A good tiny step, a public relations ploy given the UN’s failure to stop the carnage — or something even more sinister: “Is Israel engaging in biological warfare against the Palestinians?”
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In October 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared:
“No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.’”
In November 2023, Middle East Eye reported in “Former Israel general says ‘severe epidemics’ in Gaza would help Israel win the war”:
“A retired senior Israeli general has said that Israel should not ‘shy away’ from permitting the outbreak of severe epidemics amongst Palestinians in southern Gaza as it will bring Israel ‘closer to victory.’
“‘The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics,’ retired Major General Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, wrote Sunday.
“‘We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.’
“Eiland went on to say that the Israeli government must take a ‘harder line’ against the US and rule out discussions about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza until all the hostages held in the besieged enclave are released.
“The opinion article elicited an endorsement from far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said, ‘I agree with every word.’”
Zeiad Abbas Shamrouch, executive director of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, told me in November:
“Due to Israel cutting off some of the supply of water and destroying key water infrastructure and storage tanks, people are being forced to drink water from unsafe sources. Dehydration and waterborne diseases are spreading and medicine is running out. There are outbreaks of chickenpox, scabies and diarrhea due to the shortage of water.”
The BBC reported in May that “Half of Gaza water sites damaged or destroyed, BBC satellite data reveals.”
Drop Site News reported in July in “The IDF Just Destroyed a Key Rafah Water Facility Rachel Corrie Spent Her Last Month of Life Defending” about a video showing the “calculated demolition of a chief water facility in Rafah. The video, in three parts, shows Israeli soldiers planting explosives inside and around the water pumps of a facility in the occupied city. The video — which is captioned in Hebrew, ‘Destruction of the Tal Sultan water reservoir in honor of Shabbat’ — ends with footage of the water facility being blown up. The soundtrack is a song produced by soldiers of the 51st Golani Brigade with lyrics like, ‘We will burn Gaza… shake all of Gaza… for every house you destroy we will destroy ten.’ …
“For months, Israeli forces have been targeting vital water resources in the strip leading to starvation and, according to new reports, worsening access to clean water. Last week, the Israeli military and the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that Poliovirus has been found in Gaza’s sewage, further intensifying the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the occupied enclave.”
The Daily Mail in August reported on Israelis who had been held captive in Gaza:
“Blood tests also showed they had been exposed to a range of diseases, including typhus and spotted fever, during their 50 days in captivity. Many of them were also experiencing head lice due to poor hygiene conditions, including a lack of running water.”
The Vaccine
So, why is Israel reportedly agreeing to pauses to allow for administration of the polio vaccine? That may be hard to know for sure, but a few things that should be understood:
- The WHO is not what it seems to many people. There’s lots that can be said about that, but what I have examined is that the group’s chief scientist, Jeremy Farrar, who was a central figure, and perhaps the central figure, in the massive propaganda campaign which claimed in 2020 that Covid could not have a lab origin. It is simply not a credible organization just on that basis. Additionally, this gives a great deal of credence to arguments that the WHO is capable of making critical decisions with the aim of control, manipulation and publicity rather than the health and wellbeing of the global public.
- The vaccine being given to Palestinian children in Gaza is nOPV2, that is, novel oral polio vaccine, focusing on type 2 polio. Prior oral vaccines have been problematic. They contain attenuated (weakened) polio virus. This can be problematic since, as The Journal of Infectious Diseases noted in 2013: “With prolonged replication, attenuated polioviruses used in oral polio vaccine (OPV) can mutate into vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) and cause poliomyelitis [polio] outbreaks.”
- OPV was typically given in poorer countries. In rich counties like the US, what has been given is IPV which is made with inactive polio virus and given intramuscularly (an injection), not orally.
- According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative (whose partners include the WHO, CDC and the Gates Foundation), the outbreak in Gaza is from Egypt. Curiously, the Initiative claims “the variant poliovirus could have been introduced in Gaza as early as September 2023” — that is, prior to Oct. 7. The Egyptian polio outbreak according to a recent article in BMC Infectious Diseases came from a “vaccine-derived polioviruses”. That is, the outbreak now in Gaza appears, according to these sources, to be the result of the negative effects of polio vaccines given in Egypt which mutated.
- In 2018, Science reported: “Alarming polio outbreak spreads in Congo, threatening global eradication efforts: Vaccine-derived virus spreads despite emergency response.”
- Neetu Vashisht and Jacob Puliye in 2012 wrote in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics: “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. … The charade about polio eradication and the great savings it will bring has persisted to date. It is a paradox, that while the director general of WHO, Margret Chan, and Bill Gates are trying to muster support for polio eradication (22) it has been known to the scientific community, for over 10 years, that eradication of polio is impossible.”
- Nature reported in 2023: “Vaccine-derived polio is undermining the fight to eradicate the virus: Wild polio has almost been eradicated, but vaccine-derived strains retain the potential to paralyse. Better vaccines have arrived — but they are only part of the answer.”
- nOPV2 is a relatively new vaccine. In March, the WHO noted that nOPV2 has been used since 2021 “under WHO Emergency Use Listing (EUL) approval”. A report posted on the CDC website notes that there have been cases of it causing polio as in Burundi and DRC, but apparently at a substantially lower rate than previous oral vaccines. But The BMJ reported in August 2023 in “Polio vaccines: hope, hype, and history repeating?” that despite a great deal of positive media spin: “Before it was approved for emergency use, scientists warned that nOPV2 would not solve the problem set for it: to stamp out vaccine-derived polio. So far, it has not done so. Instead there are unanswered questions about the vaccine’s performance, whether the decision to rely on it was right, and whether there’s a viable path to the dream of global eradication even with a full suite of modernised vaccines.”
- Some prior OPV disasters are outlined in Science from May, largely about the Gates Foundation: “‘Unqualified failure’ in polio vaccine policy left thousands of kids paralyzed”.
- It seems remarkable that the WHO and company can spot and prioritize a case of polio amid the carnage and devastation that Israel has wrecked on Gaza. It seems driven by ideology, control or interest rather than prioritizing the needs of the Palestinians in Gaza.
- nOPV2 requires another dose in four weeks. It is not clear to me what happens if someone gets one dose and not the second.
- While Israeli snipers are targeting children in the head, Israel is being depicted as agreeing to a truce to help save children from polio.
- Some have argued Israel’s goal is to ensure that there is not a polio outbreak in Gaza since that might threaten it — it’s an example of enlightened self-interest. However, this reasoning might be undermined by the fact that Israel has been giving its soldiers a polio vaccine. And they have been giving them the IPV vaccine, not the oral one given to Palestinians. This would indicate that they would be immune to it and Israel may effectively come off unscathed from a polio outbreak among the Palestinians. Also, IPV deals with all three types of polio. In 2022, Israel had cases of polio and the WHO reports IPA and OPV were used.
- The vaccines may be seen by some as a minimal help to Palestinians in Gaza, preventing yet another disaster. And the minimal pauses resulting may be seen as baby steps toward permanent ceasefire, but this seems quite optimistic, especially given Israel’s posture. It is quite possible that the nOPV2 vaccine is largely being done for public relations reasons. This was the case for the much hyped pier the US government was allegedly building to help the Palestinians in Gaza. Some thought that there was a diabolical plot around the pier — as a mechanism for mass expulsion for example. But it mostly served as a propaganda talking point to communicate alleged US government benevolence for months on end, giving cover for Israel to continue its genocide.
- Moreover, this is useful to distract from the failure of the UN to stop Israel’s carnage. Most especially the US-dominated UN Security Council has refused to implement orders from the International Court of Justice and virtually all states — with the notable exceptions of South Africa and Nicaragua — have failed in responsibilities under the Genocide Convention. The General Assembly has failed to take meaningful action using “Uniting for Peace”. So now, the WHO doing a hopefully minimally successful immunization effort is being used in various pronouncements to put a happy face for the UN system on the continuing catastrophe. See recent WHO/UN news conference.
- Perhaps most ominously however, it may be problematic to give attenuated oral polio vaccine to a population that is immunocompromised — which most certainly includes the Palestinians in Gaza. They desperately need food and clean water and basic medical care. A host of diseases are ravaging Gaza and reportedly, 100,000 people in Gaza have contracted acute jaundice syndrome, or suspected hepatitis A. From Options for Poliomyelitis Vaccination in the United States: “Those in whom OPV is contraindicated include individuals with immunodeficiency disorders…The risk of VAPP [Vaccine-Associated Paralytic Poliomyelitis] in immunodeficient children is 3,000 times that in normal children.”
- Israel is virtually alone among industrialized countries in not signing the Biological Weapons Convention. Professor Francis Boyle drafted the U.S. Domestic Implementing Legislation for the BWC, the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act of 1989 that was approved unanimously by both Houses of the United States Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush with the approval of the U.S. Department of Justice . He said the emergency authorization provisions “trigger the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation [PDF] requiring that each recipient or their legal guardians be given informed and voluntary consent.. It does not appear that this is being done in Gaza. … They are giving the live polio virus to Gaza kids whose immune systems have been severely compromised already since October 8.” He warns you could have an “entire next generation of Palestinian Children in Gaza wracked and disabled by polio. … This implicitly raises and supports the question whether Israel is engaging in biological warfare against the Palestinians here by means of using the live polio virus.”
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As the top of this article indicates, Israel is effectively using biological warfare against the Palestinian people by virtue of knocking out the water facilities. The open question is if the polio rollout is part of that or simply a response by international institutions — perhaps following funding incentives and other pressures — unable or unwilling to do their actual jobs to stop the ongoing genocide.
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Featured image: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Bill Gates, during the World Economic Forum in Davos. (Photo by Kobi Gideon / GPO)
