Senator Imee Marcos on Thursday lambasted the Department of Health (DOH) for its alleged lack of transparency about mass testing and even the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical supplies which caused the current ordeal at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM).
The RITM is considered as the country’s main testing facility for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Had the RITM been better equipped to have a more proactive role in public health, Marcos noted that the prevailing anxiety in the institute would not have happened.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire confirmed that 42 RITM staffs tested positive for COVID-19, causing a backlog in testing thousands of specimens from suspected cases of infection, just days before President Rodrigo Duterte decides to lift or continue an already extended lockdown on April 30.
Prior to this, RITM Deputy Director Sally Gatchalian lost her battle to COVID-19.
Thirty-nine years ago on April 23, Marcos said RITM was tasked to protect the Filipino people from infectious diseases.
“The least we can do is to protect our RITM and other health workers from dying from infections,” she said.
Marcos issued the statement on the “depressing” founding anniversary of what was supposed to be the country’s prime biomedical research center to control communicable diseases.
She said that the RITM personnel who have fallen ill are among 1,062 doctors, nurses, and other health care workers who, as of April 23, make up almost 16 percent of the total confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Philippines.
“These alarming statistics have led the World Health Organization to call the Philippines an ‘outlier’ in the Western Pacific region, which comprises 37 countries where the regional average is only 2 percent to 3 percent of confirmed cases,” Marcos said.
“The long neglect of RITM dates back more than 30 years ago when the Cory administration started treating it like a leper, just because it was built by my father, then President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, through Executive Order No. 674 in 1981,” Marcos said.
“The technical cooperation with the Japanese government that helped build and equip the RITM as the country’s prime biomedical research center was pushed aside, erasing its importance in the public mind, and squandering the momentum which could have benefitted us today,” she also said.
Marcos has filed Senate Bill 1407 to rescue what is arguably the DOH’s most neglected agency from its decrepit state, increase its qualified personnel and their salaries, expand its presence to key population centers outside Metro Manila, and revive its ability to effectively handle the magnitude of future pandemics.
“The RITM’s mother agency, the Department of Health (DOH), has failed to learn the lessons of history,” Marcos said, citing the slew of pandemics that have already hit the country: acute immunodefficiency syndrome (AIDS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and now the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)./Stacy Ang
