ILOILO City – The Western Visayas regional office of the Department of Health (DOH) has defended itself from the presidential call-out that less than half of the target number of children in the region has been immunized.
Breaking its four-day silence since President Ferdinand “Bongbog” Marcos Jr. expressed his concern during his July 22 State of the Nation Address (SONA), DOH Region 6 issued a statement on July 26 insisting that it had in fact undertaken “various actions to expand the package of quality immunization services and increase its coverage, demand generation and multi-sectoral support.”
The statement, approved by Regional Director Adriano Suba-an, further cited activities “strengthening surveillance and response, build up supervision, monitoring and evaluation, and institute supportive governance, financing and regulatory measures.”
During his SONA, President Marcos said that in Western Visayas, “kulang pa sa kalahati ang nababakunahan” (less than half of the target number of children has been immunized).
In its statement, DOH-6 did not mention anything about factors that could have possibly contributed to the low vaccination rate.
Instead, it stated: “Addressing the increasing number of unimmunized and under vaccinated children, various activities were conducted by the agency.”
Among these, it said, were the “Bivalent Oral Polio Vaccine Intensive Catch-Up Immunization” and the “Supplemental Immunization Activity” from March to July 2024.
Through these, according to DOH-6, 252,524 children from ages 24 to 59 months old were inoculated, and so were 135,033 kids between zero to 23 months old.
DOH-6 further said it did the following:
* trained Health Education and Promotion Officers (HEPO) and Barangay Health Workers (BHW) to capacitate them on conducting social mobilization activities and correcting vaccine misinformation and disinformation
* held town hall meetings via virtual platforms to cater various audiences with queries and clarifications on vaccination
* held intersectoral and collaborative meetings with different agencies with the goal of getting their support to the immunization program
* hired social mobilizers and field HEPOs to augment health workers
* deployed more doctors, nurses, midwives, nutritionists, dentists, medical technologists and data encoders especially to Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas (GIDA)
Regarding vaccine supply, DOH-6 said, “Since 2023, the Department of Health allocated continuous and sufficient vaccines to fight vaccine preventable diseases such as Tuberculosis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Hepatitis B, Polio, Pneumonia, Flu, and Human Papillomavirus (HPV).”
It also said regular vaccine inventory is conducted “to prevent supply-chain management concerns”.
“Regular forecasting of vaccines is practiced to ensure that there will be lesser chances of vaccine shortages and wastages due to over-stocking,” it added.
With the resumption of classes drawing near, DOH-6 said there will be School-Based Immunization (SBI) “with the goal to protect our children against measles, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria and HPV.”
It also said “a big catch up” is being planned “to bridge the gap between the emergence of both small and large-scale measles and pertussis outbreak resulting from low immunization coverage.”/PN