The chairman of the House Committee on Public Accounts stressed the need to make a more economical, yet equally effective, child pneumonia vaccine accessible to the public to help save the government billions of pesos in losses.
Probinsyano Ako Party-list Representative Jose Singson Jr. made the call as he urged Congress to look into the so-called “bakuna budol”, which pertains to the controversy surrounding the pneumococcal vaccine procurement.
“We need to get to the root of this issue.”
“It is usually the people who are marginalized that are at risk for getting pneumonia. Procurement issues with the vaccine are roadblocks to our goal of universal healthcare and so we need to get to the root of this issue,” Singson said.
The legislator said providing the existence of a monopoly shows that the “government is losing billions of pesos while possibly depriving more children to be vaccinated against child pneumonia”.
The lawmaker cited the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring that pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) 10 and PCV 13 are at parity and not inferior to each other.
“Since 2014, the Philippines’ childhood immunization program has been using the more expensive PCV 13.”
He, however, noted that since 2014, the Philippines’ childhood immunization program has been using the more expensive PCV 13, which is the only pneumonia vaccine made available in the Philippine market.
“If there is a monopoly in the pneumonia vaccine that is tricking the government into buying the more expensive PCVs, this defeats the purpose of providing more pneumonia protection to our children,” Singson said.
He warned that the government might be unnecessarily spending on these more costly PCVs when there are “more cost-effective yet equally effective ones available”.
Singson also cited the Department of Health’s (DOH) Health Technology Assessment Council (HTAC) report that PCV10 is more affordable than PCV13, emphasizing that “a lower-priced vaccine would be more favorable to ensure higher vaccine coverage on a per-dose basis”.
The same report found that the effectiveness of the more affordable PCV10 in reducing pneumonia is equal to that of PCV 13.
“We will look into this matter closely until we get the clarification we need so we can make the best decisions not only for the parties that are involved, but more importantly, for our children, the future of this country,” he concluded.