Bedlam

The coronavirus pandemic is now over a year old, but the government is still seemingly running around like a headless chicken, invariably causing confusion with its incoherent national policies on COVID-19.

Ever-changing regulations and the lack of standardized systems have provided loopholes that unscrupulous citizens have tended to exploit — from faking COVID-19 tests to faking vaccination cards so they could cross borders and travel, for instance, which puts at risk local populations and results in new cases in the provinces.

Just last weekend, the government announced that fully-vaccinated interzonal travelers were allowed to skip the required RT-PCR tests and instead just present a vaccination card or certificate of isolation issued by the Bureau of Quarantine. Three days later, however, the Department of Health (DOH) said it was reviewing this policy after local government units balked at the change, citing the difficulty in validating vaccination cards presented by travelers.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III barely made sense in his attempt to explain the bedlam: “Bago niyan, ang dati nating resolution ay meron tayong testing… Sa ngayon, ibabalik muna natin doon. This means LGUs can still require testing as a requirement to entry. Status quo po tayo.” Admitting that there is no standardized setup yet for checking the authenticity of vaccination cards, Duque said: “Yung sistema kasi natin sa ngayon ay parang good faith lang muna…”

LGUs had good reason to complain. Not only were they not consulted on the new policy (again), but also, there was no national verification system in place, or standard security features in the vaccination cards issued by LGUs, that could help them determine the authenticity of the health document. Under Republic Act No. 11525 or the COVID-19 Vaccination Program Act of 2021, the DOH and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) are the agencies responsible for issuing digital vaccination cards. But, as pointed out by Makati City Mayor Abby Binay, this has remained a plan four months since the vaccination rollout began.

“Ideally, even before the national government implemented it, the vaccination program should have been centralized, but it did not happen,” Binay said. Also, the national government “did not give specific instructions” on how the vaccination card should be designed or whether it should have security features, resulting in a chaotic system. LGUs, already doing the heavy lifting of addressing case surges in their areas and ensuring the vaccination of their constituents, went ahead and created their own vaccine card formats. Some included an ID photo and a QR code sticker from the vaccine, while others merely indicated the name, address, and dates of inoculation of the vaccinee. Other LGUs in the provinces are reportedly using bond paper as vaccination cards and reproducing them through photocopy.

The DOH has since passed the buck to the DICT; Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said that department was supposed to lead the digital system initiative. The DICT, on the other hand, said it could not issue the digital vaccination cards just yet due to outdated records provided by LGUs.

Section 12 of RA 11525 specifically states: “[T]he DOH shall maintain a central database of vaccinations, and mandate a uniform format for the vaccine card, the contents of which shall be updated accordingly to always conform with globally accepted standards.”

With the national agencies busy pointing fingers at each other, the LGUs are once more left to find solutions on their own, on top of other logistics problems they have to handle such as delayed vaccines, shortage of medical staff, and inadequate hospital facilities. Baguio City, one of the cities flagged early this month by the Octa Research Group as an “area of concern” due to its increasing number of COVID-19 cases and high hospital bed occupancy rates, has tightened its border checks using its own digital system. Makati has issued vaccination IDs with a watermark visible through ultraviolet light. Quezon City has started distributing cards with tamper-proof seals to the new batches, and will attach a security seal to the IDs of those who previously had their jabs.

Philippine National Police chief Gen. Guillermo Eleazar has also ordered policemen to be on alert against fake vaccination cards. “If the results of RT-PCR tests can be faked, it’s not completely impossible for illicit people to also use fake vaccination documents. We won’t let this happen,” Eleazar vowed.

The DICT is said to be rushing the digital list of fully vaccinated Filipinos by the end of this month. More than 3.6 million of the 12 million vaccinees have been encoded, according to Duque, and — never mind that it was needed yesterday — the country will soon have a “real time” database.