When it was first announced that there would be a vaccination campaign against polio in the Gaza strip, I could only think of Michael Leunig's poignant cartoon, lampooning Australia's heartless PM John Howard for his collaboration with the US in the murder of Iraqi children in 2003. He was reacting to one case in particular where a 12 year-old boy had lost both arms and all his family in a US airstrike, but was then used as a fake symbol of our humanity by being airlifted to a Kuwaiti hospital and then later to the UK for re-fitting with the most modern prosthetics. This analogy is quite apt, if one replaces Howard with Netanyahu, or any of the other war criminals in Israel currently prosecuting a merciless war on humanity in Gaza. They are not sorry either, and demonstrate it by 'doing it again' every day. There is a difference this time however, as the agenda of the 'Coalition of the Willing' in attacking Iraq in 2003 was neither to 'bring democracy' to the victims of Saddam Hussein's government nor to ethnically cleanse them from the country. Ten years of vicious and vindictive sanctions had already killed and disabled hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children - at Israel's pleasure - while weapons inspectors searched for the chemical and biological weapons the West had previously supplied to Iraq to use against Iran. The picture is not as simple as that of course, as that period in the '90s saw the establishment of the 'Autonomous' Kurdish governorate in Iraq's north around the oil-fields of Kirkuk. The region and the city of Erbil have since become a key base for US and Israeli interests, close to both Iran and Syria. But that's all another story - if still a relevant one about the US-UK project to create another ethno-state and protectorate for the Kurds. My point here however is to draw attention to the obscene hypocrisy now on show as Israel and her Western collaborators bask in their humanity - for saving Gaza's children from a potential polio epidemic and ensuing paralysis of its victims, that they themselves are entirely responsible for. This may not be how it appears, and is certainly not how Western aid agencies and media want it to appear. Even though they admit that the outbreak of polio virus is a near-inevitable result of the destruction of water and sewerage services, like the Hamas invasion of October 7th, the virus didn't come from nowhere. Russia's representative to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky recently spelt out the details of this disastrous situation and Israel's culpability for it at the UNSC. Were Michael Leunig able to have his thoughts about the Gaza genocide and its 20,000 plus child amputees published in the Melbourne Age, he would surely have given us something fitting for this latest atrocity, but sadly that is not the case, as finally became clear just after I started writing this article. This is Leunig's signing off, in despair at the degeneration and corruption of our society, and the restrictions of mainstream debate. This is now evident in the way our media presents a simplistic and misleading picture of the polio outbreak - which is only one of many diseases and ills spreading rapidly in the overcrowded and polluted 'safe ghettos' into which most of Gaza's population has been forcibly relocated. So this is an attempt to clear up some misconceptions and expose some deceptions. Waste water testing discovered the virus - the 'Type 2 Vaccine-derived poliovirus' - back in June and DNA testing identified it as similar to that seen in Egypt last year. There is no longer any 'wild-type 2' polio virus in existence, so any occurrence of this strain is related to that contained in the Oral vaccine used mostly in vaccination campaigns in the Global South. Unlike the injected polio vaccine (IPV) which contains killed virus to stimulate antibody production, the oral vaccine (OPV) is an 'attenuated' live virus, produced by multiple passages through non-susceptible animals. It was only after the wild virus became rare and was finally eradicated that the problem of 'reversion' of the OPV to the original paralysis-inducing strain was fully recognised, and research put into developing a new oral vaccine that was more genetically stable. This 'Novel' type 2 oral polio vaccine (nOPV2) was first given emergency authorisation in 2020, and by 2023 around one billion doses had been administered in 25 countries. It may be assumed - I think - that the Palestinian territories including Gaza would have been included. Contrary to the impression given to most victims of the Western mainstream media stories, healthcare services provided by UN-linked agencies in Gaza were exemplary, with early childhood vaccinations covering 99% of the population in 2022. While the coverage fell a little in 2023, and dropped further following Israel's devastating attacks starting in October, vaccinations had not stopped completely. This only became clear to me when the mother of Gaza's first serious polio case spoke to Al Jazeera, explaining how her child was born in October and multiple forced relocations had meant he missed out on the OPV - as she explains in this subtitled clip:
Further information on the situation at the start of this year is in this report from UNICEF. An extract: "Despite the terrible situation linked to this escalation, I had to evacuate our home with my three children," Benan Al Jabali, a mother from the Gaza Strip, recalled with a heavy heart. "We found ourselves at Al-Shifa Hospital, desperate and with nothing—no clothes, no food, and no water. It was a harsh reality." With the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, more than 16,000 children were at risk of missing their routine vaccinations. The conflict had disrupted healthcare services, leaving diseases like measles and polio looming over them. This report followed an emergency call for medical supplies in December, and their subsequent delivery and distribution. But the extract above also highlights another fact the media ignores or seeks to obscure - that thanks to an ongoing childhood vaccination scheme it is only children under the age of two who have not been vaccinated; older children do not need further vaccinations for polio strains 1 and 3, and the imperative to immunise them against type 2 Polio is far less urgent than addressing other basic healthcare needs. As is pointed out by local healthcare staff and other commentators, the almost total lack of basic necessities such as clean water and soap, food and vital medicines makes the focus on polio vaccination quite suspect. And it becomes even more suspect when we examine exactly who is behind this 'initiative' that seemed to come 'fully formed' almost from nowhere; suddenly there was agreement on a temporary ceasefire for this project - when one to stop the bloodbath could not be agreed upon by Israel. Because Israel finally agreed to these pauses, it has been presumed that Israel devised the plans and pursued them - but this was mistaken, as the project was actually the work of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who contributed US$ 5 million for the vaccination scheme. Unlike its sister Emirate in Dubai, the province of Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, Abu Dhabi is a close collaborator with Western powers including the UK, France and Australia, as well as with Israel directly or by proxy. And as was the case with vaccines for SARS-CoV-2/COVID 19, there is money to be made in this project for the producer. In the case of the nOPV2 vaccine, an Indonesia-based company Bio-Farm is supplying the 1.3 million vaccine doses thought necessary to vaccinate the 650,000 children under 10. Whatever the agenda of the sponsors and promoters however, parents and carers of children in Gaza are evidently keen to get this little bit of help that is on offer, even though they must risk the many dangers just to get to a vaccination point - as the photo below from a Reuters report shows:
The reality of that danger is further brought home by the photo below, copied with its description - which although it names the young woman's two daughters, doesn't point out that the younger one she carries has a bandaged head. The article, from local reporter Nidal Al Mughrabi provides more relevant detail, as well as pointing out the apparent violations of the 'pause' by Israel. Some of the 87,000 children vaccinated on this first day will without doubt be either killed in a subsequent Israeli airstrike, or worse - they will be saved from possible paralysis from polio only to lose a leg or arm from infection or amputation.
The latest news this morning from Al Jazeera correspondent in Deir al Balah, Hani Mahmoud is that an Israeli drone fired a missile at a house outside the main entrance to Al Aqsa hospital where many parents and children were still gathered for the vaccinations. That Israel already broke the ceasefire agreement went unnoticed however, following the hysteria over the deaths of a handful of Israelis held by Hamas in Rafah; the story continues..
DM 3rd September 2024