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FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
HE SCENE IS QUIET, EERILY SO.
A camera moves over a
motionless child—dressed
in church clothes, laid out
on a metal table—and then
pans over a huddle of griev-
ing family members. There
is another video just like it,
and another, and another—
an entire series that, col-
lectively, offers a startling
amount of footage showing
children lying dead in a
morgue in the Philippines.
Two stoic-looking women figure prominently
in the videos. One of them, Annie Gabito, has
a stern and commanding presence. The other,
Persida Acosta, is typically at the center of the
scene. Acosta, the chief public attorney of the
Philippines, offers a word or hand to the grief-
stricken family and, in one instance, with a look of
serious inquiry prods the child’s lifeless body.
of vaccination and a sleeve or two of photo-
graphs, before-and-after-inoculation pictures
that showed their kids healthy (fourth grade
graduation, family photos, a selfie with a pet
cat) and sick (swollen body parts or teth-
ered to a hospital bed and an IV drip). A few
volunteered photos from their child’s au-
topsy, an image of a brain or internal organs,
which they said showed the telltale signs of
Dengvaxia’s horrific effects.
Sumachen Dominguez, a lead organizer of
the group, told me, “Nobody is listening to our
anguish.”
And there is some truth to that now. Last
year, the story of the Dengvaxia Victims
was the stuff of government hearings and
wall-to-wall TV coverage—a made-for-the-
movies narrative about dozens upon dozens of
schoolkids dying, like sacrificial guinea pigs,
as the Philippine government prematurely
pushed its dengue immunization drive. There
was even a fitting corporate villain—a foreign
pharmaceutical giant, with $42 billion in an-
nual revenue, that appeared to confess that its
vaccine had a serious flaw.
But while the Philippine news media and
most of the politicians involved have moved
on, the Dengvaxia controversy continues
to have a profound and lasting impact. A
handful of Sanofi executives and employees
have been charged with “reckless imprudence
resulting in homicide,” as have numerous Fili-
pino government health officers and a couple
of scientific researchers, for their alleged roles
in the Dengvaxia immunization program.
Those trials are planned for next year.
For Sanofi, it has been devastating finan-
cially as well. Right up through Dengvaxia’s
2016 launch, the Paris–based company, one
of the premier vaccine makers in the world,
had projected booming sales and a major win
in terms of global goodwill. It is struggling
to sell Dengvaxia anywhere now—despite its
regulatory approval in the U.S., the EU, and
an additional 20 countries—and the vaccine’s
inclusion on the World Health Organiza-
tion’s Essential Medicines List. (Sanofi took
a $186 million write-down on Dengvaxia in
2017, but the total loss—counting everything
the company spent on development and infra-
structure, plus vanishing sales and damage to
its reputation—is likely several times that.)
Much worse is the damage that has been
done to public confidence in vaccines: In the
Philippines, where immunization coverage
was already dangerously low, the Dengvaxia
scare caused vaccination rates to fall even fur-Broadcast live on Facebook over the past
two years, the videos have together been
viewed millions of times. They were filmed
after a forensic team assembled by the public
attorney’s office—rather than by the govern-
ment’s regular medical examiners—conducted
autopsies of the children as part of its investi-
gation into the deaths of 148 children.
Citing these autopsy results, Acosta and the
family members all point to the same culprit
for the children’s deaths: Dengvaxia, made by
French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, the first
and only vaccine approved to protect against
the dengue virus, which infects an estimated
390 million people around the world each year.
I met the parents of 18 of these children this
July. They had come from all over the chaotic,
gridlocked megacity of Manila one Saturday
to the modest two-story home of Gabito, who
works unpaid for a Filipino nonprofit called
Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption and
who now spends much of her time focusing on
the families of the 148 dead children she calls
the “Dengvaxia Victims.”
While Gabito made lunch, I sat at a table
in the upstairs kitchen as parents filed up,
one by one, to share their stories. They each
wore a T-shirt with a picture of their deceased
child framed by name and the Dengvaxia
Victim number assigned to them by Gabito’s
organization. Many of them came with their
child’s Dengvaxia card, documenting the dates^