BBC Forced to Admit Dark Side to Bill Gates’s Polio Project

January 30, 2013

30 Jan (AGE OF AUTISM) – Ahead of tonight’s prestigious Dimbleby lecture by Bill Gates the BBC has been forced to acknowledge that there are serious concerns about the safety and usefulness of Gates’s polio  project.   In an apparently upbeat article ‘The world can defeat polio’  the BBC’s Medical Correspondent, Fergus Walsh, slips in a reference to the work of Jacob Puliyel quote in AoA last week. The abstract to the paper by Vashisht and Puliyel in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics states:

It was hoped that following polio eradication, immunisation could be stopped. However the synthesis of polio virus in 2002, made eradication impossible. It is argued that getting poor countries to expend their scarce resources on an impossible dream over the last 10 years was unethical. Furthermore, while India has been polio-free for a year, there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP). In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of NPAFP. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated. The principle of primum-non-nocere was violated. The authors suggest that the huge bill of US$ 8 billion spent on the programme, is a small sum to pay if the world learns to be wary of such vertical programmes in the future. 

Bill Gates

Clearly, what should occur is an open public debate about these issues rather than just taking the word of the world’s most successful salesperson. 

For more on this article go to Age of Autism.