Dengue Vaccine Fiasco Caused the Death of Over 600 Children in the Philippines After Rushed Rollout
In 2016, the Philippine FDA greenlighted a new vaccine against dengue fever for children based on research funded by the vaccine’s manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur. According to the 2014 paper in The Lancet, a study among more than 10,000 children in five Asian countries that showed Dengvaxia worked and had a good safety profile.
But, it was too soon to tell. Within weeks of the vaccines rollout, more and more vaccinated children would die from ‘immune enhancement’, also known as Antibody Dependent Enhancement.
Dengue fever is a mosquito-born viral disease that occurs in tropical areas that causes flu-like symptoms. The disease is generally mild in younger children (as are most infections) and can be moderate to severe in older kids, adults and people who had a previous infection.
The dengue virus is peculiar: A first infection is rarely fatal, but a second one with a different virus type can lead to much more serious disease, because of what is called antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), in which the immune response to the first virus amplifies the effect of the second type.
We saw this same Antibody Dependent Enhancement with prior attempts at coronavirus vaccines, and indeed, could still see this phenomenon with the current vaccines against SARS-Cov-2.
In April 2016, the Philippines implemented a $67 million vaccine program with Sanofi Pasteur’s vaccine Dengvaxia. The country began vaccinating 9 and 10 year old school children in highly endemic areas of the country, where at least 70% of 9-year-old children had previously been infected with dengue.
The vaccine Dengvaxia consists of an attenuated yellow fever virus that expresses genes of each of the four types of dengue virus.
But soon reports of very sick children started coming in. After nearly 830,000 children got the first dose, reports of “enhanced disease” started occurring in recently vaccinated children.
For children who had not been exposed to dengue prior to being vaccinated, or who came in contact with dengue for the first time after being vaccinated, the vaccine appeared to worsen the disease and increased the risk of a deadly complication called ‘plasma leakage syndrome’, in which blood vessels start to leak the yellow fluid of the blood.
The disease occurs very rapidly, just in a matter of a few hours, and there’s nothing on the outside of the body to signify the person is leaking fluid on the inside.
By November 2017, the school-based vaccination program was finally suspended, and the vaccine was eventually recalled.
Sanofi disclosed in 2017 that Dengvaxia could worsen symptoms for people not previously infected by the dengue virus. They did not disclose this information prior, which is criminal negligence.
The Denguevax trials were not well designed; if the researchers had looked separately at outcomes for children who did and didn’t have dengue before the shot, they would have identified the ADE risk.
According to French pharmaceutical giant, Sanofi Pasteur, none of the deaths have been scientifically proven to be connected to the vaccine.
Lawsuits have been filed against Rose Capeding, 63, former head of the dengue department of the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, Capeding’s former boss, former RITM head Socorro Lupisan; former Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Janette Garin; other officials at DOH and the Philippines Food and Drug Administration (FDA); and current and former officials of Sanofi Pasteur, the French company producing the shots.
The first of eight criminal cases—which could be consolidated—are now pending in five courts throughout the northern island of Luzon, where the vaccination campaign took place.
As of August 2019, over 600 children who received the dengue vaccine have died of complications of the vaccine.
