By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
Desperate and in a hurry to make its Crisis Action Plan work against the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19, the government uses this two-week lockdown to ramp up vaccinations and “discipline” people from becoming super spreaders.
In these situations, all of us are called to a moral responsibility to cooperate with authorities and hope these measures work. But, sadly, even the Department of Health – which had been slow in admitting a community transmission of the highly contagious Delta strain – now projects daily infections to hit 18,000 by the end of September even with the enforcement of the enhanced community quarantine or ECQ.
OCTA Research Group was already two steps ahead of government, like in the past, in calling out widespread Delta infections, but it had been dismissed as an “alarmist.” What’s worse is that our elected representatives want these experts grilled in Congress.
Lawmakers may not find this a waste of their time. Still, it disturbs the work of this formidable group which has so far been on point in its data and projections on COVID-19 that even Malacanang had once called them to join a consultative meeting with the IATF.
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Meanwhile, politicians who promote themselves in the heat of emergency pandemic response measures are almost as sickening as COVID itself. Noticeably, billboards of likely candidates in next year’s elections have sprouted on major thoroughfares. More distastefully, others have chosen to post up during relief operations in poor communities or vaccination sites.
Clearly, they’ve been taking advantage of the loophole in the Comelec’s policy on premature campaigning, which can only be considered electioneering when the violation is committed after the filing of certificates of candidacy but not before.
So while premature campaigning is illegal and could cause a candidate’s disqualification from holding an elective post, very early premature campaigning is ridiculously not.
Hopefully, a bill filed by Surigao del Sur Rep. Johnny Pimentel changes that if not ahead of the 2022 polls, then at least in the elections that follow. The bill simply corrects the technical definition of premature campaigning so that ill-timed electioneering any time 12 months before the campaign period starts is punished.
But while it all makes sense, expect such a bill to face rough sailing in a Congress bursting with individual ambitions just months away from the elections.
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SHORT BURSTS. For comments or reactions, email firingline@ymail.com or tweet @Side_View. Read current and past issues of this column at https://www.thephilbiznews.com
