IF THE government wants to relax quarantine restrictions further and inject life back to the sputtering economy, then it must speed up the vaccination against coronavirus disease of essential workers who have huge contributions to our economy.
The best way to honor essential workers is not through words, but to give them the one essential thing that will keep them safe and protected, and that is the vaccine. Yes, by vaccinating them, we end up being protected as well. But there is a “double protection” in this, so to speak. Aside from lives, livelihoods are likewise made safe.
Workers who cannot work from home should be moved up the vaccination queue. Day in and day out they put their lives on the line so that the lives of the rest of us can have a semblance of normalcy. They are the workers in the groceries, markets, public utilities, public transport, food, manufacturing, retail, media, and construction, etc. Workers in private infrastructure projects should also be included in the A4 priority list, given the seasonal nature of their employment.
Let us not forget, too, the contractual workers who have no employers to sponsor their free vaccination. Most of them depend on their daily wages. They must be included in the priority list so they could work safely.
The National Economic and Development Authority recently released the subgroups in the A4 cluster of the vaccine priority list, or the group for essential workers.
The country has over 2.5 million doses of vaccines since deliveries began in March, while the government revised its initial projection of 24.1 million doses to 11.5 million doses to arrive in the second quarter of the year.
Let us speed up the vaccination drive on essential workers so they could continue their important functions in society, and thereby inject life back to our economy.
However, there should be adequate supply of vaccines or the country would just end up with a huge backlog of unvaccinated beneficiaries. For more people to be vaccinated, more vaccines must arrive. The supply must meet the demand.
