The Core
Why We Are Here => Water Cooler => Topic started by: gm66 on May 01, 2020, 01:06:59 PM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQSYdAX_9JY
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Bill Gates fan here.. sorry :)
In my humble opinion that video sucks on many levels.
There is no such thing as a Global Health monopoly. And if there were thank god it's not with the US or any other governments.
I think The Gates Foundation is doing critical work that governments are failing to get done alone.
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No need to be sorry, i don't apologise for disliking some of the things that the man has done.
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I watched it, and it made want to dig up a little on the creator (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/James_Corbett). He seems to be a for profit Tin Foil Hat conspiracy pusher.
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Funny that this this world-changing philanthropy is framed as something bad. Almost everything that Corbett complains about here is something for which I admire Bill Gates and for doing something positive with his ill-gotten gains.
Bill Gates has spent much of the past two decades transforming himself from software magnate into a benefactor of humanity through his own Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In fact, Gates has surpassed Rockefeller’s legacy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation long having eclipsed The Rockefeller Foundation as the largest private foundation in the world, with $46.8 billion of assets on its books that it wields in its stated program areas of global health and development, global growth, and global policy advocacy.
That's a bad thing?
The near-eradication of polio has only happened because of the partnership between the Gates Foundation and Rotary International (I used to be in Rotary, for whom eliminating polio is a major priority, with Gates putting up more money than the combined efforts of Rotarians around the world). The Gates Foundation mandates an open access policy on all research they fund and they also make public all their donations, so you can see where all their money goes. Neither of those are true for many less open foundations.
Meanwhile, Corbett spends his energy and money denying climate change, railing about chemtrails and promoting "false flag" conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombings.
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It's a multi-part series, so you have more to look forward to chaps ;+}
But seriously though, yes he has made massive donations, but he's made those donations to manoeuvre himself into a position to promote privatised health and privatised agriculture in Africa and India, while the farmers in those two countries want food and medicine independence (in Africa the farmers call it food sovereignty).
He pushes GM crops and even the privatisation of seed production, giving lots of money to Monsanto.
So he is doing some good things but his long-term effect is profit for the US and UK companies that he's in league with, who want to own the food and medicine markets in those countries, and the loss of independence for farmers, who eventually (i predict) won't even be able to save their own seeds. I predict this because this is the modern, corporate-agricultural model in the West.
In the UK farmers have to pay to use seeds they've saved from their own crops (section 9 of the plant varieties act 1997), in the US the situation is similar, but even worse if you use Monsanto seeds.
We all know about Microsoft's domestic and international tax-avoidance strategies so i won't go into that, and to be fair he's not alone there (Apple, Google, General Electric to name just 3), but why dodge taxes that would benefit your own country and those that you sell to?
Vaccination programmes, in the end it's all about pricing of course, and GAVI (the 'Vaccination Alliance') is dominated by corporate interests. They have something called Advance Market Commitment, a mechanism to ensure vaccines have a minimum fixed price once they are on the market. This acts as an incentive for the vaccine producers. This sounds good but it always results in overpriced vaccines, always. They've been heavily criticised by groups like Oxfam, who care about people rather than profit.
The IP rights for many vaccines are owned by a tiny minority of companies and this drives prices up even further, a few years ago Medecins sans Frontieres did a study which found that the cost of vaccinating a child had multiplied by 68 times over the previous 10 years, all due to privatisation and greed, to quote MSF :
“... mainly because a handful of big pharmaceutical companies are overcharging donors and developing countries for vaccines that already earn them billions of dollars in wealthy countries”.
There are many instances of Gates being dismissive when asked about overpricing of vaccines, even though the result is that the poor people he claims to want to help can't afford them.
I could go on and on, the food, medicine and water markets have intensely interested me for decades since they are so important, and to have so few in control of them is very dangerous, especially when they are profit-motivated and all in the same club.
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Bill is a globalist.
NUFF Said
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Bill is a globalist.
NUFF Said
Yup. I've got nothing against a conscientious-capitalist globalism but there's no conscience in the current model, it's all about profit and control.
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Bill Gates commits $750M to help Oxford vaccinate the world against COVID-19 (https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/06/05/bill-gates-covid-coronavirus-vaccine-750-million-oxford-azd1222/)
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None of the info below is related to any of the crap conspiracy theories that are all over SM apparently.
Gates-supported polio vaccine causes more polio than wild polio :
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/28/534403083/mutant-strains-of-polio-vaccine-now-cause-more-paralysis-than-wild-polio?t=1596554059417
Details of Gates' support for the above : https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Polio
A later report, showing that ~80% of polio cases are vaccine-derived :
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/12/19/what-is-vaccine-derived-polio
The later 2018 IJERP report that concludes nearly half a million people were paralysed due to oral polio vaccinations :
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6121585/pdf/ijerph-15-01755.pdf
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I was somehwat up on this at one point when I was a Rotary member, as Rotary's main initiative is polio eradication.
The problem with the live-virus oral polio vaccine (OPV) and vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) has been discussed for quite some time in public health circles. Contrary to what you seem to be implying, though, the number of polio victims, even accounting for the elevated risk, has been massively lower than the alternative.
However, there is an inflection point where risk of wild polio virus (WPV) cases does not justify the risk of the live-virus OPV and the super aggressive repeated vaccinations that are called for when facing a massive epidemic, and that is the problem that the paper you cite is addressing (and it is a real problem).
It's a risk/benefit calculation, not a verdict on whether live-virus OPV is harmful or helpful to humanity (immeasurably helpful on net) and does not apply to the IPV vaccine, which is not associated with these problems (to my knowledge).
Also, keep in mind, these are not 491,000 additional cases. The net is still massively lower with OPV vaccination than with no vaccination. The question is when you reach crossover for whether OPV is doing more good than IPV (not than no vaccine, which is not even up for debate, I'm sorry). For some years, people have been saying India has/had finally reached that point. But it asbolutely, definitely, was NOT there when Rotary and Gates began pouring money in to help bring the hyperepidemic under control.
This is much different from saying that the polio vaccine is bad or even that the OPV is bad.
- the polio vaccine used in India during the period is the OPV, a live-virus, but attenuated, form of polio. It most certainly carries more risks, but is more effective, than the inactivated polio virus (IPV) that is used to maintain herd immunity in other places, like the US (and presumably the UK) since 2000. It's a question of risk/benefit. The mechanism is not certain, but it appears that the doses may be so high in India that even the attenuated form can colonise the gut and possibly then mutate and pass to others. It's a real public health issue, no question.
- At least as early as 2013, the WHO called for beginning a transition away from the OPV to the IPV vaccine as worldwide incidence of polio decreases (as I mentioned, in the US and countries where polio was considered eradicated, this took place around 2000).
- this study studies pulse vaccination where kids are getting 8-10 doses of live virus, compared to the 3 doses plus booster of inactivated virus that kids get in countries where polio is considered controlled or eradicated. After 2004, it was common in India to conduct 10 nationwide rounds of vaccination in a single year.
- India was, at the time this started, "hyperepidemic" and accounted for 60% of all polio cases in the world.
- Before this started, India saw 500-1000 cases of paralysis and death EVERY DAY due to polio.
For the 491,000 people who appear to have been afflicted in India due to the vaccine between 2000 and 2017, you have to stack that up against the 500-1000 cases daily in 1999. If you look at what the toll of that would have been, you get 3.3 million to 6.6 million cases. Also, you have to remember that those millions of cases are lower than might be since already before the all-out effort, a lot of Indians were being vaccinated, not just in the incredible numbers at the aggressive doses you see after 1999 (147,000,000 doses given out in a single day once).
The point of that paper is not that polio vaccination is bad, and definitely not a net ill, but that the hyper-aggressive pulse vaccination program with live virus is no longer warranted in India as the disease is no longer hyper-epidemic in India and that vaccine practices should transition to practices similar to in nations where polio is under control because, at a certain point, you hit crossover where the additional protection provided by live-virus is offset by the additional risks and the net number of polio cases is higher with OPV than with IPV vaccines.
Eradicating poliomyelitis: India's journey from hyperendemic to polio-free status (2013)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734678/
The conclusion in the abstract of the above paper gives a nice summary (WPV = wild polio virus)
Elimination of WPVs with OPV is only phase 1 of polio eradication. India is poised to progress to phase 2, with introduction of inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), switch from tOPV to bOPV and final elimination of all vaccine-related and vaccine-derived polioviruses. True polio eradication demands zero incidence of poliovirus infection, wild and vaccine.
Oral polio drops linked to paralysis in India
https://www.scidev.net/asia-pacific/disease/news/oral-polio-drops-linked-to-paralysis-in-india.html
Objective 2: Immunization systems strengthening and OPV withdrawal
http://polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/PEESP_CH6_EN_US.pdf
http://polioeradication.org/who-we-are/strategic-plan-2013-2018/
Vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis in India during 1999: decreased risk despite massive use of oral polio vaccine
https://www.who.int/bulletin/archives/en/80(3)210.pdf
Objective Vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) is a rare but serious consequence of the administration of oral polio vaccine (OPV). Intensified OPV administration has reduced wild poliovirus transmission in India but VAPP is becoming a matter of concern....
Data from the acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) surveillance system in Latin America showed an estimated VAPP risk of 1 case per 1.5–2.2 million doses administered in 1989–91 (6). These studies demonstrated that the risk was substantially increased following receipt of the first dose of OPV and that children with B-cell immunodeficiency disorders were at highest risk for VAPP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_Polio
https://www.webmd.com/children/vaccines/polio-vaccine-ipv#1
https://web.archive.org/web/20070929090612/http://www.immunize.cpha.ca/english/consumer/consrese/pdf/Polio.pdf
And for another reference:
The Economist article you link to:
The tally for 2018 shows a dramatic swing: 98 cases of vaccine-derived polio; 29 cases of the wild version. What is vaccine-derived polio?
Wikipedia
At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide every year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio
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Yes wild polio can also paralyse but what was detailed in those papers was the fact that they can prove whether the origin is wild or vaccine-derived.
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>> can prove whether the origin is wild or vaccine-derived.
That would be an interesting detail but we mustn't let it obscure the main thing that's critical here: how the total case count would compare, with vaccines versus without.
I was too young to know anyone who was killed by polio, but I know more than one person who survived it but was left with a lifelong limp or deformity.
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>> can prove whether the origin is wild or vaccine-derived.
That would be an interesting detail but we mustn't let it obscure the main thing that's critical here
I was under the impression, in the context of the OP, that being able to distinguish synthesised vs wild was a core part of the reasoning, not just an interesting detail, and it is also what actually constitutes the main thing you say we are potentially obscuring?
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>> it is also what actually constitutes the main thing you say we are potentially obscuring?
Please clarify that for me. I think I'm missing something here.
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the fact that they can prove whether the origin is wild or vaccine-derived.
I don't think that is what's interesting or new in those articles and papers.
The new information is this: they have a better estimate of the vaccine-caused cases of paralysis because they have data from when they started and when the stopped the pulse vaccination with OPV, supporting data going back 30 or more years, but showing that the rate of vaccine-caused cases in India is higher than previously thought, which has implications for which treatment is best.
Indeed, the controversy goes back to Salk and Sabin. Salk and the March of Dimes always preferred the safer "killed" virus Salk vaccine over Sabin's OPV, but trials by Sabin in the USSR and later Cincinnati demonstrated the incredible effectiveness of the OPV, precisely because polio enters the body through the intestines. But it was known to be more dangerous even back in the 1950s. Again, it was a risk/reward question. Ultimately, for those areas facing epidemic and hyperepidemic conditions, the Sabin OPV won out over the Salk vaccine because the risk was deemed worth it.
I think you're being perhaps confused by the talk about Type 2 polio. There are three types of polio, and the OPV in use at the time is a trivalent OPV (designated as tOPV in the literature and developed by Sabin circa 1964). If you look at that link to the WHO plan, you can see that part of the plan is to switch to IPV and bivalent OPV (bOPV).
The idea there is that if Type 2 is eradicated in the wild, and you find cases of Type 2, that means it is probably vaccine-induced (or your belief that it was eradicated is wrong). But that does NOT mean that the vaccine is not ALSO causing Type 1 and Type 3 infections. It gives you another tool at the epidemiological level to determine the number of cases of polio you're *causing* by vaccination and, by extension, you can directly attribute *some* of the vaccine-induced cases, but you're still missing those vaccine-induced cases where the wild type still exists. But you still account for those using epidemiological methods as in the IJERP you link to.
That's the point of the Economist article.
The scientific paper you're looking at is not focused on that at all. Rather, they are simply saying that as there are now places that have stopped doing the pulse vaccination in India, they can get a better estimate of the number of cases caused by vaccine and they can more strongly prove a causal relationship, because they can see when pulse vaccination declined and then look at the evolution of cases.
By itself that does not say which vaccine is better, but helps determine the inflection point where you switch from OPV to IPV (and tOPV to bOPV if appropriate).
Look at it this way. Say you have treatment A and treatment B for preventing people from becoming Twitter users.
Effectiveness (percentage of infections prevented)
A: 99.99%
B: 99.9%
Very bad side effects rate (risk of becoming a Twitter user).
A: 0.0015%
B: 0.00015%
Which is better? A is 10X more effective, but 10X more dangerous. Does that make it better, or worse? Well, it depends.
The rate of bad side effects is determined by the number of treatments. But the benefits are proportional to the number of wild infections.
So let's say you give treatments to one million people. Then you expect that B will result 15 people using Twitter who would not otherwise have done so without the treatment. But A will result in 150 Twitter users, which is obviously worse.
Now the question is, how many cases are prevented? If the natural incidence is 10%, that would be 100,000 natural cases of Twitteritis per million. If you administer treatment A to those million people, you still end up with 100 cases compared to the 1000 wild Twitter cases you get with treatment B.
Case A: 100 natural cases of Twitteritis
Case B: 1000 natural cases of Twitteritis
So then you look at the totals
A: 100 + 150 = 250 total Twitter users.
B: 1000 + 15 - 1015 total Twitter users.
And both are astronomically better than the 100,000 cases in the "no treatment" scenario, but the "dangerous" treatment results in fewer overall Twitter users. As a public health official, you have to opt for treatment A, even in full knowledge that some people will be harmed by that treatment.
But what if the natural infection rate is only 1%? Well, your bad outcomes per million treated do not change, but the number prevented does. Now you end up with 10 and 100 so your totals are
A: 10 + 150 = 160
B: 100 + 15 = 115
Again, both are astronomically better than the 100,000 cases in the "no treatment" scenario, but now the "less effective" treatment results in fewer total Twitter users.
You've hit the inflection point. Now it's better to switch to the less effective, but safer treatment as that results in the lowest possible number of Twitter users, which, obviously, is a fundamental social good.
If you go back to the data from South America from the 1980s and 1990s (see my previous post), then you in fact are looking at rates of 1-1.5 per 100,000. If you look at the numbers from India, though, it is much higher. Some is reporting inconsistency (at 60 days, 56.5% in UP were found to have recovered; in some other places those people would not be counted). But a lot of it is probably due to the incredibly high vaccine loads that the Indians were using in the effort to fight this scourge.
So basically, what the paper does is show that the inflection point occurs earlier than you might think based on earlier studies, and therefore India should transition earlier to IPV or at least bOPV with IPV backup for Type 2. And that's the point of the WHO roadmap and the Gates Foundation article as well. New data. New strategies.
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That said, what I was really objecting to was this statement:
Gates-supported polio vaccine causes more polio than wild polio
This is incredibly misleading. Sure, because of the incredible effectiveness of the polio eradication programs, the incidence of polio is now so low, that we have passed the inflection point and need to transition to Phase II vaccination strategies. That is a testament to the GOOD that Bill Gates (and Rotary and WHO and others) have done here, not proof of a nefarious plot.
As you state it, the implication is, rather, that Bill Gates is evil because he is pushing an unsafe vaccine on the poor populations of the world. That is simply turning the world upside down. What Gates has done is one of the most significant humanitarian efforts in history. The question is not whether or not there is an undeniable good to what he did there, but whether or not they should have transitioned earlier to a different vaccine.
The problem with the assertion that Gates is evil for pushing a dangerous vaccine is that you can't know that until years later after you have the good epidemiological evidence that the authors give in the study you cite, and the Gates Foundation is adjusting accordingly.
Was Gates a cut-throat monopolist who created a graveyard of viable businesses that died young because of him? Of course. I'm not interested in litigating Bill Gate's past and arguing over whether on balance he has been a force for good or bad when looking at his whole life in perspective.
He is no Jonas Salk or Albert Sabin (two of the GREAT heroes of the 20th century; hopefully we are not going to debate that).
But setting aside anything else Gates may or may not have done, funding polio eradication in India, did immeasurable good.
It's just that, as the Gates Foundation document and the scholarly articles state, it is time to move to Phase II of the battle (see the paper I linked in the previous post), because India is finally passing the inflection point where the cheapest and most effective treatment is doing less good than the more expensive and less-effective treatment would do due to the fact that OPV has a higher rate of highly negative side effects (death and paralysis).
Gates could have used his billions to build fantasy man-toy rockets like cut-throat billionaire monopolist Jeff Bezos.
Gates could have used his billions to fund climate disinformation efforts like cut-throat billionaire monopolists Charles and David Koch.
But instead, Gates used his billions to rid India of one of the most devastating communicable diseases known to humanity. By 2009, the number of annual cases in India was roughly the same as the number of *daily* cases a decade earlier. Thanks Bill!
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>> fantasy man-toy rockets
That made me laugh out loud!
Thanks for your posts, Ergophobe. Once again I have learned from you!
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Yes thanks for that post Ergophobe .. very interesting.
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It was a very interesting post Erg, and very well researched, further than i looked, but ultimately it's like saying "yes i may die from the operation but the risk is worth it" but on a global scale involving negative health effects on many innocents.
Would you fund this if you were a billionaire?
And it's not as if a few people died along the way and then there were no more cases so it may have been worth it, it's ongoing and it has a massive negative effect on hundreds and thousands of people to this day.
It's a f###ing never-ending revenue stream for a bloody nerd who stole DOS and is now practically in charge of the WHO, and who is on video saying that de-population is a good idea, conflict of interest anyone? It is blatantly preposterous.
This is to everyone that thinks the world is run by people that care about us all :
Have you seen what they will be charging for the vaccines?
Do you know that all the big 'vaccine providers' had their immunity from any ill effects on us the consumers for years ahead instated just a couple of months ago ?
Did you here about Ireland's Health Passport and how the groundwork started 18 months before COVID ?
Did you read about doctors being paid much more to provide a COVID death diagnostic than any other ?
Did you read about hospital administrations putting pressure on health professionals to make COVID death diagnostics ?
Did you read the official stats from the UK this week, showing that there are practically zero ICU admissions ?
Do you have members of your family who work in hospitals and have told you that they are empty and there is no pandemic, but the people that should be in hospital are dying ?
Most of us can answer yes to most of the above, so why would we have such differing opinions, is the above not worrying at all ?
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>>Would you fund this if you were a billionaire?
As I explained, I am not a billionaire, but I did contribute to funding the effort to distribute polio vaccine in India. I would say that I feel very good about what I did there, except that if I were a more generous person, I would have donated more. I feel good that I donated, but less good that I did not really donate as much as I could have. But that's because I'm a flawed person, not because I have any regrets about vaccinating Indians with polio vaccine. If I were a better person, I would have given more.
>>it's ongoing and it has a massive negative effect on hundreds and thousands of people to this day.
I feel like you are still not understanding the calculus between choosing the oral vs the IPV vaccine, why choosing the oral vaccine made total sense and was the right choice for many years, why that is no longer so but the transition is not immediate, and why all the people concerned are working to fix that situation and have been working to fix it for several years before I, you or the Corbett Report even knew it was a problem that did indeed need to be solved. It's a set of tradeoffs, and deciding which tradeoffs are worth it requires good science and good science takes time.
>>Have you seen what they will be charging for the vaccines?
Yes. Much, much less thanks to the efforts of Bill Gates.
"Bill Gates is spending $150 million to try to make a coronavirus vaccine as cheap as $3"
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/8/21359227/bill-gates-foundation-coronavirus-vaccine-serum-astrazeneca-novavax
The economics of vaccines for episodic diseases are very difficult for for-profit drug companies. Without money from governments or people like Bill Gates, vaccines are going to be expensive, especially vaccines for episodic diseases. The economics of a measles vaccine work out pretty well because you know how many doses you need each year and you can build a supply chain around that. You can't do that with a disease like ebola or SARS-COV-2. Those vaccines will be expensive and have limited availability if it's up to for-profit companies to supply them. There's no way around that.
And who is Bill Gates really worried about?
It’ll take months—or even years—to create 7 billion doses (or possibly 14 billion, if it’s a multi-dose vaccine), and we should start distributing them as soon as the first batch is ready to go.
Most people agree that health workers should get the vaccine first. But who gets it next? Older people? Teachers? Workers in essential jobs?
I think that low-income countries should be some of the first to receive it, because people will be at a much higher risk of dying in those places. COVID-19 will spread much quicker in poor countries because measures like physical distancing are harder to enact. More people have poor underlying health that makes them more vulnerable to complications, and weak health systems will make it harder for them to receive the care they need. Getting the vaccine out in low-income countries could save millions of lives.
-- Bill Gates
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-you-need-to-know-about-the-COVID-19-vaccine
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>> Did you read about doctors being paid much more to provide a COVID death diagnostic than any other ?
I've read about that but not from sources I trust.
Even if it's true that there might be some over-reporting, balance that against the fact that people who die at home don't always get counted as COVID deaths even if that's what killed them.
We'll get a better idea of what's happening in a region if we look at total "excess deaths", as well as reported COVID deaths.