Year of Dengvaxia scare

Nora Soriño

ILIGAN City – A friend asked: “What can you say of the year 2017?” Caring asked me over nails being polished by one of her “tigs” in the parlor, err, salon she owns. I’m one of her favorite clients as she I go with her when she talks about anything that catches her fancy at the moment.

I replied: “It was a year of the Marawi seige that gave us the scare of our lives being just a breath away from there; a year of the martial law, DU30 version; a year of the Maute/Isis threat; a year of our struggles to rise above our biases and be compassionate with our stricken people from Marawi; a year of…”

“A year of the Dengvaxia scare,” my friend cut in as I was struggling for more words to describe the year that had just passed.

Yes, that too, maybe. But it was in 2016 when Dengvaxia came into the peoples’ consciousness as it was supposed to be some safeguard from dengue, that scourge from mosquitoes.

Not much was said about it in that year 2016. And maybe, somehow, people accepted that during that time. Like some vaccine from other diseases, like diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, etc. etc.

The thinking about that is that virus, or bacteria and/or germs are placed inside the bodies of humans in weakened form and these will be the ones that fight the invaders and the virus or bacteria or germs become weakened and joins the “army” that is already in the body and thus the body would not get sick anymore. I have always wondered about this theory… This might be true to the others like the anti-venom, antiabies and all the other antis. And what happens here is that the reverse might have been true in the virus against dengue. The strong dengue virus became the winners.

“Instead of the ones being vaccinated or put  in the body earlier.”

“I suppose so,” I said. A layman’s view.

I think this is a major error of the Sanofi Pasteur. They should not have come up with that statement. That the vaccine “could lead to severe cases of dengue for those without any history of dengue.” With that, all hell broke loose. Imagine, 800,000 kids being vaccinated. Add the parents, two for each kid vaccinated. That adds up to two million people getting the scare of their lives. All because of that statement. And look what is happening now. It’s like hearing somebody being backbited by someone and you tell the subject about it and expect trouble. But if you did not tell that somebody of the words against him, there’s no trouble really.

“You mean Sanofi should have just kept quiet about it?”

“Yes!”

She said it so emphatically. And I said, “That’s a very simplistic way of putting it.”

“My friend,” she said, looking at me with unblinking eyes, like she was really sure of herself and her opinion. “Sometimes there are things that are better left unsaid… and speaking of simplistic or simplicity, a Jorge Bocobo said and I quote, ‘Nothing is more simple than greatness. Indeed to be simple is to be great.’”

I wasn’t sure of this Bocobo quote or whatever. But as I went out of her salon, I thought of what she said.

She could be right… In the wrong way.