Presidential daughter Veronica “Kitty” Duterte has contracted dengue, despite having received Dengvaxia, the controversial vaccine against the deadly mosquito-borne disease.
Kitty, President Rodrigo Duterte’s youngest daughter, is currently confined at an unnamed Davao City hospital, ABS-CBN News reported yesterday. According to the same report, Kitty’s mother, Honeylet Avanceña, cut short a trip to Germany to be by her daughter’s side.
President Duterte learned about his daughter’s illness while he was still in Moscow, where he was on a state visit last week. He mentioned his daughter’s health in an interview with the Philippine Star, and added that he had to hurry home to see her.
The president’s former assistant, Senator Bong Go, told Balitambayan in Filipino, “When we were on the plane [flying back to the Philippines], I saw that he was worried. He was always thinking about her, and he couldn’t sleep during the flight. For 11 hours he couldn’t stop worrying because he was thinking about his youngest daughter.”
In a series of Instagram Stories posted by Kitty early this morning, it appears that her father has already visited her in the hospital. In one post, she added the caption “With Daddy Shark,” with the photo showing a man behind her who appears to be the president.
In May last year, Go told reporters that Kitty and the president’s granddaughter, Sabina Duterte, were immunized with the anti-dengue vaccine Dengvaxia. The vaccine had made headlines after Public Attorney’s Office chief Persida Acosta controversially alleged that it had caused hundreds of children to die, a claim rejected by many doctors, including Health Secretary Francisco Duque III.
Acosta’s remarks fed into a vaccine scare that led many parents to forgo their children’s immunization altogether, contributing to a measles outbreak earlier this year, a national dengue epidemic that began last month, and the return of polio last month after almost two decades of absence in the Philippines.
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