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HomeOpinionsA short history of Big Pharma colonialism in India (Part III)

A short history of Big Pharma colonialism in India (Part III)

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The first part of the article was published here and the second part here. This is the third part of the article.

Vaccinations in Colonial British India

Vaccines may have been invented in Ancient India or in Ancient China, but the history of mass-scale and mandatory vaccination begins in the colonial period.

British colonialism provided the first model of using scientific means of pandemic control for the large-scale and coercive regulation of people’s lives. Indians in Mumbai and other cities were used as lab rats for experimental vaccines. The vaccines had nasty side effects, and many deaths were reported. While the British Raj did not introduce any legal protection for those being vaccinated, it introduced laws to enforce vaccination. The Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 gave the British Raj the right to inspect, arrest and isolate anyone suspected of being infected with plague, in other words, it gave them total control.

Oral Polio Vaccine

Polio is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. As usual, western medicine has only one solution to the polio problem: vaccination. There were only 223 reported cases of polio worldwide in 2012, and by 2018, the WHO conceded that 70 percent of global polio cases came from Gates’s vaccines. There are two types of vaccine: inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) and oral polio vaccine (OPV). The oral polio vaccine is no longer authorized in the U.S., but this pharmaceutical behemoth is still marketed in the Global South. The oral vaccine is particularly dangerous because it can cause vaccine-derived polio. Vaccine-derived poliovirus can form when a person receives a live-virus oral vaccine – that can pass the virus on to others through contamination. Oral polio vaccines “can be a direct cause of paralysis”.

Polio was nearly eradicated at the time that Bill Gates launched a global polio vaccine campaign. According to Kennedy, Bill Gates declared “war on polio in India and implemented a shock-and-awe strategy to exterminate those last few cases”. He took control of India’s vaccine oversight panel, the National Advisory Board (NAB) and stacked it with loyalists. Under Gates’ control, “the NAB mandated an astonishing barrage of fifty polio vaccines (up from five) for each child in several key Indian provinces before they reached the age of five”.

But what was the result of the mass vaccination campaign? Carpet bombing entire regions with massive vaccination batteries led to a proportionate increase in vaccine-strain polio epidemics. Vaccine-derived poliovirus—a mutation of the virus contained in the oral vaccine—came back to bite the unfortunate populations that submitted to Gates’ prescriptions.  A devastating vaccine-strain epidemic of acute flaccid myelitis—a disease formerly classified as “polio”— paralyzed 491,000 children in these provinces between 2000 and 2017, in direct proportion to the number of polio vaccines that Dr. Gates’s minions administered in each area. In 2012, the British Medical Journal wryly noted that polio eradication in India “has been achieved by renaming the disease.” Neetu Vashishi and Jacob Puliyel confirm that there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute flaccid paralysis:

In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. In regions where children are vaccinated multiple times, the non-polio acute flaccid paralysis rate is up to 35 times higher than international norms. The non-polio acute flaccid paralysis rate in a given year correlates to the cumulative doses of oral polio vaccine received in the previous 3 years.

Vashisht N, Puliyel J. Polio programme: let us declare victory and move on. Indian J Med Ethics 2012 Apr-Jun; 9(2): 114-7.

Jacob Puliyel, head of paediatrics, St. Stephens Hospital, reported that paralysis rates in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were higher in those years when the number of pulse polio rounds conducted were more frequent. But when the OPV vaccinations were reduced, the paralysis rates started to decline.

It appears that Indian authorities, at long last, learned a lesson, for Kennedy notes,

That year, the disillusioned Indian government dialed back Gates’s vaccine regimen and evicted Gates’s cronies and PIs from the NAB. Polio paralysis rates dropped precipitously. After squandering half of its total budget on the polio epidemic—at Gates’s direction—the WHO reluctantly admitted that the global polio explosion is predominantly vaccine strain, meaning it is happening because of Gates’s vaccine program. The most frightening epidemics in Congo, the Philippines, and Afghanistan are all linked to the vaccines he promoted. Polio had disappeared altogether from each of those nations until Gates reintroduced the dreaded disease with his vaccine… As the British Medical Journal reported in 2012, “the most recent mass polio vaccination programs [in India], fueled by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, resulted in increased cases [of polio].”

Robert F. Kennedy : The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (2021)

Another problem with this one-trick public health charade is that government budgets and resources are diverted away from addressing more efficient public health measures. When the government does polio vaccination, it cannot do other things. If one considers that there were only about 200 reported polio cases worldwide in 2012, then one should ask why Big Pharma lobbyists give so much attention to polio vaccination without paying equal attention to addressing malnutrition, clean drinking water and sanitation. Many activists have accused Bill Gates of “hijacking WHO’s public health agenda away from the projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases (clean water, hygiene, nutrition, and economic development)” and diverting international aid and other resources to serve their “vaccine fetish”. The question whether the eradication of viral diseases is even feasible in contexts where there is no clean water, insufficient sanitation and malnutrition is never asked. Polio vaccination is part of India’s “Universal Immunisation Programme”.

Furthermore, mass-vaccination experiments do have risks. Big Pharma lobbyists and the mainstream media, of course, never discuss these risks. To do so would contribute to “vaccine-hesitancy”. About polio mass vaccinations, Suzanne Humphries writes: “If WHO’s plan succeeds, the artificially immune herd stands to become the completely non-immune herd, as new children are born who have not been infected with wild-type viruses or even exposed to vaccine poliovirus. This condition has never existed in human history. Under these conditions, any reintroduction of poliovirus could be disastrous to this newly virgin population. The people of India, Pakistan, and Nigeria stand to become more vulnerable to viral reintroduction than any population ever before… If philanthropists want to go down in history as truly making the world a better place, is $10 billion best spent on vaccines? … Perhaps a $10 billion decade of sustainable farming, nutrition, and sanitation would have a long-lasting impact on saving the children under discussion.”

HPV Vaccine and the “Decade of Vaccines”

In January of 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates used the World Economic Forum at Davos to announce a staggering $10 billion commitment to research and develop vaccines for the world’s poorest countries, kicking off what he called a “decade of vaccines.” The Decade of Vaccines kicked off with a Gates-funded HPV vaccine program in India that, according to a government investigation, violated the human rights of the study participants with “gross violations” of consent, and failed to properly report adverse events experienced by the vaccine recipients.

Human papillomavirus infection (HPV infection) is caused by a DNA virus. Most HPV infections cause no symptoms and resolve spontaneously. In some cases, an HPV infection persists and results in warts or precancerous lesions. These lesions can increase the risk of cancer. Deaths from cervical cancer are very rare and preventable with early detection. The vaccine is administered to young girls and the side-effects include cancer, autoimmune diseases and loss of fertility. Prior to the Covid-19 vaccines, this vaccine was the most dangerous vaccine ever licensed in the United States.

At the beginning of the decade of vaccines, the Gates Foundation (and PATH) funded tests of experimental HPV vaccines, developed by Gates’s partners GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, on 23,000 girls 10–14 years old in the Indian states of Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. PATH received permission to carry out the trials from the Indian Council of Medical Research. The HPV vaccines are very dangerous, and many tribal girls were injured or died:

At least 1,200 of the girls in Gates’s study—1 in 20—suffered severe side effects, including autoimmune and fertility disorders. Seven died—about 10x the US death rates for cervical cancer, which almost never kills the young. India’s Federal Ministry of Health suspended the trials and appointed an expert parliamentary committee to investigate the scandal. Indian government investigators found that Gates-funded researchers at PATH committed pervasive ethical violations: pressuring vulnerable village girls into the trial, bullying illiterate parents, and forging consent forms. Gates provided health insurance for his PATH staff but not to any participants in the trials, and refused medical care to the hundreds of injured girls. The PATH researchers targeted girls at ashram paathshalas (boarding schools for tribal children), to dodge the need to seek parental consent for the shots. They gave the girls “HPV Immunization Cards” that were printed in English, which the girls couldn’t read. They did not tell the girls that they were part of a clinical trial and instead hoodwinked them with the lie that these were “wellness shots” that would guarantee “lifelong protection” against cancer. That was not true. PATH conducted the trials in impoverished rural areas that lacked mechanisms for tracking the adverse effects and had no system for recording major adverse reactions to the vaccines, something legally mandated for large-scale clinical trials….

Robert F. Kennedy : The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (2021)

Robert F. Kennedy argues that Gates’s strong patronage of HPV vaccines (Gardasil and Cervarix) deepened suspicions that he was weaponizing vaccination against human fertility. Historical drops in fecundity have occurred in every nation with high Gardasil uptake.

Linsey McGoey described how most of the vaccines were given to girls at ashram paathshalas (boarding schools for tribal children), sidestepping the need to seek parental consent for the shots. A later numerical analysis of consent forms collected indicated that signatures of witnesses were absent from seventy percent of the forms. By 2010, reports of mysterious deaths fuelled public alarm over the trials. When the trials were underway, health insurance was provided for PATH staff, but not to any participants in the trials. McGoey observed that “perhaps most alarming of all, PATH did not implement any system for recording major adverse reactions to the vaccines, known technically as Adverse Events Following Immunization, or AEFIs, something legally mandated for large-scale clinical trials… In 2010, the Indian Council of Medical Ethics admitted that its own ethical protocols had been flouted in permitting the trials.”

Colin Gonsalves noted that the Indian Parliament formed a committee and later came out with a very scathing report. The government officials came out and said, “We shouldn’t have authorized this, were sorry, and we’re not going to allow them again”—and now they are back, doing their same old tricks again.

Furthermore, as a consequence people are losing faith in vaccines themselves, even in vaccines that may have a relatively good or acceptable risk-benefit profile. Jacob Puliyel explains: “This is happening because the emphasis is on introducing new and expensive vaccines against minor ailments, while ignoring serious diseases against which affordable vaccines are easily available.”

This is Part III of the article. Word Virus is a writer on politics and the pharmaceutical industry. This article was originally published on substack.

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