MANILA - Presidential Adviser for Entrepreneurship Joey Concepcion on Monday said he has suggested that workers in certain sectors should be fully vaccinated.

Concepcion said he has told Labor Sec. Silvestre Bello III that in establishments like restaurants and spas where only fully vaccinated customers are allowed, "their employees must be vaccinated."

"Now, the challenge is what do you do when a waiter doesn’t want to get vaccinated? So they’ll have to put them at the side. So this is an area that, to me, has to be mandated in certain sectors like schools. I mean, to me, there’s no such thing as discriminatory," he told ANC's Headstart.

He said while he respects the position of Justice Sec. Menardo Guevarra on mandatory vaccination, he hopes there could be a way to make this allowable.

"I hope that he can find ways to allow this to happen because we are in a pandemic, these are not normal times, and clearly, restricting the movement of the unvaccinated is protecting their own life," he said.

"So the strategy is really to really push vaccination—we will really have to have a way of enforcing it. Everybody in the world is now changing that mindset, and really pushing a lot and even mandating vaccinations, especially in government," he added.

Concepcion said he hopes government offices would mandate vaccination, especially among the frontliners.

President Rodrigo Duterte in June threatened to send to jail those who will decline a vaccine.

• Duterte: Get vaccinated or I’ll send you to jail

However, Guevarra said the chief executive merely used "strong words" to get the message across, because not getting vaccinated is not a crime.

• Refusing vaccination not a crime, says DOJ after Duterte threat