philippines has expressed its interest to the United States government to be one of the beneficiaries of its coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine donations.
In a Palace briefing Thursday, National Task Force Against Covid-19 (NTF) deputy chief implementer Vivencio Dizon said the Philippine Embassy in Washington D.C. is in talks with key US government officials for the vaccine donations.
“In the next few weeks, we will get (an) update on this. But according to Ambassador (Jose Manuel) ‘Babes’ (Romualdez), the US government had a ‘very positive’ response about our request, especially for the AstraZeneca vaccines that have not been used in America,” he said.
Dizon added there are other countries that also requested to get a share from the COVID-19 vaccine donations from the US government.
President Joe Biden announced that the US would send an initial 20 million doses of vaccines to help other countries in its fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.
“(T)he United States will share at least 20 million of those doses, that extra supply, with other countries,” Biden said. “This means over the next six weeks, the United States of America will send 80 million doses overseas.”
As of May 16, Our World in Data shows that the US has given 274 million shots of COVID-19 vaccines.
About 37.6 percent of its population, or 123 million people, were fully vaccinated.
In the Philippines, 2.92 million doses of COVID-19 jabs were given, with less than a percentage of the population finishing the two doses of vaccines. Philippine News Agency
