“FILIPINOS are no [guinea] pigs!”
That could be the cry at the moment. Admittedly, AstraZeneca has never been tested yet on any people on earth. (Actually, AstraZeneca reported conducting trials of its coronavirus vaccine on 20,000 volunteers around the world. — Ed.) Contracting it now by the Philippine government can only amount to an evil experiment for turning Filipinos into guinea pigs one more time.
Into the last year of the President Benigno Aquino 3rd administration, dengue was claiming lives of Filipino children in their multitudes. On Dec. 1, 2015, Aquino appeared in earnest about solving the epidemic (eventually clarified in court cases as upon the advice then-Health secretary Janette Garin) by going to Paris to discuss a deal with Sanofi Pasteur Inc., the manufacturer of Dengvaxia, for the use of the vaccine on Filipino children — the first in Asia to be so vaccinated.
Today, therefore, five years ago was a day of infamy.
That was the day a Philippine president sent Filipino children down the road to perdition. Four months thereafter began the government school-based program of injecting Dengvaxia into Grade 4 schoolchildren all over the land, beginning with those in Metro Manila, Central Luzon and Calabarzon.
Reportedly, the program would eventually cost P3.5 billion, but that amount can only come up to a pittance compared with the cost in terms of human lives. Seven hundred thousand children received initial doses of the vaccine and, into the first year of the succeeding Duterte administration, there was widespread occurrence of deaths from dengue among children who were injected with Dengvaxia.
Then the announcement from Sanofi in 2017 that the vaccine was not to be used on children who had not had dengue fever yet, the implication being that dengue-naïve patients are actually rendered fatally susceptible to the virus when injected with Dengvaxia.
For those 700,000 Filipino children takers of Dengvaxia, that warning came too late. Hundreds had already died.
It is a good thing that the Public Attorney’s Office headed by Persida Acosta has taken the cudgels for the Dengvaxia victims, filing charges of reckless imprudence resulting in homicide against Garin and Sanofi officials for some of those Dengvaxia deaths. The latest development is that last November 27, a Quezon City Regional Trial Court issued arrest warrants for Garin and the Sanofi officials in connection with those cases.
Now certain aspects about Dengvaxia strikes me clearly.
One, it has, as reports go, taken Sanofi 20 years to develop the vaccine. But from records of actual occurrences, we can see that epidemics take place in intervals of shorter periods, i.e., the severe acute respiratory syndrome (2002 to 2004), Middle East respiratory syndrome (2012 to 2015) and H1N1 (2009 to 2010) — that is, talking about epidemics of recent times. Before all these was the Spanish flu pandemic from 1918 to 1919.
This should show that viruses that attack man vary in characteristics in duration of periods much shorter than 20 years, such that before a vaccine that takes 20 years to develop becomes effective, an entirely new virus comes into play, requiring an entirely new version of vaccine quite different from that developed 20 years ago. Apply that 20-year-old vaccine to a novel virus, and you are not hitting any target. And that’s what happened with Dengvaxia when applied in the Philippines. Children, despite being injected with anti-dengue vaccine, went on to contract that very disease leading to their demise.
After the Philippine experience, Sanofi modified Dengvaxia and, ultimately, made it acceptable to the United States, the European Union and elsewhere in the world.
The second striking aspect about the Dengvaxia has been that there is no end to viral attacks. Once the dengue virus disappeared, next came the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), against which the whole world is now in frenzy searching a cure for. Next thing we know, once we do start administering AstraZeneca, another strain of virus comes attacking, rendering the vaccine useless.
The worst aspect about Dengvaxia is the dastardly unabashed human greed that attended its forcible injection into innocent children. There is evidence that the manufacturers as well as Philippine health officials were not really sure about the efficacy of the vaccine. Still they proceeded to administer it to the Filipino children with no other intent than to gain profit.
I have learned from some readings that the human body is composed of 10 times more bacterial cells than human ones, with trillions of such bacteria actually occupying an area the size of the point of a pin or the period of a sentence. Imagine those trillions replete all over your body — imagine how infinitesimal number of viruses you actually are.
All of a sudden I float in a universe where I am not distinguishable at all from the other variants and strains and species of viruses that float there along with me.
I remember Mentong expressing to me his own view on the issue.
“I believe Covid-19 has been there in our body from the beginning,” he said. “It is only now that it has been triggered to come out into the open.”
I take that view hook, line and sinker.
One reading teaches me that viruses go in and out of the human body in a ceaseless interplay of symbiosis, meaning one benefiting from the other. When we get fever or have inflammation in our tissues, it is an indication that the protective cells of our blood are fighting off an attack of a negative virus.
In other words, the body is naturally endowed with a protective mechanism by which to counter any viral attacks, be it dengue, flu or whatever. You only need to bolster that mechanism with some intervention when the natural immune system of the body gets a hard time repelling the attack of negative viruses — like the good old “suob, sukob.”
But let it be clear, I am not here prescribing any form of medication. What I am saying is that viruses, as per the assessments by microbial experts, have a natural way of neutralizing one another’s negative effects for one another’s mutual benefit, if I may put it that way.
As I wrote in my past column, “And though some microbes make us sick and even kill us, in the long run they have a shared interest in our survival. For these tiny invaders, a dead host is a dead end.”
Might we not just let nature go its way?
And that proposition goes, too, for the current fuss over having to discover a cure for Covid-19.
Not unless the novel coronavirus is, true to its name, really so novel that nothing like it is similar to any past natural pathogen that hit humanity, either in terms of DNA, RNA structure or genomes.
In which case, woe to all of us.
Vaccines work according to laws of nature, involving injection of a weakened live virus into the body in order to make our natural immune system beat it in a fight and by that acquire immunity from its real attack. But if a bastardizing of nature takes place whereby a man-made pathogen attacks the body, there is no way a vaccine can go this natural way of repelling the attack, because the attack does not conform to procedure discernible by the body’s natural immune system.
Where, in this case, does AstraZeneca figure if not in just making money out of man’s misfortune?