You could spread disease. They made a mockery of
the whole thing.” (As a former administrator at a
hospital that procured Dengvaxia for the govern-
ment immunization drive, Lo has been charged
by the PAO with reckless imprudence resulting in
homicide; he is fighting the charges.)
Lo has reviewed 33 of PAO’s forensic reports—all of which, he says, cited
viscero- and neurotropic-like disease as causes of death, despite clinical
notes, death certificates, and hospital pathology reports indicating the child
in question died of natural causes. The Philippine Society of Pathologists
has also challenged PAO’s findings, as have the Danses. Antonio Dans notes
that the PAO’s forensic investigators have based their conclusions all on
two basic observations—organ swelling and hemorrhaging. “Those simple
things you can find in almost every child who dies,” says Dans.
The parents whose children were autopsied by the PAO offered radically
different descriptions of their sicknesses and deaths. For some, the events
had been sudden; in other cases, multiple hospital stays and surgical pro-
cedures were involved. Some had died weeks after vaccination, and others
years. What the stories had in common was a list of general symptoms—fe-
ver, headaches, cough, dizziness, UTIs, irritability, fatigue, swollen limbs.
And also a shared belief that before Dengvaxia, their child was healthy and
normal—and after, he or she had died.
Many of the parents didn’t initially suspect Dengvaxia as the cause of the
child’s death or illness but reached that conclusion after talking to some-
one—the kid’s teacher, a bystander at the funeral, a nurse at the hospital,
who then connected them with the Dengvaxia Victims Facebook group.
It had never made sense to these parents that their once healthy children
were dead, and after hearing about other kids, it made more sense that it
had been Dengvaxia than what was diagnosed or written on the death cer-
tificate: leptospirosis, rabies, leukemia, an enlarged heart, and so on.
“One death is one too many”
IN MARCH, the Filipino government indicted a wide range of individuals for
their alleged roles in the so-called Dengvaxia deaths. They included former
Health Secretary Garin and six Sanofi employees, but also a cast of more
peripheral figures—Julius Lecciones, executive director of the Philippine
Children’s Medical Center, which procured the vaccine; Rose Capeding, the
researcher who investigated Sanofi’s dengue trial in the Philippines; and a
handful of career employees at DOH. They were all charged with “reckless
imprudence resulting in homicide,” which is punishable by up to six years
in prison. All of the accused deny any guilt. Sanofi says it strongly disagrees
with the DOJ’s findings and it is “vigorously defending” its employees.
When I spoke with some of the defendants in July, they were having a hard
time. Many had left their jobs and were struggling to reconcile their situa-
tion with the fact that they had spent their lives serving the public. Facing a
trial was expensive and stressful; it also made them public targets. One of the
accused, Lyndon Lee Sy, a former Health Department spokesperson, died of
a heart attack in September; his family and friends blame the weight of the
case. Others noted the prosecution of researchers set a chilling precedent.
Richard Anthony Fadullon, the senior deputy state prosecutor for the De-
partment of Justice, told Fortune that linking the deaths to the vaccine and
the administration’s “rushed” implementation will be difficult. The PAO’s
methods and findings, he admits, may complicate his efforts. But he says
prosecuting the cases filed by the PAO is a worthy pursuit. “We cannot close
our eyes to the deaths that happened,” said Fadullon. “One death is one too
many. It matters a lot to the family, and it matters a lot to government.”
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