Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto was in the middle of a smooth-sailing and quite serious online forum with the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP) on Wednesday when a hilarious thing happened.
While the young mayor was answering a question during the Zoom video-call about what Pasig will do in case of a total lockdown, an image of a naked man suddenly appeared.
“Definitely, we will not shut down establishments that are selling food and other necessary supplies,” Mayor Vico was saying just before the “inappropriate” photo got flashed on the screen.
The split-second, surprising appearance of the shirtless guy elicited an awkward pause, a puzzled look then a nervous laugh from the mayor, before he proceeded to talk more about the ECQ measures in his city.
“Mas magiging magulo yun. That will cause a lot of social unrest and we can’t have people starving in their homes. So, yes, we will continue to be strict in implementing stay at home, if you’re not doing anything important, if you’re not buying food, you have to stay at home. And we have been ramping up security measures, increasing checkpoints and doing other things to be stricter with this,” Mayor Vico further said.
According to netizens, a forum participant must have used the Zoom feature that allows users to pick virtual backgrounds to spice up and supplant otherwise boring “work-from-home” settings during video calls.
As of writing, FOCAP has yet to provide an explanation or statement on the matter.
Nevertheless, the video interview, which went live on Facebook Wednesday morning, has since generated at least 100,000 views, nearly 4,000 reactions and over 1,800 shares.
You can check out the full interview (with the epic gaffe at 14:50) in the video below.
By Wednesday evening, a video clip from the FOCAP interview was circulated on social media that “Vico Sotto” trended on Twitter as netizens reacted on the mayor’s reaction.
