President Marcos Jr. said he will appoint a new chief of DOH once the country’s situation returned to normal in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said he would only appoint the chief of the Department of Health (DOH) once the country has licked the COVID-19 pandemic and things have “normalized.”
On the website of the Office of the Secretary, Marcos insisted that before he designates a health chief, the country must first be lifted from its state of public health emergency and state of calamity.
“We have to get away from the emergency, the emergency stance of the DOH because we have to open up businesses. We have to make the Philippines more hospitable to travelers, both business and tourists,” he said.
Marcos pointed out that
“it does not help if we are still under a state of calamity if we are the only country that still has a mask protocol. But these are mandated to us by the laws that were passed during the pandemic. So kailangan pa nating ayusin ‘yun.”
The president acknowledged that it would be difficult to immediately lift the state of public health emergency and state of calamity as it would directly affect the DoH's current handling of the health crisis, Manila Times reported.
"We cannot remove ourselves yet from the way we are handling it dahil halimbawa pag tinanggal ko 'yung state of calamity, hindi makukuha ng ating mga health workers 'yung kanilang benepisyo na nasa batas, hindi tayo makakapag-import ng vaccine, yung sa procurement, masyadong mabagal ang magiging procurement,” he said.
Meanwhile, he emphasized that in the case of DOH, “it’s not structural changes, but the method of handling the pandemic.”
He added that the government should start treating COVID-19 not as an emergency but as something that has to be managed in the long term like flu and pneumonia.
“Nandiyan lagi ‘yan pero mag-ingat tayo para hindi tayo magkasakit. And that is the way that we should be handling COVID. We cannot remove ourselves yet from the way that we are handling it,” Marcos explained.
Despite the detection of the Omicron XBB subvariant and XBC variant in the country, Marcos said it is time to treat the pandemic differently.
"I want the people to understand that this is the government's work. Not everything is a crisis so i-normalize natin ang trabaho ng gobyerno,” he said.
He noted that deaths due to COVID-19 have been minimal, and mostly among those with co-morbidities.
"What we have to understand about Covid and the way that we are treating it is that the risk factor of getting Covid in 2022 is very, very different from the risk factor of getting Covid in 2020 or 2021 and that is indicated by the hospitalizations and the rate of the death," he added.
Tags: #DoH, #DOHchief, #PresidentMarcos