(Eagle News) — On or before December 30, the country’s vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr., will start negotiating with the US-based biotech firm, Moderna, so the Philippines can get vaccine doses for its mass vaccination campaign next year.
This was according to Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr, in an interview with CNN Philippines’ ‘The Source.’
Galvez is going to start negotiations with Moderna “on or before Wednesday next week,” Locsin said in the interview.
Locsin, reading a statement supposedly from Galvez, also said that Galvez was glad that Philippine ambassador to Washington Jose “Babe’ Romualdez himself “is helping us with negotiations.”
He said Moderna was interested in giving an allocation for the Philippines after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had approved Moderna’s two-dose regimen for the vaccine against COVID-19.
On Friday, the United States announced that it authorized Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use.
The US is the first nation to authorize the two-dose regimen, now the second vaccine to be deployed in a Western country after one developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
“With the availability of two vaccines now for the prevention of Covid-19, the FDA has taken another crucial step in the fight against this global pandemic,” Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Stephen Hahn said.
-Another chance to get Pfizer vaccine allocations-
Ambassador Romualdez had earlier said that Pfizer was ready to provide vaccines to the Philippines,
Romualdez recalled that it was Pfizer which first approached them months ago. The company had even offered to sell their vaccines to the Philippines at a more affordable price — around $5 per shot — since it considered the Philippines as one of the US’ allies.
He said that the Philippine government has had talks with Pfizer months ago after Foreign Affairs Secretary Locsin’s discussions with US Secretary of States Mike Pompeo.
After a second talk with Pompeo, Locsin said Moderna and Pfizer were again interested in giving an allocation for the Philippines and had already reportedly reached out to Romualdez.
Locsin said that they would try to get back what the Philippines lost in terms of the vaccine allocations, which Pfizer now sent to Singapore.
The Philippines was supposed to get around 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine by January 2021 but this did not push through due to a failure to follow through a commitment that had been initially set through the efforts of the DFA with Secretary Pompeo.
(Eagle News Service with a report from Agence France Presse)