‘Come to think of it, the battle cry of Never Forget and Never Again must apply to the most basic Filipino failing — ourinnate inability to hold peoplein office accountable for promises they fail to keep, most especially if they’re our friends.’
HAVE you ever tried getting a VaxCert for yourself? The VaxCert is an official document from the Department of Health that you can apply for and obtain online, which identifies and itemizes the date and brand of vaccines and/or boosters you have received in the global fight against COVID-19.
For many, if not most travelers, obtaining an e-copy (or even a hard copy) of the VaxCert is important as it is a required document you need to show at the airline check-in counter and sometimes again at the immigration counter at your destination.
Getting a copy is really easy, provided you remember the date and place (LGU) where you had your vaccines. But a second element is also critical — that your vaccine was properly recorded and registered by the LGU that distributed it.
It seems the Philippines has not been doing a great job with the second element, as I have had a couple of friends asking me what they should do because their record is not appearing in the database of VaxCert. A few others — myself included, actually, are missing an entry of a second vaccine shot or a booster shot and so our record isn’t complete. (It’s an opportunity to get another booster, too.).
Why this still happens in this day and age is sad and frustrating. You’d think that given all the hullabaloo around the pandemic and the need to vaccinate a certain number to reach herd immunity — which Duque, Galvez and Co. failed to do — our authorities would have been very careful when it came to record keeping.
Maybe my case was just an aberration, or that of two senior citizen friends who had to go through the process of validating their data so they could get a VaxCert for travel purposes. Maybe in the greater scheme of things, ours were the outliers, the one in a thousand instances where data capture would have failed or human error would have factored into the whole process of encoding and all. But then shouldn’t we hold our authorities to higher standards and be less quick to provide them excuses ourselves?
I will just put my faith and trust in folks like DICT Secretary Ivan Uy that things like these will be things of the past when the BBM administration bows out in 2028. On his shoulders and those of his colleagues fall the task of finding the missing link – or links – that Duque and Co. failed to provide and have apparently escaped accountability for, as we all feared.
Come to think of it, the battle cry of Never Forget and Never Again must apply to the most basic Filipino failing — our innate inability to hold people in office accountable for promises they fail to keep, most especially if they’re our friends. And that is, fundamentally, the most important missing link of all.
