THE Commission on Audit (COA) says some P119 billion intended to strengthen the Department of Health’s capacity to address the COVID-19 pandemic remain unused, and DOH did not touch P59.125 billion of its budget allotment in 2020.
Over 12,000 COVID positive cases are reported daily in the last few days. With DOH poorly managing much needed resources to ramp up the country’s response to this health crisis, the buck does not stop just with Secretary Francisco Duque but on the national leadership.
The COA report is yet another damning proof of not only Duque’s incompetence but of the national government’s lip service to stamping out inefficiency in government by still keeping Duque at the helm of the health department. Where is command responsibility? Fire Duque, if he still does not resign over this latest anomaly.
The people continue to suffer and literally die with government’s failed pandemic response – weak public health care system, lack of support to healthcare workers, slow testing, very limited genomic sequencing capacity vital for contact tracing, laggard vaccination roll out. How many more of these before public officials are really made accountable?
This is not the first time Duque has been embroiled in controversies and with the President shielding him from calls for resignation or firing. These calls come from a broad range of the public especially people’s organizations and from government itself including progressive lawmakers in the House of Representatives and members of the Senate. The 15-billion Philhealth scandal; the delayed negotiations in vaccine procurement resulting in slow vaccine rollout; delayed compensation for health workers who died or were severely infected with COVID-19 are just some of these. Research from think tank IBON Foundation show that PhilHealth has been “helping too few and slowly” as it only paid for a fraction of 17.4 million COVID tests and over 100,000 hospitalizations since last year.
Enough of this criminal neglect and bad governance.
