MANILA, Philippines (Updated 3:37 p.m.) — Two senators on Tuesday pushed for the overhaul of the country's coronavirus task force, calling their failures a year into the pandemic "inexcusable and unforgivable."
They said this a day after the Philippines recorded 8,019 new infections, breaching the 8,000-mark for the first time ever and setting a record-high for the fourth day in a row.
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"At 8,000 cases a day, it will take just over a month to hit 1 million COVID-19 cases, and just about 3 months to double our current number of infections which originally took us a whole year to reach," Sen. Risa Hontiveros warned.
"It is clear as day that we need to overhaul the [Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases] and replace its members with public health experts who actually know how to handle a public health emergency."
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, whose resignation the Senate, health workers, and hospital groups have sought on several occasions, is the only member of the IATF with experience in medicine and immunology. Other members of President Rodrigo Duterte's Cabinet make up the rest of the interagency body.
Meanwhile, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto called for the proper representation of the private sector in the task force.
"It is time to expand the membership of IATF, to include those in private business with superb managerial skills, such as those who have been running companies with a million moving parts with efficiency and precision."
Recto also pointed out that the private sector is also not represented in the implementing arm of the IATF, the National Task Force for COVID-19, which is headed by the Department of National Defense.
"To cite one skill set, the war against COVID requires logistics experts who supply a customer base numbering in the tens of millions, like that bakery in Laguna that every day brings millions of pieces of perishable bread to store shelves from Aparri to Zamboanga in a matter of hours," he said.
'System-wide failure'
Hontiveros further characterized the country's pandemic response as a "system-wide failure," with members of the IATF "continuously and confidently" leading the country in the wrong direction no matter how many times they are called out. She also accused them of being in denial about their shortcomings.
"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."
"We've had how many mutations of coronavirus in one year, but we still haven't graduated from kindergarten. When will we learn?" Hontiveros questioned in Filipino.
'Overhaul, not abolish'
Sen. Imee Marcos and Senate President Tito Sotto previously called for the IATF to be abolished, but Hontiveros said she still believed an interagency task force to be necessary. However, she noted: "It must be led by public health experts and epidemiologists. Not by military officers."
"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."
"The IATF is important, but it cannot be led by incompetent and short-sighted decision makers."
Palace: Calls to abolish, overhaul IATF politically motivated
During a virtual briefing held later Tuesday, presidential spokesman Harry Roque dismissed calls to abolish the IATF as political noise.
"Nothing can be abolished. If you abolish the IATF, it's as if you abolished the government," Roque said in Filipino.
Malacañang also rejected calls to restructure the task force, saying that its decisions are based on science.
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Roque further deflected blame for the rise in cases seen in recent weeks, saying in Filipino: "Whether we accept it or not, the virus mutated and that is not the fault of the IATF."
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Authorities only recently acknowledged that the presence of COVID-19 variants in the country contributed to the surge in cases, with Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire on Monday maintaining that non-compliance with public health protocols is still the “root cause." — Bella Perez-Rubio