SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGEN­CIES

Of­fi­cials say the emer­gence of the Omi­cron vari­ant has un­der­lined the need for vac­ci­na­tion against the coro­n­avirus.

The Philip­pines has be­gun an am­bi­tious cam­paign to vac­ci­nate nine mil­lion peo­ple against COVID-19 over three days, as it tem­porar­i­ly sus­pend­ed a de­ci­sion to al­low ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed tourists in­to the coun­try af­ter the emer­gence of the Omi­cron vari­ant.

The im­mu­ni­sa­tion cam­paign was scaled back from an ear­li­er tar­get of 15 mil­lion shots, but would still be a record in a coun­try where vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy re­mains an ob­sta­cle and there are lo­gis­ti­cal hur­dles to reach peo­ple in the sprawl­ing arch­i­pel­ago.

Three mil­lion vac­ci­na­tions per day is near­ly four times the av­er­age of 829,000 dai­ly shots in No­vem­ber.

An of­fi­cial said news of the Omi­cron vari­ant made the cam­paign even more vi­tal.

“It is bet­ter to be pre­pared for the ef­fects of Omi­cron,” Car­l­i­to Galvez, the coun­try’s vac­ci­na­tion chief, told CNN Philip­pines on Mon­day.

The spread of Omi­cron, which the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion has de­scribed as a “vari­ant of con­cern”, has sparked glob­al trav­el re­stric­tions.

Mani­la an­nounced plans last week to al­low ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed tourists from most coun­tries to en­ter from De­cem­ber 1, but the gov­ern­ment’s COVID-19 task force re­versed course over the week­end as it an­nounced the sus­pen­sion of flights from sev­en Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, in ad­di­tion to an ear­li­er ban on ar­rivals from sev­er­al African na­tions.

“The IATF deemed it nec­es­sary to sus­pend the en­try of for­eign tourists, giv­en world­wide con­cerns over the Omi­cron vari­ant,” Bu­reau of Im­mi­gra­tion Com­mis­sion­er Jaime Morente said on Mon­day, us­ing the acronym for the task force.

The Philip­pines has faced one of the worst COVID-19 out­breaks in Asia and has been slow­er than many of its neigh­bours in im­mu­nis­ing its peo­ple. About 35.6 mil­lion peo­ple have been ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, or a third of its 110 mil­lion pop­u­la­tion.

The coun­try aims to im­mu­nise 54 mil­lion peo­ple by the end of 2021, and 77 mil­lion by next March.

Al­though new cas­es have fall­en sharply to an av­er­age of 1,679 a day in No­vem­ber from a peak of more than 18,000 a day in Sep­tem­ber, vac­ci­na­tion rates re­main un­even.

Ac­cord­ing to gov­ern­ment da­ta, while 93 per­cent of the cap­i­tal re­gion’s res­i­dents were ful­ly in­oc­u­lat­ed as of mid-No­vem­ber, on­ly 10.9 per­cent of peo­ple in the pre­dom­i­nant­ly Mus­lim re­gions in the south­ern Philip­pines were.

The gov­ern­ment says it will de­ploy 160,000 vol­un­teers in 11,000 vac­ci­na­tion sites na­tion­wide for the three-day cam­paign.