SunStar Editorial: Securing trust for vaccination
DIALOGUE, NOT PUNISHMENT. Threatening to jail persons who refuse to be vaccinated is counterproductive to earning the trust and cooperation of individuals and communities that must work together for the Philippines to survive and thrive after the Covid-19 pandemic. (SunStar file)
+ June 27, 2021 The threat to arrest Filipinos who refuse to be vaccinated is ill-advised as the punitive measure hardly addresses the roots of the country’s dismal vaccination figures.
Since the government implemented last March 1 the National Deployment and Vaccination Plan for Covid-19 Vaccines, only 2.25 million Filipinos, representing 2.1 percent of the total population of 108.1 million, were fully vaccinated as of June 22, according to ourworldindata.org. The website, a collaboration between Oxford University and the non-profit organization Global Change Data Lab, uses data from official sources.
The nonprofit group PATH is using its connections with international government agencies, vaccine manufacturers, and scientists to create a coronavirus vaccine that can be manufactured in lower-income countries.
SINGAPORE - Largely spared the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic for most of last year, South-east Asia is now in the grip of a new wave of infections that is putting unprecedented pressure on healthcare systems and threatening to bring economies to their knees.
In Thailand, hospital beds are quickly filling up after infections, first seeded in some exclusive entertainment outlets in Bangkok, resulted in the country s highest-ever number of daily cases early last month. The number spiked again after Songkran, the Thai New Year.
Since then, the caseload has crept upwards and has more than quadrupled to nearly 135,000 as the authorities struggled to contain outbreaks in overcrowded prisons, markets and camps housing construction workers.
SINGAPORE (The Straits Times/ANN): Largely spared the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic for most of 2020, South-east Asia is now in the grip of a new wave of infections that is putting unprecedented pressure on health systems of countries in the region and threatening to bring their economies to the ground.