EXPLANATION OF VOTE

Committee Report No. 185

Senate Bill No. 2057

COVID-19 VACCINATION PROGRAM ACT OF 2021

Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph G. Recto

23 February 2021

Mr. President, my dear colleagues: 

What is this bill? It is a cocktail of cures for the national vaccine lack caused by executive lethargy. 

It is an adrenaline shot that will boost procurement. 

It is the inoculation against suits that suppliers are demanding.

It orders a vaccination mark, so to speak, for those who will get jabbed—so that properly identified, they can move around freely. 

This bill expands the roster of vaccine procurers to include LGUs, humanitarian organizations, and private and civic groups. 

The ways and means of achieving these are spelled out in the bill in great detail. 

By tapping the potential of other actors outside the national government, the new rules this bill provides are hopefully a game changer.

This bill also removes a major thorn in vaccine sourcing—that of indemnity fund and guarantee, the absence of which has conferred on us what seems like the status of a pariah among the vaccine gods.

Hopefully, this vaccine blockade will soon be lifted by the expressed provisions in this bill. 

Also removed by this bill are the taxes and fees on vaccines, because as I’ve said before, there is no moral justification to tax a cure that will spare us from an existential threat. 

This measure also prescribes how one can own a “I have been vaccinated” card in a manner that is not intrusive of one’s privacy and penalizes anyone who will counterfeit it.

After the failures of the past, where we suffered a vaccine drought in a world where vaccines have been airdropped and made a beachhead to countries smaller and poorer than us, we hope that this bill will usher in the great rebound. 

As a wartime statesman once said, “this is either the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.” 

This is a good plan. And I can only pray, for the sake of this vaccine-starved land, that it will not be squandered by poor generalship.