Lockdown, medical tyranny, economic and fiscal damage

Six years ago I wrote in this column the initial impact of lockdowns in some countries on GDP in the first quarter of 2020: the Philippines -0.2%, Thailand -1.8%, Japan -2.0%, Singapore -2.2%, China -6.8% (“Growth lockdown and low carbon economy,”  May 20, 2020).

The full-year 2020 contraction of the Philippines was -9.5%. It was the worst in Asia and also the worst in Philippine economic history since post World War 2.

The Duterte government’s lockdown policies were so severe, so many businesses were shutdown and so many people in the private sector became jobless while salaries, allowances and bonuses in government from national down to barangay levels kept flowing. So the government was borrowing left and right while giving certain ayuda (aid) to households, while the government outstanding debt/GDP ratio rose from 37% in 2019 to 52% in 2020 and 57% in 2021.

Among the 10 Asian economies, the Philippines had the largest drop in GDP growth from 2017-2019 (no lockdown) to 2020-2022, from 6.5% to 1.3%. Japan and Thailand also had poor performance in 2020-2022 but they were doing poorly even in years before that.

Our debt/GDP ratio in 2017-2019 of 37.4% went up big time to 55.3% in 2020-2022, almost 20 percentage points in just three years (see Table 1).

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) released on May 26 the Vital statistics (births, deaths, marriages) for November 2025, also the Causes of Death. Among the notable numbers are the following.

One, no “excess death” in 2020 when so many COVID cases were reported, there were even fewer deaths in 2020 than in 2019. But there were large excess deaths in 2021 when mass vaccinations started.

Two, fewer births from 2020 to present compared with 2019, partly due to fewer marriages in 2020-2021, and possibly due to the vaccine impact on people’s fertility as pointed out by a number of medical studies.

Three, a medical anomaly in causes of death where pneumonia deaths that were 10% of total in 2019 suddenly dropped to only 5.6% in 2020 and 4% in 2021. Respiratory diseases and respiratory tuberculosis (TB) also declined in 2020-2021. It may be a case where many pneumonia and TB deaths were counted as COVID deaths, which further fanned the virus scare (see Table 2).

On May 25, Executive Secretary Ralph G. Recto issued a statement about a “nuisance and a harassment case” about the PhilHealth fund transfer that keeps cropping up. He wrote: “At the onset, the transfer was mandated by law under the General Appropriations Act of 2024. Inutusan ng Kongreso ang Department of Finance Secretary. The Supreme Court justices themselves said that I have no criminal liability because I ‘simply followed the law and implemented it in good faith.’”

Some fiscal data point to the fact that the P60 billion transfer of PhilHealth funds to the national treasury in 2023 has helped overall public finance, which allowed more fiscal space for the DoH and other agencies. In 2023, the government experienced the lowest financing or net borrowing since 2020 of only P1.25 trillion. Subsidy to government corporations including PhilHealth declined that year (see Table 3).

A P60-billion cut or reduction in borrowings in 2023 at around 6% average rate of government 10-year bonds means some P3.6 billion/year savings in interest payments alone.

The three tables above seem unrelated to each other but they have one common denominator: some physicians that helped engineer the medical and lockdown protocols of 2020-2021 that (a) led to very deep economic contraction and very high increase in debt/GDP ratio, (b) pushed mandatory vaccinations nationwide (choice is zero because people with no vax cards could not even enter schools, offices and malls) that contributed to high excess deaths and possibly declining births, and (c) huge increase in budget deficit and annual financing from 2020 onwards.

Among these physicians is Tony Leachon. I saw his Facebook page. It is like a political lobbying page begging for high political mileage with repeated slogans of “Recto resign.” I think physicians who helped engineer the medical tyranny of 2020-2021 are guilty of large-scale economic sabotage.

Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. is the president of Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. Research Consultancy Services, and Minimal Government Thinkers. He is an international fellow of the Tholos Foundation.

minimalgovernment@gmail.com