Vice President and presidential aspirant Leni Robredo said Sunday the government must offer incentives to motivate unvaccinated people to get their jabs against COVID-19.
“We need to give incentives to encourage those unvaccinated,” she said.
She reacted to President Rodrigo Duterte’s order for barangay officials to “restrain” and “arrest” unvaccinated people who would refuse “to stay put.”
She claimed the Office of the Vice President was able to convince Aetas in Tarlac province to be vaccinated employing incentives.
“We need to think of something, instead of being punitive at once,” she said.
“For me, COVID has been here in the past two years, we should have been experiencing different problems,” she said.
She said the government had not really defined the benchmark of a mass testing.
The government believes mass testing is the testing of the whole population of 110 million people, while others would call for a mass testing in high-risk areas only, she noted.
“By this time, testing should no longer be a problem. By this time, (even) contact tracing and isolation centers are no longer a problem. We have enough time to prepare,” she said.
She took a swipe at the government for its “justification” why it could not offer free swab tests.
“Testing is too important since this would be the basis why one needs to quarantine,” she said.
She asked the government to allow the public to use cheaper antigen kits to prevent people from crowding into testing centers.
