EDITORIAL - Quarantine's meaning lost to Garin

It may be a joke, but with a very serious reason for telling it -- this suggestion about having acting health secretary Janette Garin wear protective gear when she appears at the Senate on Monday for the 2015 budget hearings. Garin, you see, in a fit of mental lapse, pulled a publicity stunt along with similarly unthinking AFP chief Gregorio Catapang by hobnobbing unprotected with soldiers quarantined on an island after coming home from a peace-keeping mission in Ebola-stricken Liberia.

Garin, trying to defend the indefensible, said she broke no protocols. Oh yeah? Does she even understand the word quarantine? True, none of the soldiers have shown any symptoms of Ebola, which has no known cure and of which the world knows little or nothing about. But that is precisely the point -- nobody knows. That is precisely why they were quarantined on an island in the first place, so their isolation would be greater.

 And yet there went Garin, dressed as if on a picnic, accompanied by equally gregarious Gregorio, even showing off to the television cameras (yes, they brought along television cameras to record their folly and broadcast it to the world) how they literally rubbed elbows with the quarantined soldiers. What a pair they made of themselves!

If the health department which she temporarily heads even gives out condoms to offer protection for something as pleasurable as sex, why would the acting health secretary that she is go unprotected on something that, as opposed to being pleasurable, is devastatingly deadly. What kind of message was she trying to send, that it was perfectly all right to rub elbows with people on quarantine from Ebola-stricken countries for as longt as they have not exbibited any of the symptoms?

What a reckless and irresponsible message that is. If Garin has any sense of propriety left after expending and losing some of them on the quarantine island of Caballo, perhaps she should consider resigning. Anyway, she has other reasons for doing so. For aside from her Caballo stunt, she is also currently implicated in the now infamous pork barrel scam from dealings she had while still a congresswoman.

But if, as many have suspected, her Caballo island stunt was in aid of election (she could try to regain her Congress seat or aim higher and make a bid for the Senate), then there is no way she would be resigning. In fact the question was already popped to her and she replied that her stint at the health department was at the pleasure of the president.

 And as we all know, nothing pleases this president more than to frustrate public clamor by doing the opposite, which is to keep his erring friends and allies for whose heads the angry public had been crying. There is no way the president will ask Garin to step down, much less actually fire her. In fact, that is precisely the reason he plucked Garin from political unemployment, to place her in a position of prominence and thus set her up for something else.