LABOR Secretary Silvestre Bello 3rd found himself in hot water earlier this week when it was disclosed during a Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) online briefing that he had asked the governments of the United Kingdom and Germany to provide the Philippines with Covid-19 vaccines in exchange for deploying more Filipino health care workers to those countries.

As Alice Visperas, DoLE international labor affairs bureau director, explained in the briefing, Bello had informed the two governments that the Philippines “was considering” giving them an exemption from an existing cap on the number of health care workers that could be deployed if the agency’s requests for additional vaccines as well as renewal of some bilateral agreements guaranteeing protections for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) were granted.