More news about how the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines is being handled by the public and the government.
Anti-vaccine claims circulating during a Philippine child immunization drive recycled conspiracy theories such as vaccines containing harmful substances or being tools for depopulation—that gained widespread traction globally during the Covid-19 pandemic. These narratives, amplified on social media, compounded existing distrust in public health institutions that had already been strained by the pandemic and earlier vaccine controversies.
When Jenette Torres Odena’s three-year-old son fell ill days after receiving a jab as part of a Philippine vaccination drive, his photograph quickly spread on Facebook alongside claims the inoculation had killed him.
Doctors found no link between the boy’s condition and the measles-rubella vaccine, and he went on to fully recover, but by then his image had appeared in anti-vaccine videos viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
“I felt like crying,” Odena told AFP.
“I kept praying for my son to recover and suddenly they were killing him on Facebook.”
The videos were part of a wave of misinformation that accompanied a child vaccination campaign this year that saw more than seven million Filipinos inoculated. Some 230,000 declined the jab.
The Department of Health said concerns about side effects accounted for 66 percent of refusals and called misinformation spread by social media influencers a “major driver” of vaccine fear.
The Philippines has struggled to restore routine childhood immunization rates after years of plummeting coverage, which contributed to a polio resurgence in 2019 and recurring measles outbreaks.
The claims circulated on social media recycled conspiracy theories that gained traction globally during the Covid-19 pandemic while tapping into lingering fears about vaccine safety after the botched rollout of a dengue vaccine in the Philippines a decade ago.
“Vaccine hesitancy should not simply be understood as a lack of scientific knowledge among the public,” Daniel Fritz Silvallana, a health communication researcher at Deakin University, Australia, told AFP.
“In the Philippine context, it is also connected to questions of trust, politics, and people’s previous experiences with vaccination and public health institutions,” he said.
Within days of the photo of Odena’s son being shared online, Facebook content creator Maharani Sona Shiloh had incorporated it into a video, framing it as evidence the vaccination campaign was harming children.
To bolster her claims, Shiloh cited Trump’s recent controversial move to reduce the number of vaccine doses administered to American children.
The video viewed hundreds of thousands of times paired the child’s image with a photograph of US President Donald Trump and the words “Everyday slaughter”.
Facebook, which did not reply to AFP requests for comment, eventually took down the page.
Three affiliated pages remain active.
Shiloh rejected suggestions she was spreading harmful misinformation, describing herself as a human rights advocate.
“People call us crazy,” she told AFP. “Why is it that human beings don’t have the right to challenge these things?”
The 44-year-old said she became involved in anti-vaccine advocacy years before the pandemic, later connecting with church groups and “advocacy circles” that also campaign against SIM card registration and other policies they associate with a treacherous “New World Order”.
Videos posted by Shiloh, some with millions of views, claimed vaccines contained harmful substances including “human placenta” and “formalin”, while warning the World Health Organization was trying to depopulate the planet.
One mother, who asked to speak anonymously to protect her children, told AFP she decided to hold off on vaccinating them after watching the videos.
“I watched Ms Maharani’s videos because I was looking for more information. They gave additional knowledge… so it helped me to think more carefully,” she said.
A week after the Facebook page was shuttered, she said she remained undecided about vaccinating her children, explaining that she and her husband worried about possible side effects.
– Rebuilding trust –
While Shiloh’s claims quickly collapse under scientific scrutiny, vaccinologist Helen Petousis-Harris of the University of Auckland said such videos rely on fear rather than compelling evidence.
“Recognised vaccine ingredients become mysterious contaminants. Rare adverse events become brain damage, epilepsy, organ failure and death,” she told AFP.
For health workers on the frontlines, however, the videos are increasingly difficult to ignore.
“They get scared because the vlog said vaccines are fatal,” said Wenna Mae Belen, a rural health worker in Sorsogon province.
Conversations with some parents have also become hostile, Belen added.
“They tell me if something bad happens, they’ll make me suck the vaccines out of their kids’ bodies.”
While the 25-year-old said Facebook bore “major responsibility” for the spread of vaccine misinformation, she cautioned that picking fights with content creators like Shiloh and their followers was a losing battle.
Rebuilding trust will take time and patience, she said, calling for open, non-judgmental conversations with parents.
“It isn’t enough for us to just say: ‘We’re the experts, so trust us’.”
As for trusting the experts, sudden deaths related to myocarditis, miscarriages, and other injuries occurred that were directly related to the experimental mRNA vaccine. On the social front it turned out masking was ineffective, social distancing was ineffective, the death rate from actual covid was inflated as those deaths were due to various co-morbidities, and shutting down society was a gravely mistaken plan of action from which the world is still recovering. Why should anyone "trust the experts?"
At least 500 GMA Network employees are entitled to P240.6 million in hazard pay for working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Court of Appeals upheld the NLRC’s decision, ruling that GMA was given due process and that the payment was validly ordered.
At least 500 employees of GMA Network are entitled to P240.6 million in total hazard pay for rendering work during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Court of Appeals (CA) ruled in a decision dated Sept. 16.
The appellate court ruled that the National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC) did not commit grave abuse of discretion when it ordered GMA and its chairman and CEO, Felipe Gozon, to pay 500 employees their hazard pay and cover the legal expenses they incurred in pursuing their unfair labor practice case against the broadcasting network.
It dismissed the petition for certiorari filed by Gozon to overturn the NLRC’s multiple rulings in 2023 in favor of the employees, who were members of GMA Channel 7 Employees Union, and the award of their hazard pay covering Mar. 17, 2020, to Mar. 31, 2021.
After these rulings became final and executory in October 2023, GMA workers filed a motion for execution and recomputation more than three months later, this time asking that they be entitled as well to hazard pay for the period April 1, 2021, to July 20, 2023.
This covers the period that the country remained under a public health emergency due to the pandemic. President Marcos lifted the emergency status on July 21, 2023.
The recomputation was also granted by the labor arbiter, which brought the total hazard pay due the employees to P240.6 million.
This prompted the company to file a motion to quash writ of execution, claiming that they were not notified of the final recomputation nor given the chance to comment on the matter.
But the CA, in its ruling, said the execution writ by the NLRC was “validly issued.”
“The NLRC aptly ruled that the petitioners failed to establish that the writ of execution was improvidently issued, much less to show that the amount of the judgment award as indicated in the said writ of execution was erroneously computed,” the appellate court said in a decision written by Associate Justice Carlito Calpatura.
Contrary to the network’s claim, CA said it was not deprived of due process because it had the opportunity to counter the recomputation of the judgment award during the mandatory pre-execution conference conducted by the labor arbiter.
“The court has consistently held that the essence of due process is the opportunity to be heard. In other words, there is no denial of the right to due process if there was an opportunity for the parties to defend their interests in due course,” CA said.
It said that GMA was aptly notified of the recomputed award because it did not complain when the new amount was attached to the court documents sent to it as party to the case, and the company’s lawyers did not point out any specific errors in the computation by the NLRC.
The broadcast giant also lost a labor case last year when the Supreme Court upheld that 94 members of the Talents Association of GMA were regular employees—not just independent contractors—who were thus entitled to monetary benefits. This covers individuals who were hired from 2003 to 2013.
The same ruling affirmed that about half of them were illegally terminated and were entitled to reinstatement and privileges, including back pay and allowances.
The hazard pay covers the period from March 17, 2020, to July 20, 2023. The decision follows another labor ruling in which GMA talents were recognized as regular employees entitled to benefits and, for some, reinstatement and back pay.
The Philippines borrowed a record $4.1 billion from the World Bank in FY 2026, exceeding the $3.068 billion it secured in FY 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During that pandemic peak, the country ranked as the World Bank’s top borrower, with the loans primarily directed toward combating the virus and addressing its severe economic fallout.
The Philippines borrowed a record $4.1 billion from the World Bank during its fiscal year (FY) 2026, exceeding even the loans the country secured at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and making it the fifth-largest borrower from the Washington-based multilateral lender.
The World Bank Group’s (WBG) annual report for FY 2026, which covered July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026, showed that Philippine borrowings from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) jumped 43.6 percent from $2.855 billion in FY 2025. IBRD is the WBG’s lending arm for developing countries like the Philippines.
Only India, with $5.984 billion; Türkiye, $5.615 billion; Brazil, $4.546 billion; and war-torn Ukraine, $4.21 billion, borrowed more from IBRD than the Philippines in FY 2026, allowing the country to maintain its position as the fifth-largest IBRD borrower for the third straight FY.
But unlike in the previous two FYs, when the Philippines ranked seventh overall after borrowers from the WBG’s International Development Association (IDA), which lends to the world’s poorest countries, were included, the country climbed to fifth overall in FY 2026. Ethiopia was the largest IDA borrower in FY 2026, with $3.85 billion in loans, but still ranked below the Philippines overall, the report published last Sept. 25 showed.
The latest Philippine borrowings also surpassed the $3.068 billion across eight loans secured in FY 2021, or from July 2020 to June 2021, when the country was the WBG’s No. 1 borrower at the height of the pandemic.
Those low-interest loans had been mainly spent to fight Covid-19, which inflicted on the Philippines the largest pandemic-induced output gap in the region.
After the pandemic-era surge in IBRD borrowing, World Bank-approved Philippine loans fell to $1.578 billion in FY 2022, the last FY under the Duterte administration, before picking up to $2.336 billion in FY 2023, the first full FY under the current Marcos Jr. administration, and rising further to $2.35 billion in FY 2024.
The Philippines moved to upper-middle-income country (UMIC) status last July, at the start of the current FY 2027, which means it will have less access to concessional financing from multilateral development banks (MDBs) like the World Bank in the future.
The WBG’s latest annual report also showed that the Philippines received capacity-building assistance to strengthen its management of financial risks arising from interest rate, currency, and commodity price volatility.
The country was among eight economies that received such assistance in FY 2026, while the WBG executed $5.4 billion in risk-management transactions across 53 countries.
Meanwhile, the WBG annual report likewise disclosed that the Philippines was among nine countries whose World Bank-funded projects were the subject of new complaints processed by the lender’s Inspection Panel in FY 2026.
The Inspection Panel is part of the World Bank Accountability Mechanism, which allows people and communities who believe they have been or could be harmed by a World Bank-funded project to raise concerns independently of the lender’s management.
The panel processed 10 new complaints involving projects in the Philippines, Ecuador, Indonesia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Uganda during FY 2026.
In the Philippines, earlier World Bank documents seen by Manila Bulletin showed that the Inspection Panel received a request last March concerning the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) Project being implemented by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).
The $473.56-million project, approved back in 2020, is backed by a $370-million World Bank loan and aims to improve land tenure security as well as stabilize the property rights of agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs).
The complaint was filed by two individuals, one residing in Australia and the other in South Cotabato province, who identified themselves as legal heirs to land they claimed was being affected by the project.
The complainants alleged that SPLIT failed to comply with the World Bank’s environmental and social standards on land acquisition, restrictions on land use, as well as involuntary resettlement by disregarding a 1997 DAR order that they said excluded their property from the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
Also, the complainants alleged violations of the lender’s standard on stakeholder engagement and information disclosure.
However, the Inspection Panel decided not to register the complaint after finding that one of its admissibility requirements had not been met, as the issues involving the alleged non-compliance had not first been brought to World Bank management’s attention.
The panel stressed that its decision did not prevent the complainants from filing another request for inspection concerning the project in the future, World Bank documents showed.
COVID-19 inflicted the largest pandemic-induced output gap in the region on the Philippines, driving the earlier surge in emergency financing. After borrowings fell sharply in the immediate post-pandemic years, the new record shows that recent lending has now surpassed even those crisis-era levels.
Filipino grocery shopping habits in 2026 reflect a more selective and value-driven approach, with consumers prioritizing essentials and cost-effective options amid rising prices, according to a USDA report. Food and beverage retail sales are projected to grow only modestly by 1.7 percent this year, a slowdown consistent with the lingering caution many households adopted after the economic shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The country’s food and beverage retail sales are projected to remain relatively flat this year as consumer spending grows more selective amid rising costs, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
In a report dated Oct. 2, the USDA said food and beverage retail sales are on track to total $123 billion this year, a modest 1.7 percent improvement from the $121 billion recorded last year.
The international agency noted that this year's muted growth forecast reflects the country’s subpar second-quarter economic expansion, which slowed to a post-pandemic low of 2.3 percent.
This reinforced softened household consumption and widening price sensitivity, especially as prices for key products remain elevated amid rising transportation costs, peso depreciation, and elevated inflation.
“Consumers are opting for cost-effective alternatives and focusing on essentials while others prioritize value over volume,” the USDA said.
Despite this year’s setback, the USDA said the country’s food and beverage retail sales are expected to grow five percent year-on-year to $129 billion in the coming year.
Apart from rising incomes and its large youth population, the growth is projected to come from the entry of new retailers, the expansion of modern retail chains, and the continued consumer shift toward e-commerce.
“Modern retailers are rapidly expanding to rural areas, offer variety of product options including imported products, and better value offers to consumers,” the USDA said.
“Some warehouse clubs, hypermarkets, supermarkets, and convenience stores are expanding into cities with high income communities offering more imported selections while offering lower-priced products,” it added.
In terms of modern retailers, the USDA said convenience stores are poised to achieve a seven-percent year-on-year growth to $2.67 billion this year from last year’s $2.49 billion.
Supermarkets are estimated to end the year with total sales amounting to $13.61 billion, slightly higher than the $13.57 billion recorded last year.
Hypermarkets, on the other hand, are projected to grow by nearly six percent to $5.6 billion within the year from $5.29 billion a year ago.
Further, sales from warehouse clubs are seen to grow by 11 percent to $2.07 billion this year from the previous year’s $1.86 billion.
The USDA said traditional food and beverage retailers remain the largest retail channel in the country, with sales estimated to expand to $39.47 billion this year from $39.02 billion last year.
Meanwhile, the agency said the Philippines remains the largest market for US exports in Southeast Asia, which shows that there is still growth potential for American food and beverage products.
Among the “best product prospects” for American exports include pork, poultry, and beef products, as well as milk, instant coffee, seasonings, frozen fries, butter, and cooking oil, among others.
The Philippines stood as the eleventh-largest market for US agricultural and related products in 2025, surpassing $3.4 billion, according to the USDA.
US exports accounted for 16 percent of the total agricultural exports to the Philippines, maintaining its status as the country’s largest single-country exporter.
The continued shift toward e-commerce and modern retail formats builds on the rapid digital adoption that accelerated during lockdowns, when online grocery purchases became a necessity for many. Even as sales are expected to rebound more strongly next year, the emphasis on value over volume shows how pandemic-era pressures have lasting effects on how Filipinos manage household food budgets.
