With its dengue vac­cine in the reg­u­la­to­ry queue, Take­da out­lines longterm fol­lowup da­ta that it says keep it out of Deng­vax­i­a's shad­ow

When Sanofi pub­lished longterm fol­lowup re­sults from a trio of Phase III tri­als for its dengue vac­cine in 2015, in­ves­ti­ga­tors flagged a con­cern­ing ob­ser­va­tion that they weren’t able to ex­plain: In the third year post-vac­ci­na­tion, chil­dren younger than 9 who got the jabs were more like­ly to end up in the hos­pi­tal than those in the con­trol group.

The hos­pi­tal­iza­tion im­bal­ance didn’t stop Sanofi from clinch­ing the ap­proval to start the world’s first large-scale vac­ci­na­tion cam­paign in the Philip­pines with its vac­cine, Deng­vax­ia. But even though pub­lic health of­fi­cials tried to skirt it by lim­it­ing the in­oc­u­la­tion dri­ve to old­er chil­dren and adults, the is­sue — which Sanofi was lat­er ac­cused of play­ing down — would come back to haunt the ef­fort. Kids and adults were de­vel­oped with se­vere fever af­ter vac­cines, in some cas­es lethal, spark­ing na­tion­wide pan­ic and forc­ing the Phillip­pine gov­ern­ment to shut down the pro­gram. Even though Deng­vax­ia even­tu­al­ly got adopt­ed in oth­er coun­tries, the fi­as­co left its scars.

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