Albay Rep. Joey Sarte Salceda said he anticipates the enactment of the proposed Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Act, a priority legislation in the 2020 State of the Nation Address of President Duterte.
Salceda, chair of the House committee on ways and means, made the statement as the Senate has begun its plenary discussion on the measure.
“We have time. The consensus in the scientific community is that we need a stronger framework for dealing with epidemics, which the CDC hopes to respond to,” Salceda said.
The Senate plenary began tackling SB 2505, the Senate’s version of the measure, this week, when the committee report was sponsored in the Senate floor.
“President Duterte cited this measure as a priority in his two most recent SONAs, so I am hoping we can have the measure certified. I will work with Senate Health Chairperson Senator Bong Go to request a certification of urgency,” Salceda said.
The Department of Health (DOH) also recently reiterated its support for the bill.
Salceda was the first author of the base version of the bill, which he filed on January 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic spread in the Philippines.
The Senate began its hearings on the CDC bill on May 6, 2021.
Salceda reminded both the Senate and the House, however, not to make the CDC too bureaucratic and to ensure that it is capable of responding to what he calls “sudden-onset” health emergencies, or emergencies that have the potential to break out and spread very quickly.
Salceda also asked the Senate plenary to focus the CDC’s mandate on fighting infectious diseases.
In a manifestation to the Committee, Salceda said that his bill “insists on decisive response at the precommunicable stage, including the apprehension of precommunicable individuals if needed, because this is where outbreaks can be prevented. The successful fight of Vietnam against COVID-19 centered on this particular strategy of hard and early isolation of the infected few over the diffuse and soft isolation of the suspected many. This author’s proposal and its copies refiled by colleagues is the only one among the different versions that insists on this distinction.”
Salceda also asked the committee to ensure that the agency does not become “too large against its own good.”
“If the CDC is too large to include non-communicable diseases, we believe that it will be bogged down by the same bureaucratic issues that led us to creating this agency in the first place,” Salceda said.