Coronavirus vaccines: will Hong Kong answer the Philippines’ plea for city’s excess supplies?
- The Philippines’ top diplomat said on Twitter on Monday that he had appealed to the city’s leader ‘to donate or sell excess vaccines before they expire’
- Hong Kong’s government did not confirm if it had received such a request – but specialists say liability would be a ‘key concern’ if a deal went ahead
Specialists interviewed for this article were surprised by Locsin’s claim that a manufacturer would ban the sale or donation of its vaccines to a third party – though they said that liability would be a concern once the jabs had left a company’s temperature-controlled supply chain.
A Hong Kong government spokesman did not confirm if Manila had put in an official request for excess vaccines, but said options for handling “expected surplus doses” from the city’s vaccination drive included “postponing or cancelling delivery of certain batches or donating them to places which are more in need of the vaccines through channels such as the World Health Organization Covax Facility”.
An estimate of “the quantity of vaccines that may become excessive” would be made “based on the vaccination and appointment trends” and following discussions with the jabs’ manufacturers, the spokesman said, “to avoid wastage amid tight global supply”.
Hong Kong’s vaccination rate remains stubbornly low, with only 1.2 million people, or about 16 per cent of the city’s 7.5 million residents, fully immunised as of Monday – nearly four months since its mass vaccination programme began.
As of May 24, there were 840,000 unused Comirnaty doses in storage and 1.05 million unused Sinovac ones, the government said in a statement the following day. Comirnaty is the brand name for the vaccine developed by Pfizer-BioNTech that needs to be kept at ultra-low temperatures – though the US Food and Drug Administration said last month that “undiluted, thawed” doses could be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures for up to one month.