The Palace on Tuesday rejected calls to abolish the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF), denying charges of its incompetence as the country recorded the worst COVID-19 spikes since the pandemic began.
Government health officials conceded this week that the surge in cases was due to the presence of new, more transmissible COVID-19 variants, despite their earlier reluctance to say so.
“Whether we like it or not, the virus is mutating and that’s not the IATF’s fault,” said presidential spokesman Harry Roque, speaking in Filipino.
“Nothing will be abolished,” he added. “If you abolish the IATF, that’s like abolishing the government.”
Alarmed by the surge in new cases, senators called for an overhaul—and even the abolition–of the IATF.
Senator Imee Marcos, a Duterte ally, called for the abolition of the body or the replacement of its key personnel, saying that after more than a year, the country was back to square one.
“We’re implementing different kinds of lockdown that created confusion,” she said.
She cited the need to intensify mass testing for COVID-19, contact tracing and vaccination.
Some Cabinet members, she said, were dismayed by the IATF recommenations.
Senate President Vicente Sotto III backed the IATF’s abolition, citing the “gross incompetence’ of the Department of Health (DOH) in handling the pandemic.
Senator Risa Hontiveros called for an immediate overhaul of the IATF, saying it should be led by public health officers “who actually know how to handle a public health emergency.”and not former military officers.
“The extreme call is to abolish the IATF, but during a pandemic, an interagency body is necessary. It must be led by public health experts and epidemiologists, not by military officers,” Hontiveros said.
“This is a system-wide failure. The IATF has continuously and confidently walked in the wrong direction, backward, no matter how many times the public and lawmakers have called them out,” she added.
Hontiveros said the members of the task force “do not know what they are doing and are not listening to experts.”
“We need health experts who will lead the way, just like in other countries. We need a team of public health managers who understand that we need a systematic health approach and have the expertise to accomplish their mandate of effectively and scientifically controlling the coronavirus,” she added.
Hontiveros said that while the IATF is important, “it cannot be led by incompetent and short-sighted decision-makers.”
“Stop forcing the Filipino people to martyr themselves just to keep a few in positions of power. The public has put up long enough with the IATF’s gross mishandling of the most basic solutions of test, trace, isolate and treat,” she said.
“It has come to a point in which their failures are inexcusable and unforgivable. Overhaul the IATF immediately,” the senator added.
Hontieveros also called for a comprehensive special audit of the government’s total expenditure for the COVID-19 pandemic response after continuous record-breaking cases of infection.
Hontiveros said the government released around P570 billion forthe pandemic response, based on the public documents from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM).
“Where did the billions go? Are the funds parked? If they’ve been exhausted already, why is it we do not feel the effect?” she said.
“Everyday we break new records in the number of cases because free mass testing and contact tracing remain mediocre and unsystematic,” Hontiveros said.
The senator said she will file a resolution to investigate where the funds are, how they were utilized, and how they can be mobilized if unused.
She added that it was ‘crucial’ to conduct the audit in light of the “ever-increasing loans” being contracted for the pandemic response.
The audit would cover both Bayanihan 1 and Bayanihan 2.
“We need to see the gaps so we can aggressively fill them in. We need a full audit to see our real status, so that we can make up for the mistakes in our response,” she said in a mix of English and Filipino.
Despite criticism from the Senate, testing czar Vince Dizon on Tuesday said the country’s current capacity to detect cases of COVID-19 was an improvement from a year ago, despite the new surge in cases.
Dizon said the country now conducts more than 50,000 tests daily unlike in early 2020 when the Philippines had “almost zero” capability to screen individuals for COVID-19.
He also said a person can now get the test result in less than 24 hours as compared to three weeks in the past.
“We now have 229 testing laboratories. We’re able to test more people,” Dizon said at a Palace news conference.
The Philippines has tested 9.12 millionp people as of March 21, the DOH said.
Dizon, however, acknowledged that the country still has to do more given the rising cases in Metro Manila. Contact tracingshould also be intensified, he said. With PNA