BARMM health minister refutes fallacies on vaccine

COTABATO CITY --- The regional health minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao dismissed as “baseless” insinuations that COVID-19 vaccines are forbidden in Islam.

Anti-COVID-19 medical workers from the Integrated Provincial Health Office-Maguindanao gave Bangsamoro Health Minister Bashary Latiph a Sinovac anti-coronavirus jab Thursday.

Latiph, a physician, is a Muslim who hails from Lanao del Sur, a component province of BARMM.

Latiph has reiterated his appeal to residents in all cities and provinces in BARMM to ignore fallacies and assertions on Facebook by skeptics and pessimists who are not even medical practitioners that vaccines can do more harm than good.

“Listen only to BARMM’s Health Ministry, to the Department of Health and to health workers in provinces and in cities in the Bangsamoro region,” Latiph told reporters after he got an anti-COVID-19 shot.

There are also radical clerics identified with local terror groups operating in the fashion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria overtly opposing the government’s anti-coronavirus vaccination campaign.

Even Sheik Abu Huraira Udasan of the Darul Iftah (House of Opinions) had repeatedly announced via mainstream media that it is alright for Muslims to be vaccinated.

He said vaccines are “halal,” something not forbidden in Islam.  

Huraira had earlier said preservation in Islam is paramount, like a bounden duty of every Muslim.

The Darul Iftah is a bloc of Islamic theologians, among them graduates of religious schools in the Middle East and North Africa, helping BARMM’s chief minister, Hadji Ahod Ebrahim, manage the Bangsamoro regional government in an advisory capacity.

Employees of IPHO-Maguindanao, led by physician Elizabeth Samama, are in the forefront of BARMM’s war versus COVID-19 in all 36 municipalities in Maguindanao province.