As if the IRS, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Verizon-NSA, and AP journalists scandals weren’t enough to damn the Obama administration and sour the public’s perception of its self-declared high ideals, along comes Vaccination-gate — a misuse of power that “may yet kill hundreds of thousands,” according to the May 2013 issue of Scientific American.
The magazine’s analysis states: “In its zeal to identify Osama bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where he was hiding. The effort apparently failed, but the violation of trust threatens to set back global public health efforts by decades.” The administration has not denied the CIA plot.
The program started in a poor neighborhood of Abbottabad, “no doubt to give it an air of legitimacy,” SA opines. “Yet after the first in a standard series of three hepatitis B shots was given, the effort was abandoned so that the team could move to bin Laden’s wealthier community.” It is this lapse in protocol that betrayed the program for the bluff it was.
The deadly chickens are already roosting. “Villagers along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border chased off legitimate vaccine workers, accusing them of being spies. Taliban commanders banned polio vaccinations in parts of Pakistan, specifically citing the bin Laden ruse as justification.” After nine vaccine workers were murdered in Pakistan last December, the UN withdrew its vaccination teams. Two months later, gunmen killed ten polio workers in Nigeria. Though other accusations may be at work there — such as a rumor of a Western plot to sterilize girls — it’s a sign that the violence against vaccinators may be spreading.
Leslie F. Roberts of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health says that the distrust sowed by the fraudulent campaign in Pakistan could conceivably postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases that might otherwise not have occurred, with the victims “forevermore” blaming the US.
Humanitarian workers adhere to an international code of conduct that requires their services to be provided on the basis of need alone, not national agendas. NGOs, QUANGOs (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization)and such are already suspect, and occasionally banned, in some parts of the world. Using healthcare workers — protected noncombatants in conventional wars — to prosecute the war on al Qaeda can only make matters worse.
What might this administration’s fast and loose attitude toward international healthcare protocols presage for the implementation of our own Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?
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