It's Chinese, duh!

A SUPERMARKET where one can get free medical consultation and buy medicines unavailable in the Philippine market.

A disused restaurant repurposed as a warehouse for medicines.  

Both run by Chinese nationals, for Chinese nationals. Right in the heart of the Filipino-owned Clark Freeport.

Cached thereat – P20-million worth of medicines, medical supplies, food supplements, cosmetics – all bearing Chinese characters, none registered with the Food and Drug Administration.

Part of the medical supply chain of the makeshift, and therefore illegal, clinic, hospital, and pharmacy earlier raided at the Fontana Leisure Park in Clark and at nearby Koreatown in Angeles City. So, the raiding party of NBI and FDA agents suspected, in the absence of hard evidence, as yet.  

It does not take a Sherlock Holmes though to see the connection between the makeshift hospital and the equally improvised medical depot. Even a bungling pulis patola would shout “Eureka!” by simply looking at the circumstances obtaining in all cases and finding their common denominator. It’s Chinese, duh!

Considering the volume, if not the amount, of medicines and medical supplies seized in this latest raid – June 4 – in the Clark Freeport, and juxtaposing it with  the stockpile of the same contraband taken from a PhilExcel warehouse, also in Clark, in the May 21 raid, there emerges the high probability of more clients for these underground pharmaceuticals than those two makeshift hospitals raided so far.

So, we ask anew: What gives now, CDC?

At the time it locked down Fontana last May 20, the Clark Development Corp. declared: “This illegal activity not only violates the law, but also poses danger to individuals who potentially need medical treatment for the deadly disease. CDC does not and will never tolerate this inside the Clark Freeport.”

Yeah, right. And the two Chinese nationals arrested in that raid were released on the same day without any charges.

Then the PhilExcel raid came. And we did not hear even but a whimper from CDC.  

Now, this.

In police parlance, tatlong beses nang nabukulan ang CDC. Fortunately for the government-owned and -controlled corporation, it is not the police and is therefore spared of the PNP’s one-strike policy.

(On second thought, even cops got spat at by the Chinese and, rather than striking back, they simply grinned and bore it.)  

So, as these raids come and go, and everyone getting away with it, it does seem that – as elsewhere in this benighted country – Chinese primacy is the operative, if unexpressed, CDC policy.   

Wonder now if CDC, in actuality, means Chinese Directed Corp.?
(Pictures courtesy of NBI-Central Luzon Office and CDC)