By Mario Casayuran
Senator Panfilo M. Lacson Wednesday gave Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Francisco Duque III advice on how to lead his subordinates in dealing with the deadly 2019 novel coronavirus acute respiratory disease (nCov ARD) scare.
Senator Panfilo M. Lacson
(CAMILLE ANTE / MANILA BULLETIN)
“When the leader falls short of his mission, he does not look for scapegoats. He takes immediate steps and rectifies. Still failing, he simply assumes responsibility. That is leadership,” Lacson said.
Lacson was referring to the failure of DOH officials and personnel to properly perform ‘contact tracing’ to find the remaining 83 percent of the 331 airline passengers who took the same plane boarded by a Chinese tourist who died in the Philippines from nCoV ARD infection.
Duque pointed to the failure of his personnel in looking for the passengers of a Cebu Pacific flight from Hong Kong who sat in front, behind, or beside the nCoV fatality.
He also blamed airlines for not giving details of the passengers’ addresses, presumably for security reasons, but this was belied by Cebu Pacific and Philippine Airlines (PAL) that carried the tourists, including the lone nCoV fatality in a Dumaguete-Manila flight
Lacson forwarded to Senate reporters PAL’s reaction to Duque’s excuse:
"We confirm that we released to the Department of Health (DOH), through the Bureau of Quarantine (BOQ), the full unredacted manifest of our 25 January 2020 flight PR2542 from Dumaguete to Manila, which includes the contact details of the passengers on the flight.
“We are also assisting the BOQ in the call-out of the passengers. We will always do our part to cooperate fully with the responsible authorities when it concerns the health and safety of the general public.
“We released manifest to BOQ last Jan 31 2020 on the request of BOQ. Our VP Safety emailed Dr Oba, head of BOQ (DOH) T2 NAIA.”
Lacson, a former Philippine National Police (PNP) chief, said this was the reason he blew his top during the Senate committee hearing last Tuesday “when the cabinet members present - Secretaries Duque, Teodoro Locsin (Foreign Affairs), and Arthur Tugade (Transportation) - took turns in defending an indefensible inaction and incompetence of the DOH leadership.”
“Worse, they did it at the expense of hapless subalterns who cannot defend themselves given the circumstances,” he said.
“It is failure of leadership, plain and simple. It is up to the appointing power to act. It is not for me or the Senate to suggest or advise what to do with Secretary Duque.”
To opposition Sen. Francis N. Pangilinan, the hearing conducted by the Senate health committee chaired by Senator Christopher “Bong” Go “should be a wake-up call for the inter-agency committee and its whole-of-government approach.”
“The health secretary was clearly in the dark as to his department's efforts to trace the passengers of the two flights which flew in the two nCoV patients,” Pangilinan said.
“This most basic intervention was at 17 percent success rate two weeks into the outbreak. Worse, the secretary was unaware and only found out during the hearing that it was a dismal 17 percent.”