Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
According to the World Health Organisation, the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in the Philippines on 20 January 2020. More than a year after, there are now more than 600,000 confirmed cases, nearly 13,000 deaths and a surge of 5000 new cases in one day. Approximately 41 percent of the (...)
A year ago, the whole of Luzon was placed in one of the longest and most brutal lockdowns in the world to contain a fast-spreading deadly virus with the rest of the country following later. A year has passed, yet Filipinos continue to struggle against the hardships brought about by the COVID-19 (...)
MANILA – For weeks now, the Philippines is experiencing a surge in the number of daily COVID-19 cases. The government, however, is responding to the pandemic as if it were only yesterday – still clueless, still grappling, still militarist.
Since the pandemic broke last year, the likes of Josh (...)
’The only silver lining to this scandal is that the vaccine the VIPs received is apparently one made by a state-owned Chinese pharmaceutical company, Sinopharm, with a terrible safety record’
The VIP vaccine scandal has shocked the public into learning that the operative policy of the Duterte (...)
The operative policy of the Duterte gang when it comes to Covid-19 vaccination is it’s every man for himself. Screw the absence of FDA authorization of a vaccine before it can be used in the country. Screw the prioritization by the IATF of frontline health workers, seniors, and the poor. (...)
In more than nine months of community quarantine in the country, law enforcers have warned, given tickets to, and arrested about 598,000 persons, whom they call “pasaway,” for allegedly violating quarantine and health protocols meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (...)
President Rodrigo Duterte and his government met the deluge of inaccurate claims about the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic with a clampdown on what it referred to as “fake news.”
Unfortunately, even public officials, to whom Filipinos look for guidance and reliable information, were (...)
Medical journal The Lancet ranks Philippines 66th among 91 countries in coronavirus suppression, noting President Rodrigo Duterte’s ’medical populism’ as a factor
After the Philippines was ranked by 66th among 91 countries in a study by an independent medical journal submitted to the UN General (...)
The demand for abolition becomes urgent in the face of a highly militarized response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines.
The COVID-19 pandemic has truly brought out the worst in the Philippine government. Instead of treating the pandemic as a public health crisis, the state is (...)
Often, our greatest problem is the failure to understand the true nature of the problems we face. And here lies the root cause of many developing countries’ inability to overcome perennial challenges of governance.
With the Philippines confronting one of the worst public health and economic (...)
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s latest outrage is an attempt to shift the blame for rising numbers of COVID-19 cases onto health care workers. Duterte made his extraordinary outburst—accusing them of inciting “revolution”—after reimposing strict quarantine in many of the country’s major (...)
This Monday, President Duterte is expected to announce adjustments in the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the absence of a unified and coherent official communication system, it has been difficult to comprehend the logic of this response. We are drowning in an alphabet soup of (...)
On Feb. 17 this year, I taped an hour-long interview with Dr. Edsel Salvaña, director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of the UP National Institutes of Health in Manila. Dr. Salvaña was among the first Filipino infectious disease experts to closely follow developments (...)
When President Duterte delivers this Monday what may well be the most awaited State of the Nation Address of his presidency, he may be disposed to go straight to what needs to be done to revive the economy from its induced coma and to meet the urgent needs of the poorest of our people. I hope (...)
After 75 days of hard lockdown, the Philippines has had the longest community quarantine in the world to date. The lockdown, or enhanced community quarantine, although initially declared to last from 15 March until 15 April, has been extended twice: first for one more month up to 15 May, and (...)
COVID-19 is more than just a health crisis. It has accelerated the shift to a digital economy/society, revealed the shaky foundation of international cooperation, escalated hegemonic rivalry between the two major powers, and shed light on the variation of the capacity and nature of states. The (...)
Intervention of Walden Bello in the Webinar on the “Program for a New Normal in Agriculture” sponsored by Greenpeace Philippines and other organizations, May 29, 2020.
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this panel.
I was originally intending to give the main points of a recent article I (...)
We publish below the fith article of a series of five.
In an unprecedented uncertainty with the country’s $331 billion economy put in frozen animation by a pandemic, what more would it mean for another lockdown in whatever form? When do policy-makers of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s (PRRD) (...)
Introduction: The Global and Regional Contexts of COVID-19 1. Brief Chronology of Events in the Philippines 2. Steps taken by the Philippine Government in Fighting the Invisible Enemy 3. Current Status of the COVID-19 Situation in the country 4. Impact of COVID-19 on Peoples’ Lives 5 Some (...)
As locked down workers in the Philippines and the world celebrated May 1 in online actions, the labor group Partido Manggagawa (PM) slammed Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello’s push for a “Balik Probinsya” scheme.
“The ‘balik probinsya’ [back the province] plan of Sec. Bello and the ‘balik trabaho’ [go (...)
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