Allow tax-free vaccine imports

The private sector played a key role in addressing the social and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. It saw early on that the government, weighed down by inefficiency, bureaucratic tangle, and lack of adequate funds, could not handle the historic crisis on its own. Thus, private companies stepped up to the challenge, using their own money to extend help to the poor that were affected the most, waiving rent for their small business partners, and providing medical supplies to public hospitals, among others.

As the country prepares for the next phase of the public health crisis — the procurement and rollout of a vaccination program — it is imperative that the government again solicit all the help it can get from the private sector. Already saddled with a budget deficit that has breached P1 trillion as of November this year, the government now faces the gargantuan task of rolling out a vaccination program. Congress has earmarked P72.5 billion to buy COVID-19 vaccines under the 2021 national budget. The government is targeting to vaccinate 60 million Filipinos or about 55 percent of the population to attain herd immunity from the virus.

Given how bureaucracy will most likely cause delays and complications in the vaccination program, the government should consider the proposal submitted last week by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), the private company operating the country’s power transmission backbone. It has urged lawmakers to allow private companies to import tax-free COVID-19 vaccines for their employees, and for Congress to immediately pass a law to encourage the private sector to provide vaccination to employees. With such a vaccination program in place, NGCP president Anthony Almeda said more businesses and industries would be able to regain some semblance of normalcy, bounce back more quickly, and help put the economy on its way to recovery from the pandemic-induced recession.

This proposal should have a more positive effect than the similar suggestion to allow local government units (LGUs) to procure the vaccines on their own. While on paper such a move will unburden the national government by decentralizing the procurement and vaccination process, the experience during the lockdown on the cash assistance for the poor coursed through LGUs left so much to be desired. Many LGUs are not equipped for the daunting logistical and safety requirements of rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine, and porous tracking and accountability — witness the government’s dismal contact-tracing efforts — could doom the immunization drive.

The NGCP has more than 5,000 employees deployed in the critical function of ensuring reliable electricity supply to the country. Many other private firms are similarly situated and may want to bring in vaccines the soonest possible time for their employees (and perhaps their families, too), rather than wait for the government’s vaccination program which will prioritize frontliners and those without the means to procure the vaccine.

Private initiative is the best option to jumpstart the program, especially now that the government is scrambling for funds. The NGCP’s proposal will ease the centralization in the national government of the complex logistical processes of vaccinating millions of Filipinos. In the past several months, the private sector has demonstrated its ability to be proactive and highly efficient in addressing the ill effects of the pandemic. While the administration was still thinking of remedies for those impacted by the health and economic crises, its officials incessantly talking at cross purposes and unable to get a consistent message across, the private sector was in a position to immediately respond to the emergency situation by, among others, freezing rent, repurposing factories to produce what were needed with urgency, and instituting relief programs to assist the poor.

The private sector can easily replicate the same track record in the next phase of the pandemic, rolling out a vaccination program for those not included in the government’s initial priority coverage. This will also redound to considerable savings for the government, which it can then use to expand coverage for the mass inoculation drive, such as for the unemployed and those not in the official government lists (as the cash assistance program had shown, such lists are patchy and incomplete at best).

The government will presumably take care of its own employees, so initiatives by private companies to protect their workers must likewise be encouraged. And nothing is more urgent and critical at this time than to ensure that workers are vaccinated promptly once the immunization shots become available and are approved for use. In this, the government would be doing a sensible and valuable service by providing the private sector the proper incentive: waiving taxes on their COVID-19 vaccine imports.

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