The process is already laid out from arrival to storage and delivery to the vaccination site of vaccines ordered by the private sector from AstraZeneca.
When the vaccines land in mid -June, they will be delivered immediately to the Zuellig Pharma facility in Parañaque.
Vaccines undergo a thorough inspection before being stored in storage at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius.
“We will check the outer box to make sure that there is no tampering. So ‘yong mga seal, dapat hindi broken. The boxes are intact, walang punit,” said Jannette Jakosalem, the chief business officer of Zuellig.
In the next few days, Zuellig will also be responsible for delivering vaccines to vaccination sites after obtaining a Food and Drug Administration certificate.
Zuellig will also deliver the vaccine to private companies in other regions of the Philippines.
The said company is also in charge of collecting syringe supplies and vials not to be counterfeited or tampered with by other products.
Meanwhile, the private sector will ask the Department of Health (DOH) to inject all vaccines in the first batch as the first dose of qualified workers.
Private sector ready for arrival of ordered vaccines
“But we have to compute the arrival dates of the next batch,” said Presidential Adviser for Entrepreneurship Joey Concepcion.
If the plan is allowed, between 800,000 to 1.3 million economic frontliners will be immediately vaccinated by their first dose.
Concepcion is confident that the DOH will allow this because it is already working on a system for some vaccines in local government units.
In March, President Rodrigo Duterte announced that the private sector would be allowed to buy their COVID-19 vaccines “at will.”
Duterte said that many private companies want to buy vaccines for their employees. “You know the reason why? So that the economy can be opened,” he said.
The government targets to vaccinate 70 million of the population before the end of the year. As of the last record, 4.3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been injected in the country.
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