First of all, the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital team of experts didn’t state that 14 children died as a direct result of vaccination with Dengvaxia. At the same time, it didn’t say that all of the kids died because the controversial vaccine was entirely benign, either.
What the expert panel said was that two out of the 14 children died of apparent “vaccine failure” and that three, including the two, died of “dengue shock syndrome.” This fact by no means absolved Dengvaxia, its makers and the people who enabled its use, as the people calling for the probe to shut down are telling us.
So forgive me if I fail to see why a group of doctors, academicians and public health experts, including two former health secretaries, are spinning the UP-PGH story into something entirely unintended and unrecognizable: that alleged untrained non-experts, to include the Public Attorney’s Office, should immediately stop looking into the reported Dengvaxia deaths.
This is a conclusion drawn from the experts’ report that is as breathtaking as it is false. And it attempts to shut down the only official investigation that cannot be accused of being biased in favor of the three actors in this sordid drama from the very beginning: Sanofi, the French pharma giant that created Dengvaxia; the previous administration and present and current public health officials, who rushed the rollout of the massive immunization program despite warnings from its own experts; and the sector of the medical community that has been compromised by its unimpeded use of the revolving door that allows them to shift seamlessly from private practice, the state health service and the pharmaceutical companies.
Why can’t the doctors led by ex-Health secretaries Manuel Dayrit and Esperanza Cabral, instead of repurposing the UP-PGH report, ask instead that PAO continue its investigation—or allow anyone else with a stake in the issue to do so, for that matter? And why, if they think that the real experts have already spoken, can’t they trust that their conclusion will stand up to anyone’s review, if they think that it’s really bulletproof?
And why can’t Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque stop himself from backing the call to shut down the PAO investigation, when he is part of the same government that ordered it in the first place? Does Roque’s unrelenting pursuit of then-Health secretary Paulyn Ubial, who was eventually “convinced” to expand the rollout of the Dengvaxia program to a whole new region—Central Visayas—have anything to do with the spokesman’s declaration that everyone can now sleep soundly because the vaccine is safe?
I don’t think so. What this sounds like to me is that the long-reported coverup is proceeding as planned —and that if non-experts don’t keep up the pressure, then in the end, as one prominent expert once said, only the aedes aegypti mosquitoes are really to blame for the dengue deaths.
Three out of 14 (or even two out of 14) is truly scary, when you consider that 830,000 children were given the Dengvaxia vaccine at the end of the term of Noynoy Aquino. And you only need arithmetic, not a public health expert’s advanced degrees, to do the terrifying math.
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Some people have accused me of unfairly putting down the University of Santo Tomas while turning a blind eye to the failings of my own school, the University of the Philippines. Well, UP didn’t disappoint, getting back into the headlines immediately after UST grabbed the limelight by getting all worked up about an award given to Mocha Uson while remaining silent about the Senate recommendation calling for the disbarment of its law school dean, Nilo Divina.
It was Duterte to put UP in the news, when he urged students there to keep on holding walkouts, actions that he said would allow him to give the coveted slots in the state university to “bright” lumads. The activists in UP responded by saying that they intend to keep doing what they’re doing.
Now, I have no problem with students joining all the protest actions they want. I was a student in Diliman once and I understand the attraction offered by anti-government protests to smart, idealistic young people encouraged to question everything.
But the current crop of activists in UP—who are by no means representative of the majority of the student population—is also guilty of the hypocrisy that bedevils the anti-Uson faction in Catholic UST. And UP can’t even claim to be following the diktats of religion like the young people over at España.
What I mean is, the current UP protesters are not being guided by the teachings of some coherent and world-changing ideology but are instead being gamed by those pushing a discredited and morally bankrupt partisan political movement. And they don’t even know that they’re being played, even if they should be smart enough to realize that.
Why, for instance, do the UP protesters never hold rallies demanding that those who perpetrated the Dengvaxia scandal be held accountable? Why didn’t they ever protest the death of 44 elite commandos in what became known as the Mamasapano Masacre?
For crying out loud, why can’t UP’s activists even find the energy to rail against the building of a huge P4 million steel barricade to protect Noynoy Aquino from protesters just like them from coming near his home on Times Street? Instead they scream “Ibagsak ang rehimeng US-Duterte,” without even questioning the stupidity of this claim.
The UST activists are at least proud to be yellow, that school’s colors. Those in UP, which stole its maroon and green livery from Harvard, is even more hypocritical.