It’s time for Duque to go

OUR editorial on April 17 was titled “Should Secretary Duque be fired or commended?” and was in response to the filing of Senate Resolution 362 the day before, in which 14 senators called for Department of Health (DoH) chief Francisco Duque 3rd to resign or be fired by President Rodrigo Duterte.

We questioned that resolution because the senators calling for Duque’s removal from his post as head of the DoH and the Interagency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID), the body leading the government effort against the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, did not provide evidence or other justification for their accusations against him.

Resolution 362 condemned Duque for “failure of leadership, negligence, lack of foresight and inefficiency… resulting in poor planning, delayed response, lack of transparency and misguided and flip- flopping policies and measures in addressing the Covid- 19 pandemic that endangered and continue to endanger the lives of our health care professionals, frontliners and the Filipino people.”

At the time, however, it seemed that management of the Covid- 19 crisis was being handled as well as anyone could hope. An enhanced community quarantine had been imposed and the IATF- EID was addressing challenges as they arose. If Secretary Duque had made mistakes — for example, in initially demurring on imposing a travel ban on visitors arriving from China — he had corrected them as more information became available, which is all anyone could ask.

Let Secretary Duque do his job and subject the Senate resolution and the questions it raised to very careful scrutiny and debate before making any change in leadership at such a critical time, we concluded on April 17.

What a difference a month makes.

In the past few days, Secretary Duque himself has provided the evidence needed to support calls for his ouster, to which we now add our voice. He has lost the confidence of the nation and must step down.

There are two points that cause particular concern.

First, there have been serious questions about DoH data on Covid-19 cases. A review by the University of the Philippines found a large number of odd discrepancies such as patients’ ages or genders being improperly recorded, which raised questions about the accuracy of the information we are being given. Duque glibly dismissed these concerns as “affecting only about 1 percent of the data.” Some errors might be inevitable given the size of the task at hand, but to simply shrug them off is unacceptable. Further questions have been raised this week about the accuracy of the Health department data when it was found that some of what are being reported as new cases of the Covid-19 infection might be results of repeat tests, meaning at this point, we now no longer know exactly how many cases the country has.

Second, Duque has recently demonstrated an alarming tendency to downplay the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic in spite of months of very obvious evidence to the contrary. In a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Duque claimed that the Philippines is already in a “second wave” of infections, a claim that was quickly repudiated by other health experts, the official spokesman of the Duterte administration and his own Health department.

In the same hearing, in arguing for limited testing of the population for Covid-19, Duque also seriously misrepresented the advice of the World Health Organization (WHO), claiming that “the WHO has found no evidence of asymptomatic transmission” of the novel coronavirus.

This is what the WHO actually said on that subject in a statement on April 2: “There are few reports of laboratory-confirmed cases who are truly asymptomatic, and to date, there has been no documented asymptomatic transmission. This does not exclude the possibility that it may occur. Asymptomatic cases have been

reported as part of contact tracing efforts in some countries (emphasis added).” The WHO has not revised that advice since then.

The nation can no longer be assured that Secretary Duque, and by extension the IATF-EID he heads, is making decisions based on correct information or that Duque is properly interpreting the information available to him. Without public confidence, the government cannot expect the nation to cooperate with its efforts to halt the Covid-19 pandemic.

It’s time for Duque to go.