The Global Polio Vaccination Policy Serves as a Cautionary Tale

by Vera Sharav
Alliance for Human Research Protection

Recent news reports confirm the worst fears: the oral polio vaccine has caused crippling paralysis because live strains of the oral polio virus in the vaccine have mutated and have become virulent.

The global War on Polio Appears to Have Backfired

National Public Radio (NPR) Mutant Strains Of Polio Vaccine Now Cause More Paralysis Than Wild Polio. (Jun 2017).
SCIENCE Magazine reports: Alarming Polio Outbreak Spreads in Congo, Threatening Global Eradication Efforts (July 2018)
SCIENCE: Surging Cases Have Dashed All Hope That Polio Might Be Eradicated (July 2019)
STAT NEWS reports: “The Switch Polio Eradication Quandray” (Sept. 13, 2019)

The global eradication of polio has been the promotional rallying call for a powerful and aggressive global vaccine lobby under the umbrella of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI),^[ii] a public-private partnership launched in 1988. GPEI was spearheaded with substantial funds by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) – all of who are closely tied to pharmaceutical companies thereby ensuring that manufacturers’ interest is served by GPEI policies.

The global polio eradication drive was confounded by the failure of global public health officials to ensure that that the live oral polio vaccine – containing 3 strains of the virus – was safe – BEFORE embarking on mass vaccination of millions of children. By the year 2000, the mounting evidence of vaccine-caused paralysis, led the U.S. to halt the use of the oral vaccine in the U.S.[iii] But officials at the WHO and GPEI did not change course. Publicly they displayed a mask of “strategic ignorance” and continued the mass vaccination drive; disregarding the paralysis the oral vaccine was causing.

They declared to the world,

“We’re closer than ever to ending polio worldwide.”

Photo by Asif Hassan/ AFP

Public trust in vaccination campaigns was irreparably undermined in the Muslim world, when it was uncovered in 20111, that the CIA had used a vaccination team in Pakistan to spy on and confirm Osama Bin Laden’s location by obtaining DNA from his family members.[i]

Distrust of the polio vaccination teams intensified as word spread about the risk of paralysis in children following vaccination with the oral polio vaccine, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2015, the UK Guardian reported that Pakistan Jails 471 Parents Who Refused To Give Polio Vaccine To Children. Global public health officials declared type 2 of the wild polio virus eradicated.

In 2016, these same global vaccine authorities embarked on a massive, experiment on millions of children in 155 countries, which they called a “switch”. They “switched” oral vaccines from the trivalent vaccine containing (types 1, 2, and 3 polio viruses) to a bivalent oral vaccine containing (type 1 and 3). As SCIENCE notes,

“No one knew exactly how this experiment would play out. It was clear, however, that for a few years some type 2 outbreaks would still occur—either those that had started before “the switch,” as it is called, but had not been detected or those caused by the last use of trivalent OPV.” [SCIENCE, 2018]

That experimental “switch” turned out to be the cause of the current paralytic polio crisis; a crisis caused by the oral polio vaccine.

“As a result of the 2016 vaccine switch, an increasing number of children lack immunity to the type 2 virus, setting the stage for a explosive outbreak.” [SCIENCE]

CDC virologist, Mark Pallanch acknowledged:

“We have now created more new emergencies of the virus than we have stopped,”

Michel Zaffran Director WHO-GPEI

The response of the GPEI Director, Michel Zaffran, who is the WHO coordinator of immunization to the impending “explosive polio outbreak” the experimental “switch” has caused, was to use up the supply of the existing oral vaccine.

“We have to live with the risk until we have a technical solution.”

The vaccine-derived type 2 poliovirus is spreading throughout Africa: Ghana, Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, and Somalia. Type 1 vaccine-derived poliovirus cases have been reported in the Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia, New Guinea.

In January 2019, the WHO did not call the world’s attention to the critical threat of polio paralysis for children in countries that had followed the vaccination recommendation of the WHO. Instead, officials of the WHO declared “vaccine hesitancy” as posing one of the 10 most serious threats to public health in 2019 — on par with Ebola.[iv]

That “fake public health threat” announced by the WHO was widely disseminated by the media, and used as ammunition by the vaccine lobby which is using its enormous financial clout to exert pressure on government officials around the globe to enact mandatory childhood vaccination laws – thereby stripping parents of their parental authority to protect their child from medical interventions that they have reason to believe, will put their child in harm’s way. Protecting one’s child is not only a human right, it is a parental mammalian instinct.

Responsible parents, who are concerned about the safety, and raise questions about the safety of government-recommended childhood vaccination schedules, are being taunted, humiliated and hounded as “anti-vaxxers”. Now, they are threatened by state-enacted involuntary, forced vaccination policies. These legislative actions are an ominous slide backwards to the darkest state-authorized medical atrocities in history.

Such extraordinary authoritarian measures do not happen in a vacuum. Vaccination policies are established, promoted and facilitated by multi-national pharmaceutical companies in concert with a network of collaborating private-public partnerships that have an enormous financial stake in the implementation of mass national and global vaccination drives.

Vaccination policies are established, promoted and facilitated by multi-national pharmaceutical companies in concert with professionals selected from a network of collaborating private-public partnerships that have an enormous financial stake in the implementation of mass national and global vaccination drives.

Global health policy is crafted under the pervasive, noxious influence exerted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,[v] which is the largest private philanthropic player in global health. This Foundation is the embodiment of “philanthrocapitalism”.

Next to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the most influential institutional entity in global vaccination policies is the Gates Foundation, which was founded in 2000, with its enormous investment portfolio of $40 billion – just as Microsoft had suffered a disastrous anti-trust lawsuit which deemed Microsoft’s business methods illegal, badly sullying Bill Gates’ reputation.[v] The Gates Foundation became the vehicle for Bill Gates transformed his public image from the ruthless Microsoft tycoon who stifled competition by exerting illegal monopolistic control over Windows software, to the most visible philanthropist in the world.

As Professor Linsey McGoey, at the University of Essex, explains in her book, No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (2015):

“Philanthropy often opens up markets for US or European-based multinationals which partner with organizations such as the Gates Foundation in order to reach new consumers. Giving more is an avenue for getting more.”

Read the full article at AHRP.org.

Comment on this article at VaccineImpact.com.

References

[i] Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) launched in 1988. WHO

[1i] CIA Organised Fake Vaccination Drive To Get Osama Bin Laden’s Family DNA, The Guardian, 2011′ The Fallout From The CIA’s Vaccination Ploy In Pakistan, By Orin Levine and Laurie Garrett, The Washington Post, July 15, 2011

[iii] CDC. Manual for the Surveillance of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases: Chapter 12: Poliomyelitis, 5/2018

[iv] World Health Organization (WHO). Ten Threats to Global Health in 2019. Jan. 16, 2019.

[iv] No Such Thing as a Free Gift: the Gates Foundation (2016) by, Linsey McGoey; The Philanthropic State: Market–State Hybrids in the Philanthrocapitalist Turn, Linsey McGoey, The NONPROFIT Quarterly, 2016;

[v] Millions for Defense, New York Times review of two books covering the Microsoft Antitrust Trial in 2000 that badly sullied Bill Gates’ reputation. Pride Before the Fall by John Heilmann; World War 3.0 by Ken Auletta.