DoH funds enough to buy new vaccines to fight COVID-19 surge
By Kenneth Christiane L. Basilio
THE DEPARTMENT of Health (DoH) will be pooling its unused funds to purchase a sufficient volume of new vaccines to combat emerging variants of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
“If there’s a need to provide something for the emerging [COVID-19] variant, we can always make some modifications within our budget,” Health Undersecretary Achilles Gerard C. Bravo told Wednesday’s House panel hearing.
The DoH is “collating all the resources” of its unused funds to modify and transfer them to “fast-moving appropriations” to support the government’s preparation spending for the disease, he added.
During the hearing, Marikina Rep. Stella Luz A. Quimbo questioned the department’s budget management. “There is a quick response fund… of [P970 million] that could be used, at the same time we have a communicable disease program that the DoH hasn’t used,” she said in Filipino.
“What we will do is that we have so many funds at the DoH, even from the [continuing appropriations] in 2023 and the current,” replied Mr. Bravo said, assuring the panel that funds and mechanisms are in place to purchase vaccines to combat a COVID-19 surge.
The health department has allotted P970 million for its quick response fund as of March 2024 which could be used to prepare for the new COVID-19 variant, he said.
DoH: NO TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS
On Tuesday night, the DoH said it does not see the need to impose travel restrictions even as the country faces rising COVID-19 cases potentially spurred by new subvariants.
“There’s still no scientific basis for travel restrictions to any country because of an increase in COVID-19 cases,” it said in a statement, noting the local situation “to be to be mild and manageable.”
All Philippine regions remain at low risk from the virus, it added.
The DoH has been tracking “newly designated variants under monitoring,” as its Southeast Asian Singapore faces an uptick in cases spurred by KP.1 and KP.2, which both belong to a new family of subvariants nicknamed as “FLiRT.”
From May 14 to 20, the Philippines had an average daily cases of 202, fewer than about 500 per day at the start of 2024. It’s also lower than 1,750 per day in the middle of May 2023, it added.
“Out of the new cases reported for the said week, 16 had severe or critical disease,” it said, adding that 12 deaths had been recorded, five of which were logged from May 7 to 20.
KP.1 and KP.2, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has labeled as a variant under monitoring and has been widely seen in the United States recently, have been linked to rising COVID-19 cases in Singapore.
Singapore, whose COVID-19 cases had risen to 25,900 cases from May 5 to 11 from 13,700 a week earlier, was expecting its new infection wave to peak in the coming weeks.
The University of the Philippines – Philippine Genome Center and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine continue with their sequencing efforts.
The Health department said the flagged Omicron subvariants KP.2 and KP.3 are “already likely here” but noted that “cases continue to be clinically mild and manageable.”
The agency said it avoids using “FLiRT,” a coin used by researchers to describe amino acid changes in the COVID-19 virus’ spike protein, to refer to the subvariants “as the term is informal and casual.”
“Using it might result in a miscommunication of health risk. There is still no evidence now that the KP.2 and KP.3 variants are causing severe to critical COVID-19, both locally and internationally,” it added.
As of May 18, only 12% or 141 of 1,155 of intensive care unit (ICU) beds for COVID-19 patients had been occupied, it said.
The agency said 1,435 or 14% of 10,356 COVID-19 beds had been used.
Severe and critical COVID-19 cases admitted in various hospitals account for 151 or 9% of total admissions, it added.
“The average number of daily reported severe, critical, and ICU COVID-19 admissions as of May 18 is much less than its level in the middle of May 2023.” — with a report from Kyle Aristophere T. Atienza
