Senator Richard J. Gordon said face-to-face classes amid the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic can be implemented once at least 70 percent of the country’s total population have been vaccinated.
“It is important that we make sure that everyone is safe and that our people are protected from the virus before we go back to face-to-face classes. It would be best if we achieve a population or herd immunity first. Through an effective vaccination program, we will be able stop the spread of the virus and break the chain of transmission,” Gordon said in a news release on Thursday.
Gordon cited the experiment by Serrana, a town in the state of Sau Paolo, Brazil, where local cases dropped after a mass vaccination for Covid-19.
According to a report, almost every adult resident of Serrana completed the two vaccine shots between February and April.
The research team in charge of the experiment, based on the report, claimed that “the results were dramatic. Symptomatic cases of Covid-19 have dropped by 80 percent since the start of mass vaccination, related hospitalizations fell 86 percent, and deaths plummeted 95 percent.”
“I think we can also do that here. We can try to do mass inoculation first in one province. If we see the efficacy of it, then we can continue doing that to other areas, especially the ones with the highest number of cases, until we got everybody vaccinated,” Gordon said.
He said full protection from Covid is achieved “that’s the time we can send the students back to school.”
“We can all work again, start to rebuild our economy and live normally once more,” he said. “We must do every way possible to be able to totally wipe out the virus that have infected more than one million Filipinos and killed thousands of our people.”
Gordon, being the chairman and CEO of the Philippine Red Cross (PRC), has been consistently promoting vaccination as a protection and efficient solution to various diseases.
Last February, the PRC kicked off its nationwide measles-rubella and polio supplemental immunization activity in partnership with the Department of Health.
On June 11, the World Health Organization declared the Philippines as polio-free once again after a successful vaccination campaign.
Source: Philippines News Agency