Dengvaxia is the name of a vaccine against dengue fever. It is also the name of a corruption scandal in the Philippines that involved the deaths of children inoculated with the vaccine.
Manufactured by the Western company Sanofi, Dengvaxia was given to close to a million Filipino children. The vaccine is supposed to be given only to those who have already contracted dengue fever because trials showed that giving the vaccine to children who had not yet been infected actually worsened outcomes.
In the Philippines, schoolchildren were given the vaccine regardless of their serostatus. This means hundreds of thousands of seronegative children were needlessly inoculated and put at risk of death. It is estimated that 14 deaths may be linked to Dengvaxia.
The reason for mandating Dengvaxia for schoolchildren is widely attributed to corruption in the yellow Noynoy Aquino administration that was in power before Rodrigo Duterte was democratically elected president. If Duterte hadn’t become president, that scandal would have been quietly swept under the rug with no action taken, as was common in the past during the Western-allied Aquino regimes.
In 2018, a lawsuit was finally filed against Noynoy Aquino and several members of his administration for their role in the Dengvaxia scandal.
