High Potency Polio Vaccine & India's Crippled Babies

"A two-year-old girl of this village, Saniya, suffers from Type I polio despite being administered more than seven doses of the new polio monovalent vaccine (MOPVI), which is made specially for the Type I poliovirus. The vaccine was introduced in mid-2005 and tom-tommed as the final step in the eradication of polio from India...... There are 15 cases of Type I polio spread across Uttar Pradesh (There are also 41 cases of Type II polio which takes the total count to 56). While there has been no reported Type I case in the endemic Moradabad, the new cases have been reported from eastern and central Uttar Pradesh; so instead of just a region, cases of wild polio are being reported from all over Uttar Pradesh now.

"Saniya's mother, Noorjahen, is furious. "She is having polio drops ever since she was four days old. She has had over a dozen doses of the polio drops. We came to know about her polio when she got a high fever. She could barely manage to stand, could not walk at all, after the fever. We took her to the local hospital where they did a stool test. We were later told that she has polio," she recounts. "There must be some thing wrong with the polio drops if even after so many doses my child has contracted polio. The government should test medicines before they are used. Pata nahin bachchoo ko kya pila rahin hain!" (Don't know what they are making my child drink), she adds.

"Head of the pediatrics department of Delhi- based St Stephen's Hospital, Jacob Puliyel, took up the matter with Lancet. In his strong-worded letter to Lancet's editor, he wrote: "We are shocked and dismayed that Lancet should have published the paper on the protective efficacy of monovalent oral Type I poliovirus...having overlooked the serious ethical issues involved." He went on to write, "What was introduced, according to this article, was a new vaccine that was five times more potent than previous vaccines, presumably also with the increased likelihood of adverse effects. No informed consent was taken, nor was the public told that the vaccine was experimental. Efforts were made to give the impression that the monovalent vaccine was not new." - Tehelka (New Delhi, India),UNTESTED VACCINE SURFACES IN POLIO OUTBREAK, July 28, 2007

Barbara Loe Fisher Commentary:

The wild-eyed vaccinologists are at it again. This time, World Health Organization doctors are hunting down children in India to pour a high potency live polio vaccine down their throats without telling parents it is an experimental vaccine. Using the unscientific rationale that "more is better" and with a callous disregard for human life and human rights, WHO officials replaced the tri-valent oral polio vaccine with an untested high potency monovalent Type 1 oral poliovirus vaccine without telling the public what it was doing.

Now there is more Type 1 (and Type 2) polio in India plus an unexplained higher incidence of non- polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis following widespread use of the experimental polio vaccine. Trotting out the shabby "coincidence" argument, the WHO's predictable response is "This is due to better reporting and surveillance. We know by our 50 years of experience that the polio vaccines are safe."

We have seen vaccinologists exercise unchecked power and experiment on children without the informed consent of their parents before and we will see it again. Exploitation is easy when people are carefully taught to trust and obey the orders of anyone wearing a white coat who comes to vaccinate.

The distraught mother of a little girl crippled by Type 1 polio after swallowing many doses of both the tri-valent and experimental mono-valent live polio vaccines was quoted by India's Tehelka (The People's Paper): "She is having polio drops ever since she was four days old. She has had over a dozen doses of the polio drops....There must be some thing wrong with the polio drops if even after so many doses my child has contracted polio. The government should test medicines before they are used. Pata nahin bachchoo ko kya pila rahin hain!" (Don't know what they are making my child drink), she adds."

One brave and clear thinking pediatrician in New Delhi, Jacob Puliyel, has written a letter to the editor of The Lancet, which published an article in April 2007 about the experimental high potency polio vaccine campaign in India. "We are shocked and dismayed that Lancet should have published the paper on the protective efficacy of monovalent oral Type 1 poliovirus....having overlooked the serious ethical issues involved...... What was introduced, according to this article, was a new vaccine that was five times more potent than previous vaccines, presumably also with the increased likelihood of adverse effects. No informed consent was taken, nor was the public told that the vaccine was experimental. " He protested experimentation on children by Indian health authorities, who licensed the experimental vaccine, and WHO authorities, who are running the mass vaccination program. "The oversight body that introduced this experimental vaccine should also have monitored adverse effects," he wrote to The Lancet. "Data from Uttar Pradesh show an increase in the incidence of non-polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis since the introduction of the monovalent vaccine."

Now that Dr. Puliyel, head of pediatrics at a New Delhi hospital, has spoken up about scientific and ethical lapses connected with the experimental polio vaccine program - will he be kicked out of his hospital and have his medical license revoked? Maybe not. But it is very likely that government health authorities and pediatrician colleagues will make his life miserable.

This kind of vaccine experimentation without informed consent does not happen only in India or Africa or South America among disadvantaged populations. This kind of exploitation also happens in America.

In what turned out to be a deadly experiment conducted during the mid-1980's using a high potency Edmonston Zagreb measles vaccine, vaccinologists first injected the experimental measles vaccine into four month old babies in Africa, the Middle East, Mexico and Haiti at 10 to 500 times the usual dose levels to try to overcome natural maternal antibodies and replace them with vaccine induced antibodies. Even though researchers in Africa knew half way through the experiment that a higher than expected number of girl babies were dying six months to three years following vaccination, the CDC moved the high potency measles vaccine trials to Los Angeles in 1990.

With the help of Kaiser Permanente, more than 1500 six month old primarily black and Hispanic babies in inner city LA were injected with the high potency EZ measles vaccine between June 1990 and October 1991. One child in the vaccine trial died from a bacterial infection that researchers insisted was unrelated to vaccination.

In June 1996, then CDC Director David Satcher admitted that an NIH investigation of the LA trial found that informed consent regulations had been violated: the LA parents were never told that their babies would be injected with an experimental vaccine that had never been licensed by the FDA for use in the U.S. Shortly after, researchers reported that infants with the highest antibody responses to high potency measles vaccine have the most profound immune suppression.

How high are the antibody responses of children in India who are repeatedly vaccinated for polio, especially after being given high potency polio vaccine? And how many are suffering immune suppression, which is followed by wild-type or vaccine strain polio or unexplained Acute Flaccid Paralysis?

The militaristic approach taken by vaccinologists employed by governments and the World Health Organization unfortunately includes conducting vaccine experiments without the informed consent of participants. Their assumption that proof of efficacy is all that matters because injuries and deaths following vaccination are always a "coincidence" is both unscientific and dangerous.

The human right to informed consent to all medical interventions which carry a risk of injury or death, including vaccination, should be made law in every country and there should be criminal and economic sanctions for all those who violate it during the course of clinical research or the practice of medicine.