AMID the health scare caused by a major immunization program approved by the previous administration, senators from the former ruling Liberal Party have urged the government to be fair and impartial in its investigation of the P3.5 -billion deal to buy a new anti-dengue vaccine from the French company Sanofi.
The government last week suspended the world’s first public immunization program for dengue, after the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi warned that the Dengvaxia vaccine could worsen symptoms of people who had not previously been infected.
More than 733,000 schoolchildren have already received the vaccine, causing fear and concern among their parents.
“We support calls for investigation of this issue as thousands of children’s lives are at stake here. We must ensure that the investigation will not be selective and will cover all periods of implementation of the program,” said Liberal Party president Senator Francis Pangilinan.
Pangilinan pointed out that the program was implemented by the Department of Health during the last year of the Aquino administration and continued by the Duterte administration, upon the recommendation of the new DoH leadership.
If the implications were not so serious, the LP president’s talk of an impartial investigation would be laughable, given the previous administration’s penchant for selective justice.
Also, while it is true that the new Health department leadership had agreed to continue with the immunization program, it was officials from the previous administration who signed off on the P3.5 billion deal to buy the vaccines from Sanofi, just weeks after then President Benigno Aquino III visited France and met with the pharmaceutical company’s executives. If the Sanofi contract was a midnight deal, it was not the officials of the present administration that benefited from it.
The truth of the matter is that the dengue vaccine mess is just yet another example of the LP chickens coming home to roost.
Over his six-year term, President Aquino and his Liberal Party presided over the decline of the country’s agricultural production by failing to make the right investments and doing nothing to stem the flood of smuggled produce. In that same time, Mr. Aquino and the Liberals, by their inefficiency and corruption, also allowed the deterioration of the public transport system to a point where commuter trains are no longer safe. Mr. Aquino and his fellow Liberals have also engendered ineptitude, inefficiency and corruption in the bureaucracy to a point where the government charges the public for goods—such as license plates and drivers licenses—but fails to deliver them after more than a year.
If a truly impartial investigation were conducted on all these crimes, the jails would be overflowing with former LP officials who simply didn’t do their jobs.