The Philippines’ Department of Health (DoH) said that it will be asking for an additional budget from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) to sustain the sequencing efforts on the new COVID-19 variants.

The DOH said that the sequencing was not part of the 2021 budget proposal and there is a need to sustain the genome sequencing for a year. Health Spokesperson Maria Rosario Vergeire said that they will be requesting at least Php362 million.

“The P362 million budget [proposed to the DBM], this was consolidated requirements coming from UP-NIH [University of the Philippines – National Institutes of Health], UP- PGC [Philippine Genome Center and also the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine,” Vergeire said in a media briefing.

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The DBM told the DOH that they will look for sources of the additional fund being requested by the DOH.

The DOH said that they had encountered several challenges in its sequencing efforts due to the delay in the delivery of sequencing reagents.

Vergeire said that this is a global problem due to the UK COVID-19 variant.

The DOH said that the reagents already arrived and the Customs Bureau is about to release it.

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Vergeire said that they will purchase in advance to avoid encountering the same problem. They ordered the supply from Singapore.

Due to lack of supply, the Genome Center has only used its small machine which can process 48 samples per week compared to its big machine which can run at least 750 samples. (TDT)