Health Secretary Francisco Duque III on Saturday said he supports the proposal to hire a third-party pathologist from abroad to examine the bodies of children who died supposedly because of the dengue vaccine Dengvaxia.
Duque followed President Rodrigo Duterte, who expressed the same idea after meeting with Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II, Public Attorney’s Office chief Persida Acosta, and Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission chairman Dante Jimenez in Malacañang on Friday.
“That [proposal] should be supported. For us, what’s important is the truth surfaces clearly, and we learn all the reasons why these deaths happened,” the Health secretary told radio dzBB.
Duque said he was not present during the President’s meeting with the three officials, and sought to clarify Duterte’s directives and confirm the proposal to hire foreign pathologists.
“Probably on Monday I’ll learn the real score, because I will be with the President, and hear from himself what his orders are regarding this third party,” he said in the radio interview.
In a statement, the DoH also said it wants to partner with the World Health Organization, which has an office in Manila, in probing future “adverse events” related to Dengvaxia.
Health Undersecretary Eric Domingo said the department wants the WHO to be part of an expert panel together with the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital.
“We are seeking guidance from the WHO so we can continue the process in investigating the adverse effects of Dengvaxia. We want to work with them,” Domingo said.
Duque said the DoH already turned over the findings of the UP-PGH’s Dengue Investigative Task Force to the Department of Justice, saying they wanted to cooperate with the probe instead of pointing fingers.
The Health secretary said he saw television reports that proposed an independent investigating body, which he noted were unclear because there were other offices investigating the vaccine issue like the DoJ, the National Bureau of Investigation and PAO.
Previously, Duque said the PAO was not cooperating with the Department of Health’s investigation into deaths linked to the use of Dengvaxia, the vaccine made by French drugmaker Sanofi that the government under the previous Aquino administration bought for P3.5 billion to use in a school-based dengue immunization program.
Acosta on Friday defended her decision not to share PAO’s forensic findings with the DoH, saying there was a conflict of interest and that the President, after their meeting, never told her to do so.
The DoH asked the UP-PGH to conduct its own investigation after the PAO conducted several autopsies on the victims and linked the deaths to Dengvaxia.