President Rodrigo Duterte “needs to be more serious” in making remarks that may affect public health, a former Health secretary said Thursday.
Duterte might have been joking when he advised the public to disinfect their face masks with gasoline, but he needs to make accurate remarks and take health advisories from experts, former Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral said Thursday.
“We know that the President is very popular especially among the masses at this point, so everything he says can be taken seriously by these people,” Cabral told ANC.
“The public does not know when he is joking and when he is not…so he really needs to be more serious about the things that he tells the public.
“People may take him seriously and actually do what he says we should do, and people are going to be put in danger because of those.”
Cabral cited US President Donald Trump who earlier told his constituents that drinking disinfectants reduced the chances of COVID-19 infections.
“[Duterte] needs to actually rehearse these things to make sure that he’s saying accurate things,” Cabral said.
“So maybe every two weeks or every month he can come out when there is something important to say and he should leave it to his IATF [Inter-Agency Task Force] to tell people the nitty gritty of things.”
Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said Duterte’s statement was only a “joke” when he advised the public to wash their face masks with gasoline.
“He’s been President for four years, and it’s as if you still don’t know him,” Roque said.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque, meanwhile, should listen to the advisers whom he trusts after making inaccurate statements about the pandemic in the Philippines, Cabral said.
“The Secretary was correct in correcting himself as soon as he realized he made a mistake in his message because people make mistakes. The important thing is we recognize the mistake and tell people the correct thing afterwards,” Cabral said.
The Philippines needs to ramp up its virus measures “faster” and on a “wider scale,” Cabral said.
“We cannot keep ourselves on lockdown forever, so we need to look at other methods in order to control the virus, the pandemic. We need to be improving our testing capacity, contact tracing some more, equip our communications people with better data and make sure they tell the public about this.
“We need to get the public on our side. I think that is one of the things that we still need to do.”