PUBLIC Attorney’s Office chief Persida Rueda Acosta on Friday stood firm on her decision not to share with the Department of Health their forensic findings on the deaths of several children who had been inoculated with Dengvaxia vaccine.
In a television interview on ANC’s Headstart, Acosta said President Rodrigo Duterte never told or instructed her to share PAO’s findings with the DoH.
“The only thing I remember was that he [just] told me ‘thank you for your concern in humanity.’ It really boosted our morale when he said before not to destroy the youth of this nation,” she said.
Acosta reacted to Health Secretary Francisco Duque’s statement that PAO was not cooperating with him in the Dengvaxia probe, and that Acosta was not replying to his letters asking for a copy of PAO’s report that there was a pattern in the deaths of several children who had received the anti-dengue vaccine under the department’s mass immunization program for public elementary school pupils.
The PAO chief, for her part, said PAO was not cooperating with the Health department because of a conflict of interest.
She said Duque had treated the PAO shabbily when he declared that the study by a team from the UP-Philippine General Hospital was “more scientific” than theirs.
“Imagine announcing… another group, wherein Secretary [Vitaliano] Aguirre [III], my boss in the department, already issued a department order directing me and the entire PAO to help the victims,” she said.
“Why would you let doctors criticizing our office join us? It seems Doctor Duque has trust and confidence in them, and not on us. Why should we let our doctors be shabbily treated or be maligned?” she asked.
Acosta said no court could stop the PAO from conducting autopsies “because the owners of the cadavers are the parents.”
“It would be obstruction of justice. Justice and truth are interconnected. If there is no truth, there would be injustice,” she said.
She said it was lamentable that the Health department’s nationwide anti-dengue mass vaccination program was implemented “without consent, screening or even blood tests” from the subjects not only among the grade school pupils and their parents, but even policemen.
A Palace official, meanwhile, appealed to parents not to stop their children from being vaccinated against other diseases simply because there was a problem with the anti-dengue immunization campaign.
“Malacañang is calling out to all mothers and fathers, not all vaccines are bad…What’s worse is if we stop taking vaccines against sicknesses that we know are deadly,” said Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque.
Roque said the investigation into the connection between the Dengvaxia vaccine and deaths of children who were innoculated with it was still ongoing.
“There is not enough data to prove that Dengvaxia was the reason for the deaths,” he said in Filipino.
Meanwhile, Senator Richard Gordon said there was “apparent haste” in the decision of the Aquino administration to procure P3.5 billion worth of the dengue vaccine Dengvaxia before the end of President Aquino’s term in 2016.
“Very, very clear from the very beginning. You can see how this was planned. There are direct connections in the travel, in the letters, memos and you can see how this was being pushed,” Gordon, the chairman of the Senate Blue Ribbon committee, said in Filipino.
Gordon said then Health Secretary Janette Garin met with Sanofi officials in Paris in May 2015 to discuss the price of the vaccine.
President Benigno Aquino III, Garin and other top officials then received Sanofi Pasteur officials who paid him a courtesy call when he was in France for the UN Conference on Climate Change on Dec. 1, 2015.
The deal was approved swiftly, on Dec. 22, Gordon said.
Also on Thursday, Senator JV Ejercito said Aguirre’s suggestion to tapping a third-party pathologist to examine the bodies of children who died after being given Dengvaxia would erase any doubts on ongoing investigations conducted by the PAO and the Health department.