Cebu City’s VSMMC targets to vaccinate 500 health care workers per day

Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC) here is targeting 400 to 500 vaccinations of its employees in the coming days.

Gerardo Aquino, Jr., VSMMC Medical Center chief, made the announcement during the vaccine rollout assessment on Thursday, March 4.

Aquino was the first in Cebu to be vaccinated with CoronaVac, the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech.

In the assessment, he said that they were aiming to inoculate 50-75 of the hospital’s top management and the department chairs that same day. He added that they would amp up the number of vaccinations to 500 VSMMC employees per day.

“We are targeting 400 to 500 per day, over the next few days,” he said.

As of Thursday morning, the number of VSMMC employees who opted to be inoculated with Sinovac rose to 1,245 from the initial count of 768 employees.

Aquino surmised that this rise in willingness was because of initial vaccinations in Manila. He added that the ceremonial vaccination would encourage more frontliners to be vaccinated with Sinovac.

“As for me, kanang murag wala lang… just a little pain sa injection site. Just like any ordinary injection,” Aquino assessed.

(For me, it’s really nothing… just a little pain in the injection site. Just like any ordinary injection.)

Also receiving their CoronaVac jabs during the Cebu City vaccine rollout Thursday were St. Anthony Mother and Child Hospital chief Juanito Tiu, Eversley Child Sanitarium and General Hospital chief Pythagoras Zerna, IATF Central Visayas chief implementer Melquiades Felician, DOH-7 regional director Jaime Bernadas, and DOH-7 chief pathologist Mary Jean Loereche.

The initial batch of 7,200 Sinovac vaccines for Cebu arrived on Tuesday, March 2. Another batch of about 7,000 vaccines was scheduled to arrive Thursday.

As for the AstraZeneca vaccines, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque assured that Cebu remained a priority in the allocation of doses. However, there was still no date when the next shipment to Cebu would be and the number of doses allocated for the island. – Rappler.com