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How can government reward medical frontliners? Let us count some of the ways. Release of hazard pay, now na. Regularization. Promotion. As to promotion, kung di pa kaya ng mass testing sa tao, mass promotion muna sa mga nagta-trabaho. There are two kinds of job promotion. One is...

Let us also swab-test the other, more important VIPs – the Very Important Pasaheros.  I am referring to LSIs who have been packed for days in quarters so crammed that physical distancing was impossible, even for those adamant in observing it. If we have tested for free...

I think the President economized in spelling out his anti-pandemic program, which is what Filipinos were expecting to hear more from him.  He could have made it detailed and nuanced, in a language that is comforting, assuring and emphatic.  It scored low in the...

I think people are not looking forward to the soaring oratory, the poetry of a traditional SONA. They are not even interested in bold strokes. What they want to hear is the to-do list in a wartime SONA that will spell out the battle plan against the pandemic. Specifically, they...

There is a group of forgotten and neglected health frontliners to whom the nation owes so much—the social workers in public clinics and hospitals. The best belated thank you card that we can give them is to make their minimum pay equal to nurses, P32,035 a month, that of Salary...

The Expanded Program of Immunization has a budget of P7.5 billion this year, to cover about 12 million individuals, from infants to seniors.  As of end of June 2020, only 2.8 million individuals, not even one-fourth of the target, have been vaccinated. That is the sad...

The “PDL” stenciled on the prisoners’ OOTD stands for “Person Deprived of Liberty.” As we are still a government of laws, let us make sure that COVID will not change it to “Person Deprived of Life.”  Our congested jails—where prisoners are no longer packed like sardines, but...

The proof of death is a photo of the body. If there is, then doubts will be laid to rest. But there is no need to stage a macabre show by making the photo public.  Simply show it to the Justice Secretary, and if he says that he had seen it, and swears that it is true, then...