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Duterte admits PH 'at a loss' about COVID-19 vaccines, calls China's Xi Jinping for help
Duterte admits PH 'at a loss' about COVID-19 vaccines, calls China's Xi Jinping for help
Even as he touted the Philippines’ readiness last year to purchase coronavirus vaccines to end the pandemic, President Duterte admitted Monday that the country was once “at a loss” on where to get the vaccines.
Duterte had to call and ask for help from Chinese President Xi Jinping at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This despite promising last year that the Philippines will have a better Christmas because the vaccines are already available for procurement. The first batch of COVID-19 vaccines arrived in the country by the end of February. It was also a donation and not a government purchase.
“Ito for public consumption na ito. Tumawag ako kay President Xi Jinping, sinabi ko kasi ‘yong kasagsagan na ng COVID eh kung walang — ‘yong walang dumating talaga, walang makapkap si Secretary (Carlito) Galvez, tumawag ako, sabi ko, (This is for public consumption already. I called President Xi, I told him because this is during the height of COVID and if there’s no — there’s no arrival, if Secretary Galvez can’t find any, I said) ‘Mr. President, I would like to ask for your help. Until now, the Philippines is really at a loss of how to get the vaccines,’” Duterte said during his prerecorded public address on Monday night, May 10.
In response, Xi told the President, “It’s okay, we will help you.”
The first batch of 600,000 Sinovac COVID-19 vaccines arrived on February 28, jumpstarting the country vaccination program, among the last to start in Southeast Asia.
Duterte argued that the Chinese president and head of the powerful Chinese Communist Party (CCP) never asked him to surrender the Scarborough Shoal (Panatag Shoal) in exchange for the vaccines.
He has pinned the blame on the previous Aquino administration regarding the loss of Scarborough Shoal, but this was not disputable as China taking control of the shoal was what triggered the 2012 arbitral case filed by the Philippines before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at The Hague.
Rather, it is Duterte’s seeming defeatist stance on China taking control of the entire West Philippine Sea (WPS) and that there was nothing the Philippines can do because it cannot afford to go to war that critics are calling out.
Duterte has repeatedly harangued former Supreme Court associate justice Antonio Carpio as the latter is critical of his stance against Beijing.
He said Carpio and his critics are “using me as an excuse to right the wrong.”