By Sania Chaudhary
On October 13, Bill Gates updated his article, “How we can close the vaccine gap much faster next time,” located on CNN. He wrote about replacing the formal “gold standard” regulations specific to each country with an adaptable universal standard. He writes, “It’s time-consuming.”
While his efforts are honorable, his foundation’s disastrous effects in introducing new vaccination in India pose questions about whether resting standards under an organization like Gates’s is safe.
Gates is the co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Among their many projects is their “Vaccine Development and Surveillance,” which focuses on reproductive health and population control.
In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) and sponsored a $3.6 million HPV observational study to propel the Gardasil and Cervarix vaccines into India’s universal immunization program.
Three years later, in 2010, an Indian government investigation into the HPV study uncovered infringements on human rights detailed within their report “Alleged Irregularities in the Conduct of Studies Using Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) Vaccine by Path in India.” Within the report, the PATH program and the consenting Indian Council of Medical Research were condemned alongside notes of a “serious dereliction of duty” and a series of “gross violations.”
The PATH study ended with the tragic deaths of seven children. The deaths were initially “summarily dismissed as unrelated to vaccinations without in-depth investigations.” Informed Consent norms in Gujarat, in Andhra Pradesh, and universal standards were wholly ignored due to failed efforts in response to subject illiteracy or absence. Still, the unconsenting subjects were included in the study.
Later in their report, it was suspected that the initiation of the HPV study and vaccines was a for-profit scheme. If the vaccine entered the national immunization program as was hoped, it would be difficult to remove. The production of the vaccine would benefit not only the manufacturing companies: GlaxoSmithKline and Merck but also the aforementioned partnered organizations and companies.
In 2010, the foundation kickstarted the project with a $10-billion pledge to vaccines and population reduction for the next decade.
In a 2010 CBS interview, Melinda Gates said, “If you get into this work and you start to save these children, will women just keep overpopulating the world?…thank goodness, the converse is absolutely true.”
The Gates foundation targeted one of their “big three” goals in another trial: The Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Their invention was a cheaper, oral polio vaccine that contains a form of weakened polio.
In 2017, only six cases of naturally-occurring poliovirus were found versus the 21 vaccine-derived cases today. To prevent the mutant polio, in addition to the low-case, naturally-occurring poliovirus, increased vaccination using the cheaper, oral polio vaccine is required. The cycle continues.
A year later, in 2018, a study in India revealed that 490 thousand people from 2000-2017 had developed paralysis due to the oral polio vaccine, a large number considering that 99% of those infected do not exhibit paralysis.
From his initial $10 billion investment, Gates has benefited immensely. In a 2019 article from The Wall Street Journal, Gates wrote, “These organizations are not trivial or expendable. In fact, they are probably the best investments our foundation has ever made.”
As the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continues to invest and manufacture in new technologies, it is essential to consider their past expenditures’ results, both in profit and progress, and raise questions on their new ventures: rewriting the standards.
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