Richard “Dick” Gordon was perceived to be presidential material when he proved the naysayers wrong by making Olongapo City and Subic thrive after the US forces pulled out of the glitzy naval base. It became his credential that easily won him a Senate seat and national cognizance.
His national political aspirations, however, were in the doldrums. He won a Senate seat in the 2004 elections. In 2010, at the height of his popularity as a pragmatic political leader, he took a crack at the presidency. But he lost to Noynoy Aquino, who gained a substantial sympathetic following the death of his mother, Cory Aquino.
In 2016, he ran again for the Senate, finishing fifth in the race. He replaced Sen. Leila de Lima as chairperson of the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights. He continued the probe into extrajudicial killings attributed by his predecessor to president Rodrigo Duterte when he was the mayor of Davao City.
Gordon, after a series of hearings, concluded there was no proof the EJK were state-sponsored or that the Davao Death Squad ever existed.
Gordon was correct for the so-called DDS was actually a phantom force conceptualized by then Davao Integrated National Police regional commander, Col. Dionisio Tan-gatue Jr., to wage psychological warfare against the “Sparrows,” the liquidation squads of the New People’s Army.
There was a mutual respect between Gordon and Duterte until Covid-19 broke out and, as in other nations, spread like wildfire in the country. From Wuhan, China, where it was first detected, the coronavirus spared no country, big or small.
Victims died on the streets of Wuhan, and those who were rushed to hospitals never had a chance of survival. Before scientists discovered that the deadly coronavirus caused the killer disease, some carriers had already traveled around the world.
Every country was caught unprepared. Countries with advanced medical sciences scrambled to produce vaccines, and when they did, they imposed an embargo. Notable among them were the United States and the United Kingdom. China, on the other hand, was quietly developing its own vaccine — Sinovac — and so was Russia.
Along with the vaccines, there was a rush to mass produce personal protective equipment (PPE) for doctors, nurses and other medical frontliners.
I have to recall these states of worldwide emergency, the specter of death and chaos, to put into the proper perspective the irrationality and disturbing amnesia of Dick Gordon who now calls for a renewed probe by the Ombudsman on the procurement of PPEs, which he claimed were overpriced.
Recall that in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Gordon led the Senate investigation into alleged overpriced PPEs procured from China through Pharmally.
To his chagrin, records culled from procurements of the same items by the previous administration of President Benigno Aquino III showed these were twice as expensive than those supplied by Pharmally. During Aquino’s incumbency, purchase orders showed PPE prices ranging from P3,500 to P3,800 per set, while Pharmally’s price was only P1,919.
Following the disclosure, the probe shifted to why the multibillion-peso procurement was awarded to Pharmally, whose working capital was only P165,000. The probe also sneered at why the Duterte government favored the Sinovac vaccine.
What was being stonewalled by Dick Gordon was that at the start and at the height of the pandemic no country, except China, sold PPEs and vaccines to the Philippines and other Asean countries as the US and UK had embargoed these medical supplies to address their own needs first.
As chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, Gordon could have helped by endorsing the procurement of those vital medical supplies, but understandably he could not. The PNRC was also helpless.
Our doctors, nurses, and other frontliners were getting sick, dying, or dead. The government could not do otherwise but buy from wherever sources were available. There is a Tagalog adage for that: “Ang taong nagigipit kahit sa patalim ay kakapit (A desperate person will cling even to a blade).”
It was the Philippines’ good fortune that China’s leadership had an avuncular relationship with us. We not only were able to purchase the items and volumes our health authorities required, we also received an extra million vaccine doses for free.
But Gordon was not amused. He unrelentingly accused President Duterte of corruption over the Pharmally deal. Well, he got his own dose of expletives from Duterte. In 2022, when Senator Gordon sought reelection, he lost miserably.
In May 2023, the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 pandemic over.
Today, Dick Gordon has forgotten what we went through, demanding that those involved in procuring the PPEs that saved our overburdened medical teams and the vaccines that protected the nation from the coronavirus be investigated and jailed.
Whatever virus has hit Gordon this time, for sure there is no vaccine for it yet.