The government-run Benguet State University (BSU) is bent on implementing the order of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) and the Civil Service Commission (CSC) for eligible workers to get vaccinated or be required to regularly submit swab test results.
“We will not force the employees to be vaccinated but we will require them to regularly submit a negative test result at their own expense,” BSU president, Dr. Felipe Comila, said in an interview on Friday.
Comila said vaccinating BSU employees would be in the best interest of the academic institution as it gears up for the resumption of face-to-face classes.
Having unvaccinated workers will affect the university as a whole and the students who are eager to return to school, he added.
“Vaccination is now the right address to the pandemic,” especially with the emergence of the more transmissible Omicron variant of the virus, Comila said.
In a separate interview, Dr. Florence Poltic, BSU medical doctor, said 883, or about 83 percent, of the university’s 1,059 employees have been vaccinated.
Poltic said with the order from the national government, they hope to encourage the remaining unvaccinated employees to get inoculated, otherwise, they would need to submit a negative swab test result every two weeks.
Christopher Depnag, Supervisor 2 of the Commission on Higher Education – Cordillera, during the Benguet Provincial Inter-Agency meeting on Friday, reported that the commission has approved the resumption of limited face-to-face classes in all major subjects and laboratories of various college courses.
Depnag said they have been receiving applications from academic institutions for the assessment of the latter’s eligibility to resume limited face-to-face classes.
He said the Commission on Higher Education has allowed all courses to have limited face-to-face classes and one of its requirements is for all of the academic institutions’ workers, both teaching and non-teaching staff, to be vaccinated. (PNA)
