WHILE others cried, grimaced in pain or hid their faces in their hands to avoid seeing the needle, a student of Parang Elementary School in Marikina City is a picture of calmness as he is injected with the dengue vaccine. NIÑO JESUS ORBETA
ZELIN Joice Carungay closed her eyes, exhaled and nervously jiggled her feet as the needle went into her arm. When it was all over, she remarked that “the bite of a mosquito with dengue [was] more painful and frightening than the injection.”
The 10-year-old was one of the over 200 Grade 4 students at Parang Elementary School in Marikina City who availed themselves of the world’s first dengue vaccine under the Department of Health’s school-based immunization program on Monday.
About a million children aged 9 and above belonging to the same grade level from public schools in Metro Manila, Calabarzon and Central Luzon are expected to receive free of charge three doses of the vaccine within a 20-month period.
The three areas have been tagged as the regions with the “highest burden” of the mosquito-borne disease.
The government has allotted a total of P3.5 billion for the immunization program which will include monitoring the beneficiaries in the next five years for possible side effects.
At the launching Monday, Health Secretary Janette Garin touted the program as the first in the world to introduce, adopt and implement the dengue vaccine through the public health system and under a public school setting.
“With this breakthrough, we can now expand our immunization services to address a disease that is of public health importance,” Garin told the attendees, among them parents, students, barangay health workers and officials of the vaccine developer, French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.
The dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia, was licensed and approved for use in the Philippines by the Food and Drug Administration in December, making it the first country where the vaccine is commercially available.
Some doctors have expressed their opposition to the DOH immunization program, raising doubts about the safety and efficacy of Dengvaxia.
Garin, meanwhile, stressed the need to make the vaccine also accessible to the poor as the country had failed to curb the rapid spread of the dengue virus in the last 20 years through its prevention and control program.
The incidence of dengue rose two-fold starting in 2010, with cases not going below 100,000 every year. Data also showed that the trend was highest in the age groups of 5 to 10, 10 to 15 and 15 to 20.
The vaccine underwent 25 clinical studies in 15 countries around the world. The key efficacy results of the studies showed a 65.6-percent reduction in symptomatic dengue, 80.8-percent reduction in hospitalization and a 93.2-percent reduction in severe dengue.
The Philippines recorded the highest incidence of the mosquito-borne disease in the Western Pacific region from 2013 to 2015. Last year, the DOH recorded a total of 200,415 cases nationwide.
As of Feb. 20, 18,790 dengue cases have been reported nationwide, 13.2-percent higher compared with the same period last year. Most of the cases were from Calabarzon with 3,182 cases, Central Luzon with 2,596 and Metro Manila with 1,479 cases.
DOH spokesperson Dr. Lyndon Lee Suy said that giving the first dose of the dengue vaccine to schoolchildren in the next three months would give them enough protection by the start of the rainy season when dengue cases usually peak in the country.