DOH-12 provides vaccines for Cotabato City frontliners

COTABATO CITY --- The Deparment of Health-12 has earmarked 2,138 anti-coronavirus jabs for personnel of two medical institutions that are both inside the Bangsamoro region.

The Cotabato Regional Medical Center (CRMC) and the Cotabato Sanitarium Hospital are located in Cotabato City and in Sultan Kudarat town in Maguindanao, respectively.

Aristides Tan, director of DOH-12, said Friday they got 17,940 doses of Sinovac vaccines from the national government that they are to administer to anti-COVID-19 frontliners, among them 1, 908 personnel of the CRMC and 230 more employees of the Sanitarium Hospital.

Both medical institutions are still under DOH but are inside the core territory of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

The BARMM has not assumed yet of the management of both hospitals via the region’s Ministry of Health.  

The BARMM government received separately last Thursday from the national government 4,200 doses of Sinovac vaccines that are enough to protect 2,100 frontliners from the infectious disease that has so far infected 584,667 in the country.

Physician Amirel Usman, acting health minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, told reporters Friday the vaccines are intended for health workers and essential service providers in the forefront of BARMM’s war on COVID-19.

“Our frontliners are happy with this,” he said.

Usman got a Sinovac jab on Friday during the symbolic launching of their vaccination campaign for anti-COVID-19 frontliners at the Maguindanao Integrated Provincial Health Office in Shariff Aguak town in Maguindanao.

Usman and physician Zul Qarneyn Abas, also a senior official of the Ministry of Health-BARMM, led the medical team that fetched from the Maguindanao Airport near  Cotabato City the vaccines that arrived from Manila, brought in by a passenger plane.

Usman said the shipment consisted of 4,200 vials of Sinovac.

The 4,200 doses are for 2,100 anti-COVID-19 frontliners in the Bangsamoro region, who shall have two jabs each.

The MOH-BARMM and the Rapid Emergency Action on Disaster Incidence, or READI contingent, are working together in pushing the anti-coronavirus containment efforts of the Bangsamoro government forward.

Usman said the vaccines that arrived Thursday are intended for 1,400 frontliners in Maguindanao, 972 in Lanao del Sur, 287 in Basilan, 1,032 in Sulu and 518 in Tawi-Tawi.

Lawyer Naguib Sinarimbo, BARMM’s local government minister, said Thursday the Bangsamoro leadership is thankful to the national government for supplying vaccines for 2,100 regional anti-COVID-19 frontliners.

“We are so thankful for this support,” Sinarimbo, also BARMM’s regional spokesperson, said.

Sinarimbo is overseeing the operation of READI that has teams of calamity and disaster response experts directly involved in BARMM’s anti-COVID-19 campaign.

A number of BARMM-READI personnel survived COVID-19 infections last year, apparently contracted while working in the field.

Photo: Bangsamoro Health Minister Amirel Usman got an anti-COVID-19 jab on Friday. (BARMM Information Office)