This lockdown will never end and this Delta variant is just getting started. I’m scared for my children as no vaccine has been allowed for those aged 18 and below. Even if I’m already fully vaccinated, I can still carry the virus back home when I’m buying supplies outside. I haven’t gone out since Thursday last week or 8 days. My freezer is holding up so I really don’t have to buy meat but I have gone low on vegetables. I have to brave it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Dept of Health Secretary Duque is going straight to hell. He has to answer a lot of questions…missing funds, unpaid hazard pay and allowances to healthcare workers, missing PhilHealth money…He is Satan’s little worker. He’s going straight to hell.

According to Commission on Audit (COA), DOH spent PHP 700,000 (USD 13,868) for four laptops. I wonder what kind of rocket DOH was launching to require them to buy a laptop costing PHP 175,000 (USD 3,467) each.

When I was still reporting on national issues, I used COA reports during my slow news days to investigate how each line agency or Congress is spending its budget. I once wrote about congressmen spending most of their pork barrel on waiting sheds and basketball courts that do not exist. When I was doing the investigative reports on the Napoles pork barrel scam, I used COA reports to follow the money and I haunted the Securities and Exchange Commission to get the General Information Statements of the NGOs that were supposedly the recipients of the pork barrel funds.

PhilHealth not paying hospitals is already crippling the country’s healthcare system. A lot of hospitals are going belly-up and many more will become crippled and may have to close down if this goes on. I wrote a long-form article last year regarding this. As some of my sources said, private hospitals outside Metro Manila have bigger exposure to Philhealth compared to those in Metro Manila as the percentage of privately insured patients and out-of-pocket payers is higher in the country’s capital compared to the provinces. This is dangerous since there is a dearth of public and private hospitals in the provinces and if you have a raging pandemic, it’s like you have already doomed the population that lives outside Imperial Manila.

I was supposed to write something related to this for a local news outfit but the lockdowns and my lack of free time for other things outside my day job have hampered me from doing this. This kind of reportage requires old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism—it involves poring over voluminous public records and documents that could only be provided by sources. Clandestine meetings with sources. Working as an independent journalist on output-basis arrangement with a news agency is not feasible unless the journalist is under a grant. Investigative stories should be done by news outfits that can dedicate a team for this, which we did before. It’s expensive and a lot of work. The news desk will also be understaffed because it will lose people who can write and edit daily spot stories because these people will have to dedicate their waking hours to the project.

So I can’t blame newspapers, TV networks, and online news outfits for not being able to build and retain a special team to tackle stuff like this. They are caught up with the day-to-day production of news stories as they fight for eyeballs and ad revenues. And this country is not like Singapore where nothing happens–where trivial things get front page treatment. Our news cycle is faster than other markets–about two weeks max–because this country is just too fucked up, too many things happening. I remember going through and reporting on a civil war, major earthquake, and earth’s strongest typhoon on record, all of which happened in just three months.

So it is up to the special dedicated investigative journalists to put these corruption stories to the spotlight.

All The President’s Men and Spotlight will not happen if not for them.