How Nigeria beat polio: from 'hit-and-run' vaccine squads to digging wells - Telegraph.co.uk
How Nigeria beat polio: from 'hit-and-run' vaccine squads to digging wells - Telegraph.co.uk |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2020 12:00 AM PDT  Dr Tunji Funsho, described by TIME last month as "the person who did more than any other to drive polio to continent-wide extinction" in Africa, could be forgiven for taking a break. In August this year, that goal was reached: Nigeria, where Dr Funsho is based, was declared free of the wild polio virus, the last country on the continent to reach the milestone. But speaking to The Telegraph from his aptly named Polio House office in Lagos, Nigeria's economic capital, with a colourful woven cap emblazoned with the words 'End polio now' atop his head, Dr Funsho is not finished yet. "Nothing could be more satisfying than to live to see the day that Nigeria was certified free [of wild polio] under my leadership," he said. But he added that there was work to be done maintaining that status - and, moreover, work to be done elsewhere to achieve the same goal. Polio, which has left hundreds of thousands of children globally paralysed or, in some cases, even dead, remains endemic only in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last barriers to a wild polio-free world. There may be lessons available in that final struggle from Nigeria's long journey to zero polio. It took decades of advocacy and vaccination drives, with major setbacks along the way and one huge need, according to Dr Funsho: money. The 72-year old, a cardiologist by trade and chair of Rotary International's polio eradication programme in Nigeria for the last seven years, said the team has spent five times the amount of money in Africa alone that was originally budgeted to rid the entire world of the disease. In 1996, when African governments partnered with the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) - made up of Rotary, the World Health Organization, and others - on the Nelson Mandela-led 'Kick Polio out of Africa' campaign, Dr Funsho was part of a team that raised $230 million to target 50 million children for vaccination and eradicate polio in Africa by 2000. The money spent, he said, has surpassed the initial budget by far. "It takes a lot to ask people to keep giving continuously," he said. "They give money this year and you have not finished the job, next year we come again and ask for more. So it becomes tougher and tougher to raise funds." That's despite the progress that has been made: about 75,000 African children annually were affected by poliomyelitis 20 years ago. The infectious disease is caused by poliovirus - gastrointestinal viruses that attack the nervous system of children under five and destroy nerve cells that allow for muscle movement. The virus transmits through a faecal-oral route, often through contaminated water or food, and causes lifelong paralysis in hours. It was not just money, though. Vaccinators, try as they may, struggled to convince some populations of the usefulness of the polio vaccine and could not counter widespread rumours that the vaccine sterilized children. In 2003, a state-backed vaccine boycott in the northern states of Kano, Kaduna and Zamfara caused a particularly devastating setback, rolling back years of progress at a time when Nigeria recorded nearly half of the polio burden in the world. The boycott was fuelled by memories of the Trovan trials in 1996, in which 200 children with meningitis were given experimental drugs by Pfizer, killing 11 of them, and leaving many more with brain damage, paralysis and slurred speech. So when top Islamic leaders - who were convinced America would attack Muslims everywhere in its war against Iraq - openly opposed vaccinations, their followers heeded their call. The boycott led to an alarming 30 per cent increase in polio prevalence. By 2008, polio cases originating from Nigeria had spread to 20 countries, reaching as far as Yemen and Indonesia and paralysing 1,500 children. It took Nigerian scientists getting involved in testing and talking to religious leaders, and so-called "give-or-take" deals with communities, to end the boycott. "You cannot be coming here and giving us all these drugs when we don't have clean water," villagers would tell Dr Funsho's team, and Rotary would dig wells or boreholes for them, he said. Then came the rise of Boko Haram in 2009. With the terrorist war raging in Nigeria's northeast - now in its 11th year - vaccinators faced death or kidnap trying to reach children in conflict-ridden areas. In one instance in February 2013, female health workers gathered around a health centre in Kano, attending to mothers and their babies, when shots rang out from attackers on motorcycles, killing seven of them. But they did not give up. Volunteers mounted "Hit-and-run" operations, landing in areas recently freed by the military to drop doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV) in kids' mouths and then fleeing before the terrorists regrouped. To get to Boko Haram-held territory, undercover vaccinators embedded in villages to distribute vaccines, sending back data with the help of chips hidden in their mobile phones. Soldiers were handed bottles of the vaccine in areas considered too dangerous for civilians. And to reach evasive nomadic tribes, data teams operating out of hubs in Abuja used GIS to map their trails as they walked their cattle. It looked like all the immense efforts paid off by 2015, and WHO removed Nigeria from the endemic countries list. But in 2016, four cases of wild polio were discovered in displaced persons' camps in Borno state. "[2015] was a joyous moment," said Dr Funsho. "Unfortunately the insurgency put paid to that because we had missed immunizing children for two years in most of Borno." More emergency vaccination drives were mounted, targeting under-fives in the camps. In 2018, a fresh round of rumours saying vaccines were infecting children with monkeypox virus shook things up again. But then finally, in 2019, Nigeria was free - with its official status declared one year later, after four years without any new cases. But health experts like Dr Funsho say it is no time to get carried away. "Our next major challenge is to keep polio at zero, and to ensure that even if a child comes in contact with an imported virus, the child is sufficiently immunised to be protected," he said. But routine vaccinations cost money that may be hard to get from governments and donors, and Nigeria's primary health care system, which should help those in far-off areas readily access vaccines, is underfunded. Dr Edmund Ogbe, the WHO lead in Bayelsa, a state in southern Nigeria, told Telegraph budgets for regular vaccinations are inadequate in most states. "I feel sad seeing people jubilate because it will make the work ahead harder. We have not reached our destination yet, but many people will still say 'have we not already eradicated polio? Why are will still immunising if there is no outbreak?'" And health workers are still not safe in their work. Earlier this year, a young local government worker attached to Dr Ogbe's unit in the restive Niger Delta was kidnapped by militiamen on a vaccination trip, and only freed after a ransom was paid by his family. Then there is the circulating vaccine-derived (cVDPV) polio strain, first discovered in Madagascar in 2001. When a child vaccinated with oral polio vaccine (OPV) passes stool or urine in places with poor sewage facilities, where the sewage can get back into the body system, the weakened virus in the polio vaccine can mutate and become infectious against children who have not been immunised. However, it is rare: two cases were discovered in Nigeria this year and several countries in the region are affected. Globally case numbers are below 800. Plus, Dr Funsho said, cVDPV polio is less difficult to contain because it only speaks to low vaccination, not a total lack of it. Outbreaks can be put out in less than six months. Rotary is also testing a more stable vaccine that cannot mutate and become infectious. The focus now is to keep the mass vaccination levels up. Regular vaccine coverage in Nigeria, now at 60 per cent, doubled in the last three years and is expected to be near-total by 2023. The WHO recommends two doses to protect children fully. And to bar possible imports of polio, travellers coming into Nigeria from Pakistan and Afghanistan must be polio-vaccinated. Because "as long as there is a case of wild poliovirus anywhere, no child is safe," said Dr Funsho. Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security  |
| Gates Foundation vaccine spreads polio across Africa - newagebd.net Posted: 01 Oct 2020 12:00 AM PDT  — New Eastern Outlook MICROSOFT founder Bill Gates has made himself the global vaccine czar as his foundation spends billions on spreading new vaccines globally. While much attention has been given to the role of Gates behind the corrupt World Health Organisation in promoting radical untested coronavirus vaccines, the record of the Gates Foundation pushing an oral polio vaccine across Africa gives more sobering evidence that all Gates says and does is not genuine human charity. The UN has just recently admitted that new cases of infantile paralysis or polio have resulted in Africa from an oral polio vaccine developed with strong support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It mirrors what happened in the USA in the 1950s. This is worth a closer look. Vaccines that cause polio THE vaccine industry loves to cite development of vaccines in the 1950s as solely responsible for eradicating what was a severe paralytic illness that reached a peak in the USA after World War II and as well, in England, Germany and other European countries. Now, despite the fact that no new cases of 'wild polio' virus have been detected in all Africa since 2016, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and their allies in the WHO proclaimed that Gates' $4 billion ten-year African vaccination campaign using an oral polio vaccine had finally eliminated the dreaded polio. That was at the end of August. One week later on September 2, WHO was forced to backtrack and admit that new polio outbreaks in Sudan were linked to an ongoing series of new polio cases in Chad and Cameroon. According to the WHO, further polio cases have been registered in more than a dozen African countries including Angola, Congo, Nigeria and Zambia. But the shocking thing is that the outbreaks are all reportedly caused by the Gates-backed oral polio vaccine. In a revealing comment, a CDC virologist involved with WHO and Gates Foundation in the Africa mass polio vaccination campaign, part of something called the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, admits the vaccine is creating significantly more cases of polio paralysis than the deceptively named 'wild polio' disease. 'We have now created more new emergences of the virus than we have stopped,' virologist Mark Pallansch of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention admitted. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is a combined effort of the WHO, UNICEF, the US Centres for Disease Control, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Rotary International. Bill Gates was reportedly responsible for driving the campaign to develop the liquid oral polio vaccine and massively administer it to the populations of Africa and Asia despite the near absence of any cases of 'wild polio.' According to one of the partners in the Gates polio initiative, from Rotary International, 'Gates personally drove the development of a new polio vaccine that is now in the final stages of testing. When the idea was put forward, about the time of the last case of polio to happen in India, many were thinking the vaccine would play no important role in eradication, but Gates insisted.' When someone asked him, why polio, which had all but vanished worldwide, Gates replied, 'Polio is a terrible disease.' That reply seems curious, as there are far more pervasive deadly diseases out there including malaria or chronic diarrhoea due to unsafe water, and poor sanitation across Africa that causes death by dehydration, poor absorption of nutrients or infectious complications. I would argue that both those are also 'terrible.' In 2016 chronic diarrhoea was listed by the WHO as the second leading cause of death in children below five worldwide. In Africa it was cause of almost 653,000 deaths, yet Gates and friends seem to be interested in other things. The insistence of Gates on pushing massive vaccination of a new oral polio vaccine his foundation backed at a time when polio even in poor countries of Asia and Africa is virtually non-existent, should ring alarm bells loudly. If his goal is to help more African children lead healthy lives, simple water treatment projects would save far more lives. Or is there something in the polio vaccine we are not being told of? Is there aluminium as adjuvant that is documented to be a central nervous system paralytic? Or other toxins? The Gates Foundation spent almost $ 4 billion to develop and administer the oral polio vaccine throughout the poorest countries in the world as of 2018. This despite that WHO stated that the cases of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan went from about 350,000 per year to 33 in 2018. There hasn't been a case in the Americas or Western Europe since before the Gates polio project was launched years ago. Define it away? HERE it gets into some very suspicious linguistic games on the part of the World Health Organisation, Gates and company. They are trying to cover their deeds by claiming that most of the polio cases are actually something they decided to call acute flaccid paralysis. That is a debilitating condition with a clinical picture virtually identical to polio. But it keeps the 'polio' numbers down. According to the US CDC, there were over 31,500 documented cases of acute flaccid paralysis from just 18 countries in 2017. This is in addition to what they call vaccine-associated polio paralysis. Yet from the point of clinical symptoms, vaccine-derived polio, wild polio and acute flaccid paralysis are identical, as is acute flaccid myelitis, a subtype of acute flaccid paralysis. With this proliferation of serious medical-sounding names to describe what produces the same medical symptoms, we have huge ground for manipulation. A paper written by Neetu Vashishi and Jacob Puliyel published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012 wrote about the Gates-CDC-WHO mass oral polio vaccine effort there: '… while India has been polio-free for a year, 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. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated…' The 1950s DEFINING away cases of poliomyelitis or Infantile Paralysis as it was called during the epidemic in the USA after World War II went back to the 1950s, and to since-suppressed deadly scandals involving the first purported polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. Regarded today as a medical hero, the truth of Salk was anything but heroic. The upsurge in cases of what were then labelled poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis in the United States began to literally explode around 1946. Relevant to note is that a highly dangerous cumulative toxin, a now-banned insecticide known as DDT, was being promoted by the US government as a 'safe' control of mosquitoes and flies said to be the 'carriers' of polio virus. What has since been all but erased from the government record is the precise match of the number of cases of children with symptoms of acute polio with the degree of acute DDT spraying, and the equally precise mirrored decline of human polio cases from the late 1940s into the 1950s, after a sharp decline in DDT use. In 1953, Connecticut physician, Morton S Biskind argued in public that, 'the most obvious explanation for the polio epidemic: central nervous system diseases… such as polio are actually the physiological and symptomatic manifestations of the ongoing government- and industry-sponsored inundation of the world's populace with central nervous system poisons.' The Salk polio vaccine was first deployed in 1955, which is two years after the dramatic decline in registered polio cases. That fact was conveniently forgotten as the narrative was promoted that the new vaccine alone was eradicating the feared polio. Serious evidence was presented by doctors and others to the US congress that there was a clear connection between the summer polio epidemics to summer-used heavy metal pesticides such as DDT. They were ignored. The promotion of DDT as a harmless insecticide was so pervasive that kids followed behind trucks spraying the streets and swimming pools were sprayed with DDT, believing it harmless. Highly emotional advertising campaigns proclaimed that deadly polio was mysteriously transmitted by insects and that DDT would protect. Farmers were told to repeatedly spray their dairy cows with DDT to ward of the dangerous insects. DDT thus contaminated the milk supply. Use of DDT exploded by the end of the 1940s across the USA. As one person described it, 'Concerned parents went further to protect their children. They feared the invisible virus as if it were hunting their children. They turned their homes into sterile zones by constantly spraying insecticides and washing down the walls with disinfectants.' That sounds familiar. Salk and Rockefeller The vaccine research of Jonas Salk as well as of his rival, Albert Sabin, was funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later known as the March of Dimes. Salk convinced the US health authorities in 1954 that his polio vaccine contained only inactive virus, and was absolutely safe. He was able to convince the regulatory authorities that the 'expensive and difficult procedures which had been suggested for the detection of possible residual live virus' in his vaccine should be dispensed with. Field trials of the Salk vaccine in 1954 were exposed by the Journal of the American Statistical Association: '…59 per cent of the trial was worthless because of the lack of adequate controls…' That report was ignored by the US department of health and the National Foundation proclaimed the Salk vaccine ready to mass distribute in spring of 1955. Already in 1955 alarming results from the Salk vaccine had emerged. His vaccine, manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, was administered to over four hundred thousand people, mostly school children. Within days, reports of paralysis began surfacing. Within a month, the mass vaccination programme against polio had to be suspended. In June of 1956, polio cases began to increase sharply in Chicago in children who had received the Salk vaccine. The National Foundation sent an urgent letter to its members urging them to, 'give reassurance that the present Salk vaccine is safe and effective to patients, parents and others in your community who still needlessly doubt it…' Salk's vaccine had caused seventy thousand cases of muscle weakness, one hundred and sixty-four cases of severe paralysis and ten deaths. Three fourths of the victims remained permanently paralysed. Secretary of health, education, and welfare stepped down and the director of the NIH, resigned. The Cutter incident was quickly downplayed by the government and vaccinations resumed after 21 days pause, using vaccines from Wyeth Labs. Those too produced cases of paralysis. Between 1923 and 1953, before the Salk vaccine's introduction, the polio death rate in the US had declined on its own by 47 per cent; England had observed a similar pattern. Following the use of Salk's vaccine between 1955 and 1963, cases of polio in the US increased — by 50 per cent from 1957 to 1958, and by 80 per cent between 1958 and 1959. This was concealed by a US government change in defining polio, much as the WHO and CDC do today in Africa. Diseases that had previously been grouped together under the umbrella of 'polio' began to be reported as separate diseases. One of these was aseptic or viral meningitis, an infectious disease that is difficult to distinguish from poliovirus, or transverse myelitis — a rare spinal cord inflammation, or the Guillain-Barré syndrome. Were all these a result of widespread toxins used in the vaccine? The government and vaccine industry was not interested in knowing or telling. Finally in 1963 the US government replaced Salk's IPV vaccine with an attenuated oral polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin. As a live virus vaccine, it, too, was and is capable of giving its recipients polio or polio symptoms. Salk testified before a Senate subcommittee in 1977 that the Sabin oral polio vaccine had caused most of the polio cases in the US since the early 1960s. Rockefeller eugenics? THE National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which funded both Salk and his rival Sabin in development of polio vaccines in the 1950's, was run by two doctors from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research — Dr Henry Kumm who had spent 23 years with the Rockefeller Institute, and Dr Thomas Rivers. Henry Kumm went over to the National Foundation in 1951 at the peak of the polio epidemic. In May 1953, Kumm became director of Polio Research at NFIP. Notably, during World War II Kumm had served as civilian consultant to the surgeon general of the US Army in Italy, directing field studies for the use of DDT against malarial mosquitoes. Thomas Rivers was from 1922 head of the infectious disease ward at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, becoming the institute's director in 1937. As chairman of committees on research and vaccine advisory for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, he oversaw the clinical trials of Jonas Salk's vaccine by Dr Kumm's group. It could be said that the National Foundation was a mask for a massive Rockefeller polio vaccine project. Polio researcher David Oshisky stated, 'In truth, polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media, not even at its height in the 1940s and 1950s. Ten times as many children would die in accidents in those years, and three times as many would die of cancer. Polio's special status was due, in large part, to the efforts of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, better known as the March of Dimes, which employed the latest techniques in advertising, fund raising and motivational research to turn a horrific but relatively uncommon disease into the most feared affliction of its time. The genius of the National Polio Foundation lay in its ability to single out polio for special attention, making it seem more ominous than other diseases.' That National Foundation was run by Rockefeller doctors. This is very much what the Gates Foundation is doing with its turbo-charged oral polio vaccine in Africa where polio had almost vanished before the mass vaccine campaign of WHO and Gates. Here the bond of dedication to eugenics and to dangerous vaccines seems to unite both the Rockefellers and Bill Gates, who in many ways is merely the heir and continuation of the deadly eugenics work of the Rockefellers. All this should give pause before regarding the pronouncements of Bill Gates on coronavirus and his favoured vaccines as the scientific good truth. New Eastern Outlook, September 28. F William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer. He holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics. More about:  |
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