We learned this week that the Philippines would have had the opportunity to get our hands on 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 as early as next month if only the Health Secretary acted with urgency on the administrative requirements of the arrangement with the United States government.
Senator Panfilo Lacson revealed that Health Secretary Francisco Duque III “dropped the ball” by failing to submit a confidentiality agreement. The vaccines eventually went to Singapore.
The negotiations between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. began as early as July, but Duque’s indifference caused these talks to fall apart.
The senator said that our envoy to the United States, Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez, informed him that the Pfizer representative was even following up on the submission of said document.
Mr. Duque however denied there was any firm commitment for the 10 million doses. “Everything was indicative,” he said in an interview with ABS-CBN.
“There is no such thing as I did not act quick enough. You go through a process… No deadline was set by Pfizer, nothing in all our documents.”
He said Pfizer had sent its document on August 11, not July, that he had problems with who the signatories were supposed to be, and that he was given instructions to sign the document by the Executive Secretary on September 25. It took Duque three weeks to sign the document—and by October, it was too late.
These clearly conflicting sentiments are a cause for concern. If the people in charge of our health cannot even get their stories and timelines straight, how can we even entrust them with doses that could save our lives?
Then again, this is not the first time Mr. Duque has failed us, and spectacularly.
Remember he was initially against banning flights from China in the early days of COVID because it might affect diplomatic ties with our giant neighbor. He told us to drink lots of water and keep our throats moist to ward off the virus.
He insisted that the Philippines was one of the first to impose preventive measures to contain the spread of the virus and had one of the lowest infection rates in the world. His choices for COVID-related procurement were questionable. He dismissed findings of erroneous data from the DOH. He claimed asymptomatic patients were not contagious. He also said we experienced a second wave of infections months ago, with the first wave consisting of the cases of the Chinese tourists from Wuhan.
Of course, there is the case of the P15 billion mess at PhilHealth.
And now this.
Duque has been lucky. Despite these scandalous blunders, the President has extended superhuman compassion toward and confidence in him, and has kept him at his post. We have little reason to expect that Mr. Duterte’s affections for Duque would be diminished by this latest revelation. Perhaps he had known this all along.
But there would be time for accountability later. Duque and all those who cheer him would be foolhardy to believe there would be no reckoning for all these sins.
For now, talks have been renewed for the Pfizer vaccines involving another, smaller set. Romualdez also said two other US firms—Moderna and Arcturus —have expressed readiness to supply 4 million to 25 million doses of vaccines to us by the second half of next year.
These are matters of life and death. We’re watching closely what authorities would, or would not, do.