Hello, everyone, I’m delighted to share the Philippine experience. Just a little bit of background, I do Chair the Committee on Sustainable Development Goals, Innovation and Futures Thinking in the Senate, but I also happen to Chair the Committee on Ways and Means and I will talk a little bit about our taxation efforts with regards to Covid. And I also I’m the Vice Chair for Committee on Finance and I handle the budget of the department of health, especially in the response to Covid. So, coming from that, and one last background is I am the Chapter Head of Unite, which our founder, Ricardo Baptista Leite just spoke earlier. So, I’m a happy sponge in these virtual conferences as I learn a lot from my colleagues from all over the world and I hope that I can also share a few things in the process.

So, very quickly. What we did in the Philippines is we passed two major laws in the early days of Covid. As a quick response, we provided the president with emergency powers to respond and in those early days the question was really the testing capacity. And, then, we had a second law wherein we tackled more technical aspects, we learned a little bit more and matured a little in our legislation and we gave the power to our… it’s called the Health Technology Assessment Council, the power to make the recommendations based on ongoing phase four trials. Because, by law, they cannot make the recommendations for government to purchase until after these are all concluded. So, we empowered them to do that only to find out, a few months later, that the world would be purchasing vaccines as they were still going through phase three trials. So, now, we are in the process of passing that law that also allows them to make those purchases during the phase three trial. But, in the meantime, as I mentioned, I chair the Committee on Ways and Means, which is taxation in our country and we passed the major legislation that really has to do with investment, making the country a more investment-friendly country, not necessarily Covid related. But because we are living in the time of Covid, we included provisions that provide for duties and tax-free importation of the Covid vaccines.

And, then, we realized that there’s also donations, we did not include donations, so now we have another law that is being tackled and that will now include donations. So, very quickly, I do want to discuss this bill that we have in the Senate and it tackles the legal limitations that we face in procuring vaccines. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but in our country, we have very strong procurement laws that basically are there to address graft and corruption and so we are not allowed to make advanced purchases. The national government and the local government cannot just make advance purchases, that is not allowed under procurement laws, so in the previous Covid response law, we allowed national government to work around that. But, as it turns out, we have exemptions when it comes to multilateral loans and, so, multilateral loans do not have to comply with these procurement requirements and that makes it easier for the national government to access these funds immediately.

But the interesting twist here is that, meanwhile, our local government chiefs are getting anxious, I think our first batch is arriving anytime now, so no one has been vaccinated in our country yet, compared to many other countries. And, so, the local governments have demanded the right to also procure for themselves and I have been awaiting the availability of the founder of our Unite Parliamentary Network to have a discussion with me on this because we do know that there are pros and cons on… we want to empower the local governments, but from what I read all over the world, vaccines are being procured by the federal governments nationally, so, how to go about this in a way that does not disenfranchise or discriminate those who are not on the priority list of those who are able to procure it some other way?

And this is actually now a nationwide call of a network of doctors in our country that they worry that if it is not centralized, if the procurement isn’t centralized, if local governments or the private sector purchase on their own, that they may not follow the priorities that the national government has accepted in line with the Covax scheme. So, those are issues that we’re facing.

And we also have a major issue on vaccine hesitancy. I don’t know how big of a problem that is in other countries. I have not heard as much as I’d like to, but um there was a survey done in the Philippines and three out of ten only are willing to be vaccinated and this may be because of our history because we had a big Dengvaxia issue a few years ago and long story, not enough time to explain it now, but it basically scared so many families, parents and, so, they are not very comfortable with vaccination at this point. So, those are a few of the issues that we face right now.

Logistically, we are a country of seven thousand islands, seven thousand plus, and, so, for example, to be specific, the Pfizer vaccine that requires a very cold temperature; we have already been told that it would be rolled out only in the metropolitan areas because that is the areas that currently have the storage facilities. The other provinces would have to make use of the other vaccines that don’t have the same cold storage requirement. I mean, every day there are new issues that come about.