Incomparable

Spokesman Harry Roque has an uncontrollable penchant for inviting blowback to the things he says. That might not be best for the job he is trying to do: to build public trust in the government he serves.

True, the job he holds is an utterly thankless one. He is on the firing line each day. The hours are long and the pay is paltry. The shelf life of presidential spokesmen is notoriously short.

Surely, Harry was not invited to the job because he was boring and predictable. He was invited because he crackles like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. He is entertaining most of the time – until he overreaches. He is the bully at the pulpit.

Sal Panelo could never do what Harry does. Sal is too much a philosopher to be at home in the 24-hour news cycle. In his leanness, he acquires the mien of a self-denying monk – therefore inducing a sense of melancholy on live TV.

Harry, by contrast, is robust: loud as the fat lady who sings. His face fills our screen and his loud booming voice rouses us when we threaten to fall asleep. He is not shy about taunting the midget minds carping about one unimportant thing or another with the only objective of cutting into the President’s immense popularity.

He is Duterte’s bulldog. Sometimes he seems on the verge of overshadowing his principal. But his principal, who sometimes appears to be lacking the vigor to properly growl, thoroughly enjoys his spokesman’s caustic style.

A few days ago, Harry was asked to rate the Duterte administration’s handling of the year-old pandemic.  Without missing a beat, he boomed: “Excellent!”

He did not have to say a word more. Within minutes, the constantly dissatisfied trolls on social media were all over him like a swarm of furious bees. Within hours, the tired mouthpieces of the opposition were straining their brain cells, trying to debunk the single word the spokesman uttered.

Debunking Harry Roque is always futile. While the naysayers struggle with the comparative numbers, the various public health records and the unholy statistics, the spokesman was off to drop his next audacious bombshell.

In the end, what becomes clear is that every country is an apple or an orange or quite another fruit. They do not lend easily to comparison. They differ in the demographics and the resources governments have ready to throw at the fire that is the pandemic.

True, some of our neighbors in the region have lower caseloads and less deaths per million. But others have higher numbers. Some countries have thoroughly bungled the job they were supposed to do. Others, like Britain, failed and then rose again with an incredible vaccination program.

Some countries were able to bring down infection rates in remarkable fashion only to see those rates zoom up again in second and third waves. Other countries, many in Africa, did next to nothing and just watched as the infection cases declined.

Some countries, such as ours, have highly a urbanized and well-traveled population susceptible to circulating the virus. Others, such as Mongolia, have their population well distributed across vast expanses – therefore inhospitable to epidemics.

Ahead of the massive vaccination program it just launched, India saw its infection rates drop nearly inexplicably. The scientists are still baffled by what happened. At any rate, the Modi government, using the country’s vast pharmaceutical platform, is preparing to vaccinate its population at a rate of 3 million a day. That surpasses even Joe Biden’s already impressive vaccination drive.

Israel, with its compact land area and small population, is closing in on having two-thirds of its population vaccinated. The success does not demean others who need more vaccines to inoculate larger populations.

At the end of the day, comparing the performance of governments relative to their pandemic responses is probably useless. This pandemic is an unfinished story. All the success and failures are tentative. There could be new variants and new surges of infection.

Our own performance has probably been middling. We have better numbers than some of the rich countries and worse numbers than some of the poorer countries. We did reasonably well with the resources we had ready.

Nor is it particularly useful to compare the speed of vaccination programs. Some economies, such as the US and Europe, have indulged in vaccine nationalism and delayed deliveries to developing nations to prioritize their own.

What is truly important in our case at this point is that vaccine hesitancy appears to have dropped drastically. The sight of our best doctors accepting whatever vaccine is available inspires us all.

At the moment, supply adequacy and not preparedness determines the speed at which vaccination programs progress. But this is not a sprint. This is a marathon. There are 7 billion human beings to vaccinate.

In Southeast Asia, some countries that began vaccination programs ahead now need to pause to await more supplies. Others, like Vietnam, seem in no hurry to join the vaccine race, preferring to wait until their own pharmaceutical industry could produce what they need.

Time, nevertheless, is still a vital factor. The quicker we could all vaccinate, the less chance the coronavirus could mutate to defy extermination.

The pandemic, now a year old, remains a moving target. The alarming rise in confirmed cases the past week tells us that any undue relaxation of health protocols could induce a surge.

We know there is light at the end of the tunnel. But we do not yet know how long the tunnel is.