The Computer Professionals’ Union (CPU) said that what Armed Forces of the Philippines Spokesman Ramon Zagala described as “mere surfing” is more “like a targeted attempt to significantly disrupt a crucial platform and curtail freedom of the press.”
Bulatlat compiled short accounts of consultants and staff of the Negotiating Panel of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, who were arrested and jailed during the dark years of the dictatorship but are now incarcerated for their continuing fight for a genuinely free country.
In the proposed budget, the epidemiology and disease surveillance program is set to receive P113 million in 2022. This is 33 percent lower than this year’s P158.6 million budget, and even way lower than the allocation set for this program before the pandemic.
A year on, community- and women-led efforts that responded to the Filipino poor’s needs continued to face harassment.
Described by the health department as “the first batch of fund transfers,” the P311.79-million ($6.2 million) SRA funds is a measly 2.6 percent of the unused P11.9-billion ($238.2 million) allocated for health workers’ Special Risk Allowance and Hazard Pay, which the Commission on Audit recently flagged.
Health workers held a protest action today as they continue to assail how they were deceived by the Department of Health (DOH) when they were repeatedly told that there is no appropriated budget for their due pay and benefits.
“The candidacy is both legally and morally wrong, and we trust that the Filipino people will realize his brazen, selfish and self-serving motives.”
“The Duterte administration should stop this drama. This is not helping the people in getting due social services at a time when the state of our health care system is worsening.”
It was three hours of grueling speech. But no clear directions were set on how to free the people from one of the worst economic crisis in recent history.
To identify close contacts up to third or fourth degree, community health advocates said that contact tracing has to rely on an already robust public health system which the Philippines does not have in the first place.
With President Duterte down to his last months in office, community health advocates say health spending is an election issue that must be addressed – a first step in undoing the sorry state of the country’s public health care under an administration that won with a promise of tapang at malasakit.