Clock is ticking

Look at the August 18 numbers from the MR-SIA VaccTrack Dashboard: Western Visayas is limping along at 41.4%. Capiz is nearing 50%. But zero in on Iloilo City — a dismal 33%.

We have until August 28 to hit the government’s 95% community protection target. We aren’t just missing the mark. We are leaving the front door wide open.

Do we really have such short memories? In 2019, uneven routine immunization coverage triggered a massive, nationwide measles outbreak. The Department of Health recorded over 47,000 cases that year. More than 600 Filipinos died — the vast majority of them kids under five. It was a wholly preventable tragedy born of logistical complacency, and the current sluggish pace in our highly urbanized city feels terrifyingly familiar.

So why are not parents rushing to the clinics? The Department of Labor and Employment-Western Visayas (DOLE-6) seems to think it’s just a scheduling issue. Their recent advisory tells employers to let workers use their “available leave credits” to get their children vaccinated.

That sounds perfectly reasonable until you step onto a factory floor or behind a retail counter. For a working-class parent scraping by on the regional minimum wage of roughly PHP 480.00 a day, burning earned leave credits — assuming they are even regularized enough to have them — is an impossible luxury. If taking half a day off to queue at a barangay health center means a deduction from this week’s grocery budget, preventive healthcare is exactly what gets skipped.

A child’s health should not cost a day’s wage. Treating a public health mandate like a personal vacation day actively undermines the region’s community protection goals.

We need a massive, hyper-local operational pivot from the city government, and we need it yesterday. Jumping from 33% to 95% in a matter of days requires far more than passive Facebook announcements. Stop waiting for exhausted parents to find the time. Launch aggressive, barangay-level saturation drives this final weekend. Knock on doors. Bring the coolers into the neighborhoods.

But the private sector cannot just watch from the sidelines. Major employers, especially our booming BPOs and retail giants, need to stop treating this as an employee’s personal logistical nightmare. Offer paid, non-deductible time off for vaccinations. Better yet, take DOLE-6 up on their suggestion to set up temporary vaccination posts right in the workplace.

Bring the health workers to the breakroom, and eliminate the friction entirely.

This is a direct investment in a stable workforce. You either absorb the minor cost of on-site vaccinations today, or you bleed productivity next month when mass absenteeism spikes because your staff is home nursing severely sick kids.

The vaccines are free and safe. We have mere days left on the clock. If we fail to close this gap because we couldn’t spare our workers a few hours, we know exactly who will end up footing the hospital bills — and digging the graves.