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FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
research community—the one he practically
nursed from birth—and Sanofi especially
for failing to acknowledge Dengvaxia’s flaws
sooner and for not doing enough to help
the Philippines manage the vaccine scare
and its aftermath. “It wasn’t purposeful, it
wasn’t done with any malice,” he says, “but we
shouldn’t just stand by and say, ‘Gosh, isn’t
this too bad?’ ”
#DenGate Goes Viral
IT WAS 1:20 A.M. when Antonio Dans, a pro-
fessor at the University of the Philippines’
College of Medicine, saw Sanofi’s Nov. 29,
2017, press release. He read the statement and
promptly punched out a Facebook post, tag-
ging 25 colleagues:
Read this news alert from Sanofi. =(
Our heart bleeds for more than 600,000
Filipino children who received dengue vaccine
without assessment for prior infection.
Sanofi, WHO, DOH—what happens to them
now???
The post was soon shared more than a
thousand times, and in the wee hours of
Nov. 30 it generated a number of com-
ments and red-faced emojis. He and his wife,
Leonila, who also teaches at UP, started a
separate Facebook page, “Health Care Geeks,”
to handle Dengvaxia-related questions and
commentary a few weeks later.
Many in the Filipino scientific community—
including some of Sanofi’s local leaders—point
to the Danses’ dramatic social media post as
one of the Dengvaxia saga’s igniting sparks. It
pinged around the social media feeds of the
Filipino medical community.
The couple were already highly visible
and controversial critics of the country’s
Dengvaxia program and had been raising
questions about the Sanofi vaccine even be-
fore the country’s immunization drive began.
A number of medical colleagues now refer to
them as “anti-vaxxers.”
The Danses, both of whom are clinical
epidemiologists, physicians, and public health
advocates, got concerned after reading about
the soon-to-launch immunization program
in the newspaper. They then turned to the
analysis of the dengue vaccine trials in the
New England Journal of Medicine. WorriedAntonio and Leo-
nila Dans at their
home in Manila.
The couple, both
of whom are phy-
sicians and public
health advo-
cates, have been
outspoken critics
of the Dengvaxia
immunization
program.