THE vaccination booster programme will be open to all health workers latest by December this year to provide them additional protection against the coronavirus.
Reports in Manila Times quoted vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr., the chief implementer of the National Task Force against Covid-19, saying the administration of booster shots will begin once 50 per cent of the country's population was already inoculated.
"We will have the boosters once we have the threshold of 50 per cent vaccination. We're pushing for this year as we don't want to take the risk of waning vaccination and later, casualties and fatalities once we have another wave of variants," Galvez said.
"By November 15 or maybe December, we will start with health care workers because we want to protect our health care system. We will start giving out third doses to health care workers because we really want to boost their protection to protect our healthcare system," he added.
The Department of Health (DoH) earlier said it was still not recommending booster shots to the public "as a matter of equity" since there was still a shortage of vaccine supply in the country, echoing the World Health Organisation's (WHO) recommendation to vaccinate a larger portion of the population first before administering booster shots.
The WHO has called for a moratorium on giving out Covid-19 booster shots until the end of 2021, since millions of individuals worldwide are yet to receive a single dose.
But Galvez said the country has reached an "inflection point" where the supply of vaccines was greater than the demand or the capacity of the government to safely store the jabs.
"This is why we opened to other sectors since we were worried that the volume of vaccines will surpass our storage capacity," he said, referring to the recent decision of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases to allow a pilot implementation programme for pediatric vaccinations.
Under the pilot programme, which is set to begin on October 15, minors aged 12 to 17 who have underlying medical conditions will be considered as part of the government's A3 category or persons with comorbidities.
Galvez said the pilot rollout of pediatric vaccination has also been expanded to eight hospitals from six.
He added that St. Luke's Medical Center-Global City and Makati Medical Centre would be included in the list of hospitals to offer pediatric Covid-19 vaccinations.
The other hospitals are the Philippine Children's Medical Centre, National Children's Hospital, Philippine Heart Centre, Pasig City Children's Hospital, Fe Del Mundo Medical Center and Philippine General Hospital.
Most of the breakthrough infections were from Sinovac's CoronaVac, the most used vaccine in the country, with 327 breakthrough infections out of the total 10.7 million doses, from which eight have died.
Janssen, a single-dose vaccine, had only 35 breakthrough infections out of 3.6 million who had been fully inoculated, of whom five have died, while AstraZeneca had 35 breakthrough cases out of 2.56 million who had been fully inoculated.