Aquino not yet off the hook – Richard Gordon

MANILA, Philippines — While Benigno Aquino III may not have been involved in any alleged irregularity in the P3.5-billion purchase of dengue vaccines in 2015, Sen. Richard Gordon believes the former president and his officials are not yet off the hook.

“I cannot exculpate him,” Gordon said yesterday, reiterating that the purchase of Dengvaxia as well as its registration with the Food and Drug Administration was “done very, very fast,” within less than two months.

Gordon chairs the Senate Blue Ribbon committee that is conducting an inquiry jointly with the committee on health into the previous administration’s purchase of three million doses of the vaccine that its maker – French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur – said may pose life-threatening risks to some.

Aquino testified that in 2010 then health secretary Enrique Ona raised alarm over the rapid rise in dengue cases while vaccines were still being developed.

By 2015, Dengvaxia was commercially available and there were no adverse reports from Sanofi at the time. 

He said he was faced with the choice of either acting quickly or waiting for the vaccine to be totally proven safe, which could take several more months, and let life-threatening cases rise.

But Gordon said that while dengue is not among the top 10 killer diseases in the country, the previous administration chose to realign funds for it and started a bidding process even when Dengvaxia had not yet been listed in the national formulary or the list of drugs that can be purchased by government agencies.

The senator also cited an order for fund allocation that bore different fonts for date and body, which, he said, could indicate that the purchase of Dengvaxia was planned earlier and the date was only placed when actual release was imminent.

“So to my mind, it’s very clear, they looked for money to spend, then they quickly got the money,” Gordon said.

Given the facts, the senator is giving Aquino the benefit of the doubt, adding that the former leader should have been more careful in transactions amounting to billions of pesos and that the people around him should have advised “properly.”

“There would appear some negligence on his part but I don’t think he was the leader in this scenario,” Gordon added. 

He believes that the Office of the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice could still file a case for plunder using the documents gathered by the Blue Ribbon committee, although he did not say who should be charged.

Sen. Joseph Victor Ejercito, who chairs the health committee, believes Aquino was misinformed when he decided to give the go-signal to purchase Dengvaxia. 

“I think PNoy (Aquino’s nickname) did it in good faith, to avert dengue outbreak in the future. But it’s the other officials who might have taken advantage and did not give him an extensive report that includes the risk, if there was. My personal take is that not all information was disclosed, so that the transaction will push through. (It is) possible that he was misinformed on the whole dengue vaccine issue,” Ejercito said in a statement.

Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian also made the same observation, saying the former president relied on Ona and former health secretary Janette Garin in making his decision.

Aquino, Garin charged

Former Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) director general Augusto Syjuco charged Aquino and Garin before the Office of the Ombudsman over the P3.5-billion dengue mass vaccination program.

In his eight-page complaint filed yesterday, Syjuco urged the anti-graft body to investigate Aquino and Garin for possible plunder, graft and corruption and mass murder through reckless imprudence and negligence.

The complaint stemmed from the Aquino administration’s purchase of Dengvaxia from Sanofi Pasteur and which were administered to about 800,000 public school students aged nine years old and above in the National Capital Region, Central Luzon and Calabarzon (Cavite-Laguna-Batangas-Rizal-Quezon).

Syjuco said that while there was only one reported case of death so far linked to Dengvaxia, the vaccine’s mass administration now serves as a “deadly timebomb” haunting children who received the shots but did not previously have dengue.

The Department of Health suspended the mass immunization program on Dec. 1, a day after Sanofi Pasteur disclosed that Dengvaxia poses the threat of severe symptoms to those who had not been afflicted with dengue before.

“Its life-threatening effects supposedly transpire 30 months after inoculation, which is now fast approaching,” Syjuco’s complaint read.

Syjuco said that since the administration of vaccine shots started in April 2016, the “30-month protection period” is about to end in October 2018.

“What horrors or dengue-related deaths await our 733,000 nine-year-old or older loved ones… who received the Aquino Dengvaxia inoculations?” the complaint read.

Syjuco asked Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales to show impartiality and order an immediate investigation on the anomaly despite being an appointee of Aquino.

Morales, a former Supreme Court associate justice, was appointed by Aquino as ombudsman in July 2011. She is set to retire in July 2018.

In a text message sent to reporters, Aquino’s spokesperson Abigail Valte dismissed Syjuco’s complaint as “frivolous.”

“The complaint has 22 news clippings as attachments. This is how court dockets get clogged… The public can judge Syjuco by his own admission: he has no evidence against the former president. Unfortunately, our judicial system is bogged down by frivolous suits like this one. At the end of the day, public money and precious time is wasted, and for what?” Valte said.

Garin welcomed the complaint as an opportunity to prove her innocence.

“I welcome the case filed by Syjuco. This will give us a platform to be fully heard, present all documents without bias and prove our innocence. This is an opportunity to put a closure to this issue and let the truth come out,” she said. – Elizabeth Marcelo, Sheila Crisostomo, Aurea Calica