President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. has certified as urgent the bill creating the country’s own Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which would institutionalize the government’s response to pandemics and other public health emergencies.

In a statement on Thursday, March 23, House Committee Ways and Means chair and Albay 2nd District Rep. Joey Salceda thanked the Chief Executive issuing a certificate of urgency for Senate Bill No. 1869, the Senate version of the CDC bill that the lawmaker first filed as House Bill (HB) No. 6096 during the 18th Congress and as HB No. 46 during the 19th Congress.

“I thank President Marcos for boosting this measure, which will protect us from the pandemics that will inevitably happen again in the future. Pandemics are now cyclical – and our preparedness must be permanent,” he said.

Bills that are certified urgent can be read, debated on and passed on the same day, which means Senate could discuss the bill in plenary and approve it on third reading on the same day.

With the certificate of urgency from Marcos, Salceda expects that the Senate would fast-track the approval of the measure.

“It got stuck last time due to some fundamental disagreements on the structure of the institution. But now that the Presidential imprimatur is clear and undeniable, I am almost certain President Marcos will have the law in his desk right before his (2nd) SONA,” he said.

The creation of the country’s disease prevention center was also included in the list of priority legislations mentioned by the President in his first State of the Nation Address (SONA) last July 2022.

Marcos’ certification of urgency came after the Department of Health (DOH) in December 2022 urged him to certify the CDC bill as urgent after the House version was passed on the third and final reading that same month.

Salceda recalled the first time he filed the proposed measure.

“I filed this bill in January 2020, on the afternoon of a meeting with members of the Sin Tax Coalition. We celebrated the passage of the Duterte administration’s Sin Tax measures, but we also knew that something big was looming,” he said, remembering the early months of reports about the Covid-19 pandemic.

“My initial version contained several health emergency provisions that were written in anticipation of necessary lockdowns, quarantines, and continued disease surveillance. Of course, legislation is compromise so that bill evolved through the different stages, and is more institutional than a matter of broader health emergency powers,” the lawmaker added.

While having gone through different edits and versions with Salceda admitting he would have wanted it to have “greater focus on health emergencies,” he maintained that the “CDC as it is now crafted would still be much better than the very ad-hoc nature of the RITM (Research Institute for Tropical Medicine).”