EPIDEMIC
OF FE AR
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FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
the drug might cause harm to some children,
the couple quickly dispatched a four-page
letter, signed by 11 peers, to the Philippines’
health secretary, Garin. In it, they also noted
that the duration of the vaccine’s protective
benefit was unknown. And they argued that a
three-dose vaccine would be hard to imple-
ment, and that the supply of the vaccine for
1 million children—at a cost of $70 million,
greater than the budget for all other vaccines
in the public program combined—was very
expensive.
The couple encouraged the government to
put its vaccination program on hold, at least
until the WHO weighed in. The Danses met
with Garin and a roomful of experts the fol-
lowing morning. Garin assured them that the
health department was well prepared for the
launch and that the WHO had told her that
its official recommendation was imminent.
The vaccination campaign began a week
later.
The Danses decided they couldn’t sit idly
by. They found Halstead’s paper and got in
touch. They felt certain that the curious (if not
statistically significant) “safety signals” in the
trial data were due to the theoretical phenom-
enon that Halstead had outlined, and that
Sanofi was willfully ignoring those signs.
They gave a handful of media interviews.
Then, in October 2016, the couple posted a
seven-minute video on Facebook, warning
parents that Dengvaxia could be harmful to
kids who hadn’t had dengue before. Colleagues
objected to the public way in which they were
undermining a government health campaign.
Sanofi—which had twice sent scientists to
review the clinical trial data with the couple—
was frustrated as well, firing off a letter to the
Danses to correct their “misleading communi-
cations.” The couple wouldn’t budge.
By then, the political atmosphere in the
Philippines had changed as well. That sum-
mer, Aquino’s party had lost the presidential
election to the controversial populist Rodrigo
Duterte. Garin was no longer health secretary,
and her successor had taken a suspicious view
of the Dengvaxia program. Congress and the
senate, meanwhile, launched an inquiry into
what some thought was the vaccination pro-
gram’s hasty implementation. But the trouble
wouldn’t really start until a year later, when
Sanofi released its Nov. 29, 2017, update on
Dengvaxia.
Thomas Triomphe was at his office in Sin-
gapore on the morning of Dec. 1 when that be-
came absolutely clear. His attention was called
to the television, which was showing a press
conference underway in the Philippines—the
government was suspending the vaccination
program.
The news came as a shock to Triomphe. His
team had been in touch with the Department
of Health before and after Sanofi’s Nov. 29
press statement. “There were no red signals,”
says Triomphe. “Of course, when you present
the data, it’s complicated,” he says. “It’s not
something you grasp in 20 seconds.” The regu-
lators wanted to understand what the finding
meant for the Philippines, and Triomphe says
the company invited an ongoing conversation.
But the story was no longer just a dialogue
between Sanofi and government health of-
ficials. It had exploded with a raw emotional
fury online.
Within days, senators were calling for inves-
tigations; #DenGate had popped up on Twit-
ter; the word “genocide” had been invoked;
political bloggers and distressed citizens alike
expressed outrage that the former government
had turned Filipino children into “lab rats” to
test an “experimental drug.” One widely fol-
lowed pundit asked, “How many will Aquino’s
Dengvaxia kill before Christmas 2018?” Presi-
dent Duterte’s spokesman, for his part, vowed
to go after those “responsible for this shame-
less public health scam.”
Physicians who offered levelheaded as-
sessments of the vaccine, meanwhile, were
mercilessly trolled. Edsel Salvana, an infectious
disease specialist who has no ties to Sanofi
and who had mixed feelings about the govern-
ment’s Dengvaxia campaign, went on CNN
Philippines to offer a measured take on the
very modest risk that children faced getting
the vaccine, compared with the benefit they’d
get. His Facebook page was promptly swarmed
by angry posters, some of whom called for his
kids to die. “It was terrible,” he says. “I was just
trying to call for sobriety.” He still gets attacked
online when Dengvaxia makes the news. “A lot
of us were blindsided by the vitriol.” He notes
that many of the trolls had political agendas
but not all of them—and it’s those people’s
responses he found most disheartening and
surprising: “People were willing to believe non-
doctors and non-specialists over doctors and
specialist scientists.”
On Dec. 4, Sanofi executives held a press
conference to try to calm the storm. It didn’t
work.
From Sanofi’s vantage point, the growing
outrage was all a big misunderstanding. The
company felt the whole mess came down to“It was
terrible,”
says a
doctor who
became a
target of
online anger
after trying
to calm
fears about
the vaccine.
“a lot of
us were
blindsided
by the
vitriol.”