Super Typhoon Cuts Power, Water, Phone for 10 Million People. Health Ministry Tells Them to Get Vaccinated

While Samantha Power tells them to have fewer brown babies

A category 5 typhoon blew through the Philippines last week. The islands of Bohol (1.3 million people), Cebu (5 million people), and Negros (4.5 million) are still largely without power and running water. So are parts of southern Leyte and north-eastern Mindanao. 400 are dead, a figure that is sure to rise as more reports are collected.

Cellphone signal took days to restore and is still unreliable and not everywhere. It took days to restore remittance services and working ATMs are still scarce (few have power and those that do don’t have money). Gasoline (to run generators for the very few who have them) is dear and there are long lines for it. The poor are lining up for water on the uncertain chance they’ll get to buy it, and the rich are lining up for water and gasoline. Even food in the stores isn’t particularly plentiful, and anyways everyone (we’re talking millions of people here) just lost their earnings.

Hundreds of thousands are “typhoon refugees” leaving the more affected areas and the big cities for somewhat more livable localities. Services-wise it’s like the aftermath of a destructive war or a bombing campaign. When days after the storm in the 2-million Cebu metro just enough power was restored to supply half of the hospitals (but not water filtration stations) this was treated as a landmark event.

Between the category 5 storm and the chronic underinvestment in infrastructure and its semi-improvised nature in the best of times, millions are sitting in the dark. Hundreds of thousands of urban poor in particular face an acute health crisis primarily due to diminished access to clean water which has some of them having to resort to boiling unclean water if the particular line for water rations they are in runs out or closes down before it’s their turn.

So of course the health ministry quickly responded to the crisis…by telling everyone to get vaccinated:

**There’s a cat 5 typhoon? Vaccinate and have fewer babies!**

Just schedule your vaccine appointment and “safe, quality time with family” is assured!

You might think “oh this is just a Facebook post” but actually in the Philippines this *the primary* way the government communicates with constituents. Official websites are rare, but every government office and local municipality has an official Facebook page, especially since Zuckerberg has made access to FB (and only to FB) free. (He has deals with local telcos whereby you can browse FB without data charges.)

Just to drive home the point that continued COVID-19 obsession is not an accident the ministry followed it up by a message that COVID social distance and masking protocols must continue to be observed in typhoon evacuation centers!:

Indeed universal compulsory outdoor face diapering has been in force since March 2020 throughout the entire country, so now you have people waiting in waterlines for hours on end in tropical heat with a sweaty, polluted cloth covering their mouth and nose. That must be awesome for health!

To make matters worse this isn’t even the national office of the health ministry (which after all has 90 million other people who were not affected by the storm), but the local office covering precisely the three most affected islands!

This mind you is the same health ministry which in a nation where there is still malnutrition and associated stunting in growth every Christmas Holiday season reminds Filipinos not to…overeat.

*Do not overeat! Even once in a year! (Of course, you have a giant feast prepared, who doesn’t? All the people in our gated communities do!)*

The valiant ministry also reminded the people during the starvation lockdowns…to remember to eat a balanced diet. This while tens of millions were left without earnings and the government was only distributing plain rice:

**The most important thing during a starvation lockdown: DO NOT EAT TOO MANY HAMBURGERS!**

What is the most disturbing is that the vaccine obsession is lately being paired by a freaky “family planning” (population control) It’s Okay to Delay campaign funded by USAID. Washington spending money for there to be fewer brown people in the world…nothing weird about that.

The health department (local and national) literally hit them with a combined vaccination and family planning message the very next day after the devastation the previous night:

Why is population control even pushed when the young generation already has fewer than 3 kids on average? And how did this US-funded campaign get the green light in a country still conservative enough that there is no legal abortion?

We are ruled by either psychopaths or fools. While people are going hungry in their lockdowns and are devastated by gargantuan storms, their three main worries are:

that there might be too many babies
somebody somewhere might be eating too much
that no one over 12 remains uninjected against a seasonal flu from 2 years ago

Something is very wrong with this picture. This is indeed a dysfunctional third-world country, but frequently in such places, the faults of our system are merely accentuated and made more glaring and absurd, rather than something we couldn’t recognize at all.

Some of the rest: