FILE PHOTO — Senator Panfilo Lacson during Thursday’s plenary session, August 20, 2020. PRIB PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — Health Secretary Francisco Duque III may claim that the coronavirus disease pandemic is a “blessing in disguise” but for Senator Panfilo Lacson, the public has yet to see the worse problems brought by the health crisis.
“At the Department of Health, we continue to be confronted by issues we hate to hear, but which we now know anyway – the DOH’s ‘double-the-price’ purchases of PPEs and face masks and probably even face shields,” Lacson said in a statement.
“Yet, as we hear the Secretary of Health saying that the pandemic is a ‘blessing in disguise,’ we know for sure we haven’t seen the worse for our suffering countrymen, in terms of health and economic well-being,” the senator added.
Lacson said this after the top health official said the COVID-19 pandemic is “some kind of blessing in disguise, serendipitous” because it supposedly speeds up the Universal Health Care implementation.
“This (COVID-19 pandemic) can also be some kind of blessing in disguise, serendipitous. Kasi parang na-accelerate (it was somehow accelerated) iyong universal healthcare because of COVID-19. It is a catalyst,” Duque said on Friday during the University of the Philippines’ webinar #18 titled, “Keeping Our Health Care Workers Safe: The Philippine General Hospital Experience.”