Melinda Colite shook with rage as she clutched a photograph of her grandson, who she said died after getting an dengue fever vaccine at the heart of a bitter scandal in the Philippines.
While Dengvaxia’s manufacturer, Sanofi, has said unequivocally that its world-first vaccination is safe, Philippine authorities disagree publicly over whether it could have contributed to children’s deaths.
The resulting confusion has prompted a dangerous plunge in vaccination rates in the Philippines for other diseases.
Photo: AFP
It has also added to a swirling political battle, fanned by bloggers who back Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and have an audience of millions on Facebook.
“The blame game has taken over the main issue,” Ateneo de Manila University School of Government dean Ronald Mendoza told reporters. “It may be doing damage to public health rather than protecting it.”
Health authorities have said child vaccination rates against illnesses such as measles have dropped by as much as 25 percentage points over the past year as public anger and mistrust has grown in the Dengvaxia case.
Several measles outbreaks have struck the nation, claiming at least 13 lives, since the controversy began.
The trouble started last year, shortly after the Philippines gave Dengvaxia to about 837,000 students as part of a public immunization campaign.
Sanofi hailed the vaccine as a breakthrough in combating dengue, which kills hundreds in the Philippines every year, mostly children.
However, the company set off a panic in November last year, when it said a new analysis showed that the vaccine could lead to more severe symptoms for people who had not previously been infected with dengue.
It prompted Manila to halt the campaign and left hundreds of thousands of terrified parents wondering if their children were at risk.
Sanofi has reiterated that the vaccine is safe, last month saying in a statement: “No causal-related deaths were reported in 15 countries after clinical trials conducted for more than a decade with 40,000 subjects involved.”
“There continues to be no evidence that any deaths have been causally linked to our vaccine,” it added.
However, that has not stopped allegations emerging of vaccinated children dying of supercharged cases of dengue after getting Dengvaxia.
“It could not have been anything else. He started complaining of frequent body aches after his third injection,” 55-year-old Colite said of her 12-year-old grandson Zandro.
As of last week, 65 deaths have been reported to authorities and are under investigation, the Philippine Department of Health said.
Different branches of the Philippine government have openly disagreed about potential risks of the vaccine, leading to confusion for the public.
“We cannot conclude at this point that Dengvaxia directly caused the deaths,” Philippine Secretary of Health Francisco Duque told lawmakers in February, referring to the cases of 14 children who received the vaccine.
However, after additional potential cases emerged, the government assigned the Philippine Public Attorney’s Office, which represents the poor, to take up the matter.
Its chief lawyer, Persida Acosta, told lawmakers in February: “They [death certificates] said they were [killed by] acute respiratory arrest, encephalitis, appendicitis, septic shock. All of those are mimics of severe dengue.”
Certainty about the children’s cause of death might remain clouded, because postmortem diagnosis of dengue can be a tricky process.
The most accurate and widely used way of testing, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), relies on genetic material that degrades quickly after a person dies, especially in warm climates like the Philippines, virus expert Benjamin Neuman told reporters.
“The challenge of determining a cause of death by RT-PCR can swiftly move from difficult to impossible,” Neuman said.
It is also unclear if this type of testing has been used in the cases under investigation.
Supporters of the president have been eager to assign blame for the Dengvaxia scandal to former Philippine president Benigno Aquino III, who has criticized Duterte’s deadly crackdown on illegal narcotics.
Although the vaccination campaign was approved and launched under Aquino’s administration, it continued for a time under Duterte.
Well-known blogs have posted entries calling for Aquino to be jailed and questioned whether the vaccine is a “time bomb.”
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