MANILA (Reuters) – Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday defended his complicated technique of fighting coronavirus amid an increase in the number of cases, promoting its effectiveness in an annual speech that critics said revealed little about recovery plans for a struggling economy.
While Duterte suggested to Congress pass a 140 billion pesos ($2.85 billion) stimulus package, he spent much of his speech attacking opponents, reviving the death penalty, and protecting a bloody war on drugs.
Duterte said the imposition of one of the world’s strictest blockades would possibly have hurt the economy, but avoided between 1.3 and 3.5 million infections and countries that opened too soon as the United States suffered.
“For me, even if the numbers were much lower, it would still be and would have been the sacrifice we made,” he said.
He maintained his resolve not to allow schools to reopen until a vaccine was available, which he first thought could be until September.
As countries rush to vaccinate, Duterte said last week he asked Chinese President Xi Jinping if Beijing made a breakthrough with the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I called On President Xi if they have the vaccine, they can afford us to be one of the first … so that we can normalize ourselves as temporarily as possible,” he said.
Although the Philippines waited 11 weeks before it began to ease restrictions on June 1, cases have quadrupled since then, 82,040 infections and deaths more than doubled to 1,945.
Duterte noted the “difficulties” with the ability.
Although he presses in a hundred-minute speech the importance of saving lives, Duterte also called for the reimposition of the death penalty and promised not to let the war on drugs that has killed thousands of people pass.
“I’m going to kill you, it’s a commitment,” he said, warned drug traffickers.
Opposition lawmakers and investors expected Duterte to unveil plans on how to repair millions of jobs and mitigate the economic damage caused by the pandemic, but said it had slightly addressed the urgent problems.
“The expected roadmap was collapsing in the path of worldly generalities and an invocation that other people deserve to accept as true with their government,” Congressman Edcel Lagman said, adding that The stimulus planned by Duterte was “radiant.”
Duterte also defended its policy of pressuring China to comply with the Philippines’ 2016 foreign arbitration award on the South China Sea, and said it risked a backlash.
“We went to war,” he added.
(Written through Martin Petty and Karen Lema, edited through Ed Osmond)
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