The Public Attorney’s Office on Sunday praised the decision of the Justice department indicting former Health secretary Janette Garin and other health officials over the deaths of children linked to the controversial Dengvaxia vaccine during the previous administration.
PAO chief Persida Rueda-Acosta said they saw the findings on Garin and company’s criminal liability as a vindication of the agency’s pursuit of cases for the victims and their families.
Acosta said she believed that the department’s filing of reckless imprudence resulting in homicide had also disproved the insinuations of Garin and Health Secretary Francisco Duque III that the PAO should be blamed for the public’s vaccine scare that supposedly led to the measles outbreak.
“We feel vindicated by the findings of the DOJ. Our tireless efforts for the families of the victims have paid off,” Acosta said.
“This is proof that we did not create the vaccine scare of measles outbreak. It was precisely this criminal liability of Garin, as established in the preliminary investigation of the DOJ, that tainted the public’s trust in vaccines.
“It was this indiscriminate mass vaccination and under-distribution of safe vaccines that caused the alleged scare and outbreak.”
Acosta said she was confident the department’s prosecutors would be able to establish the guilt of the accused in court, citing the evidence gathered by her office.
She disputed Garin’s claim that the direct link of the Dengvaxia vaccine to the deaths of its recipients had not been scientifically established, which could be the basis for the dismissal of the cases in courts.
“That’s not true. There is a medical link and we were able to establish that in the DOJ preliminary investigation,” Acosta said.
“A study by the RITM [Research Institute for Tropical Medicine] showed that four deaths were caused by Dengvaxia and 62 percent of the serious adverse effects were caused by the vaccine.
“They already knew the high risks in conducting the mass immunization of Dengvaxia without blood tests and screening and yet they still proceeded with it.”
However, Acosta did not agree with the Justice department’s dismissal of the charges against Duque and other health officials and the executives of Zuellig Pharma.
“We will file a partial motion for reconsideration of the DOJ resolution with respect to the findings on Duque and Zuellig officials,” Acosta said.
“There were over 10 deaths during the term of Duque when he pursued the immunization program in November 2017. He deliberately ignored the documented warnings of the Filipino experts as early as March 2016.”
The DOJ resolution released last week, however, only covered eight cases in the first batch of the Dengvaxia cases filed so far by the PAO.
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The department is expected to release another resolution on the second batch of cases involving eight more deaths, while it is still conducting hearings on 13 other cases.
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In the resolution by the investigating panel led by Senior Assistant State Prosecutor Maria Emilia Victorio, the DOJ found probable cause in the complaints filed by the PAO and approved the indictment of Garin and nine other Health officials for eight counts of reckless imprudence resulting in homicide.