Our government allocated P82.5-B or over $2-B contracts plus billion pesos more from LGUs and private companies. Some are already mentioning ‘kick-vacs’ in meetings with highly visible foreign vaccine representatives around town. And mind you, who are the Filipino partners of these vaccines? Who are the fixers closing deals left and right?
But we Pinoys are not stupid as these sycophants think we are. Because of mixed signals, we have today a growing distrust on all COVID-19 vaccinations, even as the total cases zoomed past 500,000 last Sunday. On efficacies, Pfizer Biontech has a 95 percent score compared to Sinovac’s Coronavac with secretive and vacillating numbers of 50.4 percent in Brazil and 91.1 percent in Turkey.
On the other hand, Sinovac and Sinopharm are still unfinished with their clinical trials. In Brazil, a clinical participant of Sinovac died in November but this was later clarified as suicide. And about ten years ago, Sinovac was accused of bribing a senior Chinese drug regulator to approve its vaccine, the guy was later jailed in 2017. This news pushed our local DOH-FDA to declare repetitiously that they cannot be bribed by Sinovac.