Israeli university received $1.3m polio research grant from Gates Foundation right before polio 'found' in Gaza

Vaccine strain polio brought into Gaza from abroad

Every so often, the media reports the discovery of polio virus in a sewer system somewhere, typically prompting a call for vaccination of the masses against polio. This past week Israeli officials discovered polio in the sewer system again, this time in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government is now offering polio vaccinations to all its soldiers serving in the area, according to World Israel News.

What was actually found in Gaza sewage is type 2 virus, the strain derived from the oral polio vaccine (OPV). (In 2022 it was type 3 vaccine strain.) The OPV is a live virus vaccine which has been attenuated (weakened). The vaccine strain virus, excreted by people who have recently been vaccinated, can in rare cases cause polio should the virus regain its original virulence. Most developed countries have eradicated wild-type polio and use the inactivated (killed) virus vaccine (IPV) rather than the OPV. Since the OPV hasn't been used in Israel or Gaza since 2016, it is suspected that the polio vaccine-virus was brought by an aid worker or tourist  from a country where the OPV is still in use, as reported by Maeve Cullinan for The Telegraph.

The vaccine responsible has not been used in Gaza or surrounding regions since 2016, causing experts to suspect it was brought in by someone who had been in Africa where the vaccine has not yet been phased out.

Dr Hamid Jafari, Director of the Global Polio Eradication Programme, WHO Eastern Mediterranean region, told The Telegraph, the vaccine-derived strain identified in Gaza had been used “quite extensively” to tackle outbreaks in recent years in Africa.

“This strain must have been brought in by someone from a country where this vaccine is used,” explained Dr Hamid.

Some experts have suggested that the strain could have been brought in by a foreign aid worker from a country where that vaccine has been used, or perhaps was brought into Israel by a traveller and spread to Gaza.

“We are still investigating the source; there could be any number of scenarios, but it can’t have originated locally because they don’t use the type 2 oral vaccine,” Dr Jafari said.

How to avoid such scenarios in the future

While imposing travel restrictions is generally unpopular, there is plenty of precedent for such a course of action. If travel could be restricted during the COVID era, people from countries where the OPV is still used could be barred from traveling to OPV-free countries until they switch to the IPV and the danger of a possible polio outbreak from OPV from the feces of vaccinated people is eliminated. ‍‍

OPV drives polio outbreaks

However, there is a problem with using the IPV. The website Polio Eradication explains that the IPV does not stop wild-type virus infection:

IPV induces very low levels of immunity in the intestine. As a result, when a person immunized with IPV is infected with wild poliovirus, the virus can still multiply inside the intestines and be shed in the faeces, risking continued circulation.

In the case of a wild-type outbreak, the oral polio vaccine will need to be used, Polio Eradication continues:

An increasing number of industrialized, polio-free countries are using IPV as the vaccine of choice. This is because the risk of paralytic polio associated with continued routine use of OPV is deemed greater than the risk of imported wild virus.

However, as IPV does not stop transmission of the virus, OPV is used wherever a polio outbreak needs to be contained, even in countries which rely exclusively on IPV for their routine immunization programme.‍

Once polio has been eradicated, use of all OPV will need to be stopped to prevent re-establishment of transmission due to VDPVs.

OPV creates perpetual polio outbreaks.

As reported in Nature, vaccine-derived polio is now "undermining the fight to eradicate the virus," creating perpetual outbreaks.

Polio is a disease of low incidence

Fearmongering >> vaccine

Polio, despite the terror it inspires, is a disease with low incidence. As Alexander D. Langmuir, et. al, explained in "The Importance of Measles as a Health Problem" (a February 1962 article published in the Journal of Public Health), morbidity and mortality were not necessarily the criteria used when deciding which illnesses to focus on in vaccine development. When it came to polio, it was parental concern, not incidence, that created the market for the polio vaccine:

The importance of any disease as a public health problem must be gauged from many angles. For example, using mortality as a criterion heart disease becomes most important. Short-term morbidity makes the common cold rank high. For chronic disability arthritis and mental disease dominate. In spite of relatively low incidence, nothing has equaled poliomyelitis. (Emphasis added.)

At least 95% of cases are flu-like illness

Man Mohan Mehndiratta, MD, DM, MNAMS, FAMS, FRCP, et. al, in their continuing education activity published in StatPearls, note that most people with the virus have a very mild form. Only five percent of cases are serious.

In up to 95% of cases, infections are non-paralytic, presenting as a flu-like illness. In approximately 5% of cases, pure motor paralysis can occur.

Not all paralysis is polio, Mehndiratta et. al. point out.

The authors also state that an illness may be "polio-like" and should be differentiated from other viruses.

In light of the recent increase in polio-like illnesses in the US, it is important to differentiate between poliomyelitis and other viruses such as enterovirus-D68.

Half a million children paralyzed following Gates polio campaign

When Bill Gates decided to make it his mission to eradicate polio in India, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) initiated a "pulse polio" program giving children under five years multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine every year, as recounted by Rodef Shalom 613. Between 2000 and 2017, 491,704 children were left paralyzed due to the numerous OPV shots.

The Gates Foundation, the largest contributor to the World Health Organization (WHO), earmarks most of its contributions for vaccination activities; over 26% of the WHO’s budget has been earmarked for polio eradication.

Although polio has been promoted as a fearsome disease, paralyzing millions, 99% of those infected do not exhibit paralysis, to the point of making surveillance difficult. India instituted a comprehensive surveillance program to detect instances of acute flacid paralysis ( AFP), and thereby catch instances of polio. Stool samples were used to differentiate AFP from NPAFP (non-polio acute flacid paralysis) which is a more severe and fatal form of paralysis than AFP paralysis from polio.

The polio eradication campaign began in India in 2000. A pulse polio program was instituted, consisting of a series of OPV (live virus) vaccinations given to children under age 5, multiple times a year. By the end of the program children had received up to 50 cumulative doses. It was assumed that once polio was eliminated the numbers of AFP cases would go down to an accepted normal range. When the last case of polio was reported in 2011, there were 47,500 cases of NPAFP that year, well over the expected amount.

In 2012, since wild polio had been eliminated, the country began decreasing the number of pulse polio rounds, and with that came a decrease in the number of NPAFP cases. The intensive campaign to eliminate polio was found to have harmed more children than it helped – from 2000 to 2017, 491,704 children were paralyzed as a result of the numerous OPV shots. (Emphasis added.)

Experts in India were troubled by the polio eradication campaign. In the end, they said, it wasn’t worth the price:

… while the anti-polio campaign in India was mostly self-financed it started with a token donation of two million dollars from abroad. “The Indian government finally had to fund this hugely expensive programme, which cost the country 100 times more than the value of the initial grant.”“This is a startling reminder of how initial funding and grants from abroad distort local priorities … “From India’s perspective the exercise has been an extremely costly both in terms of human suffering and in monetary terms. It is tempting to speculate what could have been achieved if the $2.5 billion spent on attempting to eradicate polio, were spent on water and sanitation and routine immunization.”… “the polio eradication programme epitomizes nearly everything that is wrong with donor funded ‘disease specific’ vertical projects at the cost of investments in community-oriented primary health care (horizontal programmes).” (Emphasis added.)

Definition of polio changed

"Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History" co-author Roman Bystrianyk tweeted about the failure of the Gates campaign, explaining that in 1997 the definition of polio was changed and stressing the effect this had on reported cases of polio.

In India in 1997, the definition of polio changed, and many paralysis cases shifted to AFP – Acute Flaccid Paralysis. If we use the old polio definition, we can see paralysis cases have shot up and only began to decline in 2012, with the number of oral polio vaccine (OPV) doses administered to children each year gradually reduced.

Is Gates at it again?

Interestingly, a little over a month before vaccine-strain polio was detected in Gaza waste water, the BMGF granted Israel's Ben Gurion University $1.3 million to develop and validate its approach to measuring immune responses to polioviruses.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has received a $1.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and validate a novel and safe approach for measuring immune responses to polioviruses. This research is being led by Prof. Tomer Hertz of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics and the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev (NIBN).

. . .

The funding will help Prof. Hertz and his team apply and optimize PAM – a polio antigen microarray - that was originally developed using research grants from the WHO-coordinated Polio Research Committee. PAM requires only minimal amounts of serum, or dried blood spots. Its validation will facilitate rapid analysis of serological surveys in countries where polio has yet to be eradicated.

. . .

“This is a very exciting opportunity to test our PAM assay on a large set of samples from a serosurvey conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo and we are very excited to get this project underway, and hope that this will lead to the establishment of a novel and safe to use assay for measuring protection from polio infection,” says Prof. Hertz. (Emphases added.)

>> Will the BMGF use these assays to promote polio vaccines in Gaza, Israel, and the Democratic Republic of Congo?

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Featured image - CDC Vaccine Safety Update