Robredo: Gov’t should stop being defensive

MANILA, Philippines — With the economy still unable to get off the ground a year after the country recorded its first Covid-19 case, Vice President Leni Robredo urged the Duterte administration on Sunday to take action and find solutions instead of being “defensive” about independent and international assessments that said the country’s pandemic response left a lot to be desired.

Recently, the Australian think tank Lowy Institute ranked the Philippines 79th out of 98 countries based on their performance in managing the pandemic. The index scores were based on each nation’s confirmed Covid-19 cases, deaths and testing rates.

Robredo said in her radio show that the government “should really start taking these ratings seriously” instead of branding these as “attempts from the opposition to discredit them.”

Even more alarming was the data from the Philippine Statistics Authority showing that the economy plummeted by another 8.3 percent in the last quarter of 2020, bringing the full year economic decline to -9.5 percent. This eclipsed the 7.3 percent record plunge back in 1984.

The country is likely to fare worse than its Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) neighbors, based on Asian Development Bank forecasts: Vietnam (+2.3 percent), Indonesia (-2.2 percent), Malaysia (-6 percent) and Singapore (-6.2 percent).

“What’s alarming is that we’re probably the last to recover because of the quality of our pandemic response,” Robredo said. “And yet we’re still defensive and trying to justify why our response is so poor.”

‘Stop the propaganda’

“It’s better to just find solutions for it so that the worst forecasts about our economy are avoided,” she added. “Let’s stop the propaganda [and] try to resolve this early. The longer we’re like this, the more our countrymen will suffer,” Robredo said.

She said the Philippines should also follow in the footsteps of the United States, whose initial efforts had faltered due to former President Donald Trump’s largely unscientific and inconsistent pandemic policies.

But with newly elected President Joe Biden now laying out clearer plans for vaccination and testing, the United States is expecting a turnaround from the pandemic that has killed millions of Americans.

“I hope we could be like that, too,” Robredo said.

Even simply containing transmissions, she added, could already be a “game changer” for the country while waiting for the arrival of Covid-19 vaccines. INQ