Thread by @teddyboylocsin

Is there a political problem in private sector procurement of vaccines? No. Won’t big business jump ahead of the line of big, medium and small? No. Won’t the rich be vaccinated first? No. Is there a need to rank businesses by the nature of their products to decide who will have

priority in procurement? No. Is there a criteria for deciding priority? No. Should we try to find a criteria? No matter what criteria is chosen it will end up as bribery. Explanation: Government has and will always have first priority to acquire vaccines for its responsibility:

to vaccinate first front liners—almost done—then those without the means—getting there through LGUs. Private sector cannot compete with government for scarce vaccines because vaccines are government to government by international convention so private sector as a whole, and not

in parts, needs government to procure vaccines. Also because private sector cannot match government’s P4Trillion national budget. No private sector should be prioritized; at the same time none should be disadvantaged under some spurious criteria and all criteria is spurious. Big

business with big work forces will move faster to procure and administer vaccines to its employees. Good. Helps mass vaccination to achieve herd immunity. Big business is best positioned to vaccinate many quickly because it has access and logistics to vaccinate its huge work

forces. But so can medium business and even small. It is happening already. Big, medium and even small have combined in joint procurements. Business big, medium and even small easily reach their employees because if the employees don’t make themselves available they are fired.

Business—big, medium and small—have money, access to their own workers and logistics across the board. So no need to adopt dubious criteria for prioritizing. Whether you work for Ayala or for Chibo, you need to be vaccinated so you don’t infect others who don’t work at all or are

self-employed. They constitute a huge portion of the population which it is the responsibility of the government to vaccinate. Thus with two prongs, as any general will tell you, you can encircle Covid and eliminate it: The prongs of government and

the private sector. Adopting a criteria to decide priority in private sector procurements just opens the door to shake downs of the private sector and making it beholden to the last people it should be beholden to: the bureaucrats whose salaries the private sector pays and no one

else. Period. In short the solution to the political problem of private procurement of vaccines yields the solving equation: Political Problem=No Problem at All. Just an opportunity for displays of pseudo-expertise and ultimately shakedown. Period.