The City Council, during last Monday’s regular session, urged all the city’s 128 barangays to make an inventory of their unvaccinated residents and to politely request them to take their vaccination shots to help in further improving the vaccination rate of the city government.
In a resolution, local legislators stated that the presence of unvaccinated individuals stems from a number of valid reasons such as, but not limited to, religious reasons, by reasons of age, either too old to too young, because their personal physicians have disallowed them to be inoculated on account of their health condition, and also invalid reasons such as procrastination, unwillingness to fall in line, or trypanophobia, fear of hypodermic needles, among other reasons.
The council asserted that despite these reasons, the local government has to try its best, through any means necessary to reach out to them, for the sake of the survival of the nation from the ongoing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
The body stipulated that in order for the city’s unvaccinated constituents to be spared from unwarranted restraints and possible arrest, and to give them the liberty to still do essential activities even under heightened restrictions, such as going to the market, purchasing groceries, going to restaurants and malls, and other activities that vaccinated people are entitled to, it is necessary for the local government, through the barangays, to facilitate and ease up vaccination for the unvaccinated persons.
Earlier, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered barangay officials to retrain unvaccinated individuals to help in mitigating the danger that unvaccinated persons pose to the general public since they are the most likely to get infected, the ones who seem to continually spread the virus, and are hosts to the projected mutations of the virus into new variants.
Further, the President lamented the worsening COVID-19 cases in the country following the emergence of the dominant, more infectious and more transmissible Omicron variant which is now seen as the major cause of the ongoing surge that tends to overwhelm the country’s health care system and stress the frontliners.
The barangays had been tapped to help speed up the identification of unvaccinated residents in their respective areas of jurisdiction to guide health authorities and local officials in the formulation of appropriate strategies that will convince them to already avail of the government’s mass vaccination program being rolled out for the realization of the desired population protection and herd immunity of the populace.
Moreover, barangay officials have been advised to inform and educate the unvaccinated individuals on the benefits of being vaccinated against the deadly virus to ensure that they will be protected from contracting the severe infection of the same.
The city is targeting to vaccinate some 281,000 eligible population that represents 95 percent of the city’s population as its contribution to the ongoing mass vaccination program of the government to prevent the further spread of the deadly virus and achieve herd immunity of the populace to contain the virus.
