GAVI pushed WHO to change the official policy to a universal recommendation, meaning that even countries with low disease burdens would be required to vaccinate. GAVI hoped this would reopen the Indian markets. WHO obligingly changed its recommendation to include universal immunization with hepatitis B vaccine for all countries, even those where HCC was not a problem. The Indian government obediently adopted WHO’s recommendation.
Indian academics and public health officials condemned the government’s hepatitis B mandates, citing India’s extremely low burden from HCC. The Indian Cancer Registry (ICMR) shows the incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma due to hepatitis B infection is only 5,000 cases a year. Independent scientists and Indian physicians argued against immunizing 25 million babies each year to theoretically prevent 5,000 cases of HCC. Anticancer vaccines are poor performers, and there is not even meager proof that the vaccine can prevent any cancers. Dr. Jacob M. Puliyel, MD, Chair of the Department of Pediatrics, St. Stephen’s Hospital, Delhi, told me that—even if the vaccine were 100 percent effective—the need to administer 15,000 vaccines to infants to prevent a single death from HCC that might occur decades later “intuitively seems an uneconomic way to spend scarce health resources.”
In a July 17, 1999, commentary published in BMJ, Dr. Puliyel observed that the cheapest Indian hepatitis B vaccine costs 360 rupees ($5.00) for three doses. Dr. Puliyel points out that “a third of [India’s] population earn less than 57 rupees (83p) per capita per month. The main causes of death in India are diarrhea, respiratory infections, and malnutrition.” Puliyel says, “Should immunisation against hepatitis B take priority over provision of clean drinking water?”182
The study of Gates’s forced introduction of hepatitis B vaccines in India showed that the vaccine did not reduce hepatitis B. The frequency of chronic carriers (HBsAg positivity) was similar in the unvaccinated as in the vaccinated. The study further suggested that maternal immunity was protecting newborn babies from infection at the time when they are most vulnerable to develop chronic carrier status and HCC, and that the vaccine program reduces this natural immunity. Paradoxically, therefore, there is a substantial likelihood that Gates’s vaccine is increasing the incidence of HCC in the country. These findings demonstrated the absurd futility of hepatitis B vaccination in India. “No matter,” says Puliyel, “Gates’s opinion was the only thing that counted.” WHO stood firm, taking the position that all countries must include hepatitis B vaccine in their immunization program, even if the vaccine was unnecessary.
Haemophilus Influenzae B (Hib)
WHO followed its hepatitis B debacle with a much weaker recommendation for vaccination against Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib). WHO recommended Hib vaccines only in nations suffering a grave disease burden. In an editorial in the Bulletin of the WHO, Indian doctors questioned the need for Hib vaccine in Asia, where the incidence of invasive Hib disease was extremely low (Lau 1999).183 In 2002, Dr. Thomas Cherian, who is now the WHO Coordinator of EPI, wrote that based on the available data, Hib vaccine should not be recommended for routine use in India.
To overcome such meddling from India’s prying medical community, in 2005 Gates funded, through GAVI, a four-year, $37 million study of mass vaccination with Hib jabs in Bangladesh intending to showcase the vaccine’s benefits.184,185 GAVI’s Bangladesh study backfired, showing no advantage from Hib vaccination. In response, a formidable coterie of superstar international health experts—all of them, coincidentally, from Gates-funded organizations WHO, GAVI, UNICEF, USAID, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and CDC—issued a deceitful proclamation that fraudulently claimed that the Bangladesh study proved a Hib jab protects children from “significant burden of life-threatening pneumonia and meningitis.”186 Prominent Indian doctors responded with outraged commentaries in the British Medical Journal and the Indian Journal of Medical Research, describing the Gates-funded study as a devious artifice.187,188 Based on Gates’s orchestrated guile, WHO in 2006 took the official position that the “Hib vaccine should be included in all routine immunization programmes.”189 Once again, the Indian government caved in to Gates and mandated Hib vaccines in India, where Hib invasive disease was nearly nonexistent.
In self-congratulatory articles, GAVI boasted triumphantly of its role in rescuing the Hib vaccine project in India after the Bangladesh study proved the vaccine a worthless waste of money (GAVI 2007; Levine et al. 2010).190,191 GAVI’s article notes that, since there was little burden from Hib disease in India, it had been a great challenge to gin up support for WHO’s recommendation. GAVI bragged—in technocratic argot—that it twisted WHO’s arm to revise WHO’s Hib vaccine policy from a weak permissive statement192 to a firm recommendation calling for universal vaccine introduction in all countries.193 WHO’s volte-face dragooned reticent Indian health officials to recommend the useless vaccine. Dr. Puliyel complains that incident “highlights the influence GAVI and other vaccine manufacturer-funded organizations like the ‘Hib Initiative’ have on the WHO and how it impacts vaccine uptake internationally.”194
Puliyel protests that the Gates Foundation has privatized and monetized international public health policy, transforming WHO recommendations into effective mandates and compelling poor countries to pay annual tribute to foreign Pharma overlords. Puliyel told me that India and other Asian nations are now effectively compelled to administer the vaccine and to increase Hib uptake targets, “irrespective of an individual country’s disease burden, notwithstanding of natural immunity attained within the country against the disease, and not taking into account the rights of sovereign States to decide how they use their limited resources.” He adds that “The mandate and wisdom of issuing such a directive, for a disease that has little potential of becoming a pandemic, needs to be questioned.”
Dr. Puliyel’s commentary in the BMJ denounced Gates and GAVI for pushing Hib vaccine in developing countries and for falsifying the characterization of the research data in their press release: “The directive has come after a number of failed attempts to convince the scientific community of the need for this vaccine in Asia.” Puliyel described the HiB saga as “a case study on the visible and invisible pressures brought to bear on governments to deploy expensive new vaccines.”195