"Polio still persists in Taliban-controlled regions, after the CIA ran a fake vaccination campaign to try to catch Osama bin Laden. Vaccination workers are now killed as potential spies."
That sounds like an effective tactic if your goal is to cause random wide scale death and misery. If it was actually only to catch one man, it would be just for the people responsible to become vaccine test subjects.
Think about the fact that this [1] only did not happen because a single person intervened - just a single person along the long line of custody from inception to proposal. And the person who refused to let it happen was JFK.
I’m not sure if it’s sarcasm or not, but The Devil’s Chessboard lays out a case for the CIA acting as the military arm of the rich and powerful starting basically at its inception. All of the “communist” overthrows in the 50s and 60s happen to coincide with nationalist leaders (often democratically elected) who want to keep some of a country’s resources from falling further into the control of American corps. This typically resulted in actual dictators replacing them that allowed the businesses to continue to exploit while at the same time severely oppressing the locals.
Some of the evidence is compelling, others is speculative, but a lot of the same bad actors show up in a lot of very similar global (and local) affairs.
> nationalist leaders (often democratically elected) who want to keep some of a country’s resources from falling further into the control of American corps
This is an old geopolitical problem: rich democracies tended to surround themselves with alliances of despots. Athens, Rome and America. The corporate interests hypothesis is interesting. But the resilient one is that dictators reliably deliver foreign policy goals that electeds' voters value.
I think, more broadly, that American, British, and French "anti-communist" foreign policy has consistently been about ensuring that American, British, and French companies continue unfettered access to a colonized nation's resources. Your actual governmental or economic structure is irrelevant, so long as Shell Oil or United Fruit Company are only answerable to their shareholders, and not the people of the country they're exploiting.
Anti-communism, colonialism, nation-building, all these justifications eventually become just rationalizations for protecting specifically the colonizer's economic interests. The Great Hunger, the Bengal Famine, the Banana Massacre, the excesses of the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, the Mandate for Palestine, the Belgian fucking Congo, all of these result from optimizing for foreign economic interests without any regard for local social interests.
Worth noting that while that those proposed self-inflicted terrorist attacks were rejected, other terrorist attacks in Cuba by CIA were approved:
> The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba.
The list of ‘see also’ on the site is a fun read. I never read about the “fog of war” incident before related to the Vietnam war inception which never happened.
The CIA absolutely fucked Latin America, staging coups, pushing US businesses interests, putting military dictatorships in power and assisting them while in power. The damage runs deep and I think it's quite overwhelming hearing from ignorant and/or naïve Americans about the issues China may cause, or the deaths that dictatorships brought into the world.
The misery inflicted into generations of the peoples found under the thumb of Uncle Sam's is almost unimaginable, it's all under wraps though, since winners write history the US is not currently seen as one of the major sources of instability and social strife in so many countries it involved itself in.
When Americans look at Latin America and see the mess it exists in there's no self-reflection about their part in causing it. American needs trumped over all the rights to self-determination of these peoples, be it assisting United Fruit Company to destroy Guatemala, the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, etc. And all the aftermath of the USA forcing countries in its "sphere of influence" to abide by what the USA wanted, if you attempted to go out of line there'd be a CIA team taking your government down in no time.
It's just wishful thinking but I wish to see the USA reckoning with all the misery it caused in my lifetime. It's personal to me since one of my relatives was killed during the Brazilian dictatorship, he was simply trying to be an active part of an union.
>issues China may cause ...The misery inflicted into generations of the peoples found under the thumb of Uncle Sam's is almost unimaginable, it's all under wraps though
Under wraps, and yet here you are talking about it on an American website, seemingly without much fear of repercussions or being censored for it. Is it as easy or welcome to talk about Chinese committed atrocities on Chinese websites?
Under wraps from general American society, yes. Go right now on the streets of your USA city and ask about the atrocities the USA has committed in Latin America, check what % of the people even know about that.
My comment about China is meant more in relation to the boogeyman created out of China to push USA's interests, I don't condone authoritarianism at all (it should be pretty clear after I mention a dead relative by the hands of a dictatorship) but I do have very high reservations about whatever the USA pushes for manufacturing consent across the globe, right now it's the China boogeyman.
The whole play of the USA is also to keep the veil of a freedoms' paragon as a misdirection for its transgressions, it's layered in misdirection using language such as "defense of freedom", "free market", "business interests" while behaving schizophrenically by supporting dictators who align to its interests (e.g.: Saudi Arabia, multiple dictatorships in Latin America). It's all bullshit. Owning that it's all bullshit won't ever happen, it needs to keep the discourse to keep the façade of a force for good.
At least China is more honest, they are dicks, they are ruthless, they can be aggressive, but no one else was misled to believe otherwise. That's not the case with the USA.
And my rant over your "whatabout" point ends here.
The fact that I can freely discuss the fact that my government installs and supports (occasionally very directly) brutally anti-democratic regimes that stand in complete opposition to everything my country claims to stand for, does not somehow negate the fact that my country is doing those things. This isn't a question of "is the US better/worse than China/Russia/etc?". The question is "Is the US living up to its own legend?"
I would argue that, based on the activities of the CIA and other arms of the government, the answer is unambiguously "NO".
I understand that one of the key ways that e.g. Putin remains acceptable to his population despite being unambiguously a strongman is to basically say "I am no better than any of them, except that I never said I would be".
The CIA has definitely committed some pretty heinous acts, but the only reason they appear worse than your average national intelligence service is that the US has a habit of declassifying operations and documents after they're no longer active and/or relevant, forcing them to confess to a subset of their crimes. Most national intelligence services are allowed to freely and happily cover up the vast majority of their crimes indefinitely, and there's much less opportunity to hold them accountable unless they actually get caught.
"The distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases that might otherwise not have occurred"
Doesn't really make sense to measure tragedies in terms of 9/11s, but I wonder how many 9/11s the US has caused in the name of killing Bin Laden.
That estimate is pretty insane. There were 374 polio cases in 2023, six of which were in Pakistan. Half were in DR Congo, where I don't believe the mission to find bin Laden has affected eradication efforts.
Twenty more years of that rate would be 7,480 cases, not 100,000. It's also risible to suggest that any of that nonsense has seriously hindered eradication, caseloads in that region remain very low, the hotspots are elsewhere.
While I don't know where the 100,000 number comes from, I believe most of the cases that occur outside Pakistan and Afghanistan are caused by the vaccine. Wikipedia lists those two countries as the only place polio is still endemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2023
That's what Wikipedia says, and I have no reason to doubt it?
We're fully aware the vaccine does cause some polio infections, and the countries that are seeing cases are still in the middle of their vaccination campaigns.
Oral polio vaccine (OPV) contains an attenuated (weakened) vaccine-virus, activating an immune response in the body. When a child is immunized with OPV, the weakened vaccine-virus replicates in the intestine for a limited period, thereby developing immunity by building up antibodies. During this time, the vaccine-virus is also excreted. In areas of inadequate sanitation, this excreted vaccine-virus can spread in the immediate community (and this can offer protection to other children through ‘passive’ immunization), before eventually dying out.
On rare occasions, if a population is seriously under-immunized, an excreted vaccine-virus can continue to circulate for an extended period of time. The longer it is allowed to survive, the more genetic changes it undergoes. In very rare instances, the vaccine-virus can genetically change into a form that can paralyse – this is what is known as a circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV)."
Why is it so hard to get clear data on this topic.
Please show me clear data from reputable sources on all of this. It would end a lot of the the vaccine controversy.
Let's take something like tetanus boosters. They are recommended once every 10 years not because you "need" one per se but the cost and expense of running a trial longer than that made it no longer worth the effort.
Note to people downvoting this (because maybe they think it’s anti-vaccine crankery). The attenuated polio virus vaccine can cause polio. The reward far outweighs the risk.
Should also be noted that in 2016 the trivalent OPV was replaced with a bivalent vaccine in an attempt to further mitigate the risk [1]:
> Until 2015, over 90% of cVDPV cases were due to the type 2 component in OPV. With the transmission of wild poliovirus type 2 already successfully interrupted since 1999, in April 2016 a switch was implemented from trivalent OPV to bivalent OPV in routine immunization programmes. The removal of the type 2 component of OPV is associated with significant public health benefits, including a reduction of the risk of cases of cVDPV2.
Also note that 'attuenated virus vaccine' means the oral vaccine that is prevalent in the developing world, and not the vaccine that, e.g. EU citizens get, I had to look this up, as it is not obvious.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted for this–maybe a little skittishness after years of anti-vax nonsense—but my understanding is also that you're completely correct and the vast majority of polio infections are vaccine-derived. The oral polio vaccine is (I think?) the only widely-used vaccine where this is a risk, and it's well-known.
It's worth noting that by eradicating Polio we can also eradicate vaccine-derived polio, as we'd presumably stop vaccinating people once the disease is eradicated, as we did with smallpox.
Wikipedia says polio is asymptomatic in 72% of cases, and feels like a mild-ish flu in 24% of cases. So in total 96% of cases are probably not detected at all.
> It's also risible to suggest that any of that nonsense has seriously hindered eradication, caseloads in that region remain very low, the hotspots are elsewhere.
It has killed off trust in Western vaccination programs not just in Pakistan but also in Africa and a whole other lot of places. The ripple effects from that have been immense...
There is a reason why the label "medical" should not be abused. The US campaign against Bin Laden, Hamas using hospitals to hide command centers and hostages or as a shooting range, Israeli agents infiltrating a hospital to execute suspected Hamas operatives, German police placing Red Crosses on their medical vans [1]... the list of abuses is long, and at least for war-related action international agreements actually ban that kind of abuse - we're seeing in Palestine right now why.
It's also an opinion piece and the estimate is not a direct quote, so I'm wondering if they might have incorrectly paraphrased what their source told them.
This is ridiculous and bordering on misinformation, polio was already prevalent in AF before the 2014 revelation, in large part BECAUSE of the talibans.
"In Afghanistan and Pakistan, fears that the vaccine contained contraceptives were one reason given by the Taliban in issuing fatwas against polio vaccination.[47][43][48]"
Even outside of that, the talibans would have shot those health workers eventually like they did with the 9 year old girl that wanted education, they do not like outsiders showing people their environment can be better.
>"Polio still persists in Taliban-controlled regions, after the CIA ran a fake vaccination campaign to try to catch Osama bin Laden. Vaccination workers are now killed as potential spies."
The connection is bullshit. Afghanistan has a long and proud history of killing polio vaccination workers. Also, any other aid worker. Especially women.
I was in Afghanistan for over two years over two deployments. Outside of the cities Afghans:
1. Don't know who Osama Bin Laden is.
2. Don't know that he was killed.
3. Don't know that the CIA ran a (not fake, real) vaccination campaign to locate Bin Laden. Or what the CIA is for that matter, or what or who the US is.
4. Barely know that there is a central government, who runs it, or what city is the capital.
They only know their local clan and the immediate local leader.
They're not running around scared of CIA agents they are scared of all outsiders and any outsider who can provide relief or comfort that the local leader cannot instantly becomes the enemy of the local leader.
This is also true in Pakistan and several African nations.
This is the campaign that is usually referred to when people talk about the fake vaccination campaign to locate bin Laden, but it was conducted in Abottabad, Pakistan. Are you referring to a different campaign that was conducted in Afghanistan?
I'm more than willing to believe what you say about the local leaders, but the article you linked says aid workers were being killed because the Taliban associated them with US military reconstruction and the Karzai government.
Maybe you should assign some portion of the blame to the murderous cultists who are killing medical professions and consider the reason they are so worried about spies is that they were celebrating, supporting, and hiding mass murderers.
Saying that people have a "blind loyalty" to vaccines to the point they think they shouldn't be tested is a strawman. Despite Conservative outrage news talking points, even the quickly released covid vaccines were heavily tested before being released. Just because Joe Rogan keeps referring to it as the "untested jab" doesn't make it so.
Zika may also have oncologic effect on glioblastoma (most common and deadly brain cancer). If I had glioblastoma, the first thing I’d do is visit a zika infested area.
I’ve just come to realize from this article that human challenge trials are really a form of trolley problem [1]. Is it more ethical to “do nothing” and gather data from infections in the wild, where many people are potentially harmed, or do you “throw the switch” and infect a much smaller number deliberately to get high quality data?
I think that most people would say that diverting the trolley to where you, yourself, are tied up would be a moral but supererogatory thing to do. But we still make it impossible to do that because the relatives of the person who sacrifices themselves might sue the institution that allows it.
> Now picture what would have happened if we had been willing to do challenge trials early on for COVID.
Nothing much most likely. The mRNA vaccines were designed very rapidly after the virus itself had been sequenced. The thing that took time was moving through the different trial phases. Given that there was more than enough spread of the virus in the wild, deliberately exposing people might have shaved off a few weeks at most.
But the real bottleneck afterwards was production and roll-out of the vaccines anyway. So realistically, challenge trials would not have had any meaningful impact.
>The thing that took time was moving through the different trial phases. Given that there was more than enough spread of the virus in the wild, deliberately exposing people might have shaved off a few weeks at most.
I dont think that is accurate. You can run a challenge trial from exposure to outcome in weeks, whereas it takes many months and tens of thousands of people to get enough cases in the wild.
It may still be that production was the critical path, but challenge trials are much faster.
In the case of COVID-19, for persons circulating in public, exposure was pretty much guaranteed during peak periods of the pandemic, most particularly (Northern Hemisphere) Summer 2020 and Winter 2020 (June -- August and November -- February, mostly). Challenge exposure would have been largely redundant, though it might well have been a utilised protocol.
The time constraints were the sequencing of multiple innoculations (most vaccinations require at least two doses spaced at 2+ weeks for preferred effect, with additional subsequent boosters increasing effectiveness), time from final innoculation to infection, observing course of illness, if any, and monitoring for any fall-off in immunity over time. Even on an accelerated basis that's a 90-day period, roughly, and longer-term assessments of 1--2 years are of clinical interest. Though once it became clear that vaccination showed greatly-increased immunity within weeks of treatment, authorisation of the vaccine was virtually assured.
At which point ramping up production and distribution were the challenges.
The initial mRNA vaccines were prototyped within days of the SARS-COV-2 virus being sequenced. It took nearly 18 months to go through the testing, production, and distribution of the vaccine to the point that anyone who wanted a vaccine could obtain one. Little of that lag had much to do with trial phases, though identifying better treatments (several of the vaccine lines proved less effective, notably the Chinese-created vaccine AFAIU) also had value. Parallel development and testing was effectively pursued in this case.
An issue with doing a COVID-19 challenge trial that I heard from someone in this space at the time: Nobody actually knew how much virus to administer. We weren't sure of the normal quantity of COVID-19 a person typically inhales before becoming sick.
A major argument in favor of a challenge trial was that, for people who are young and otherwise healthy, COVID-19 isn't particularly deadly. However, we don't know what would have happened if we accidentally gave participants 10x the normal dose of COVID.
>An issue with doing a COVID-19 challenge trial that I heard from someone in this space at the time: Nobody actually knew how much virus to administer. We weren't sure of the normal quantity of COVID-19 a person typically inhales before becoming sick.
I dont think that is accurate. You dont have to know the actual viral quantity transmitted to create a representative transmission event. That is to say, if you know people can catch covid sitting side by side, that can be your challenge.
Even if the scenario isn't perfect, you still know how many people caught it vs placebo.
Yes, but again: If you gave participants an ineffective or placebo vaccine followed by 10+ times the normal dose of COVID, how many of them would die?
If you're okay with potentially killing most of the trial participants, I suppose you could still get useful data, but the ethics become significantly more questionable IMO.
Edit: I just re-read your post. I think you're saying, you wouldn't actually give anyone the COVID virus directly, you'd just find someone who was known to have contracted COVID in the wild and bring them in to purposefully expose trial participants. That is an interesting idea which I've never seen discussed in the context of a challenge trial. I'd be interested to read more about why this is not typically done.
Getting a 10x Lethal dose just doesn't seem like a realistic concern to me, and certainly not a dealbreaker.
We know and knew what a normal exposure was: being in close proximity to one or more contagious people for somewhere between a few minutes and many days.
If you have someone sit next to an infected person for an hour, how do you get to this hypothetical 10x super dose?
Edit: I would also add that medical trials also have well established methods of determining effective and dangerous exposure levels, and these are used in almost every Phase 1 trail. You start with extremely low exposure, then increase it until you see dangerous outcomes. This could easily be done with a covid serum to find the infectious but non-lethal level. for example, if you think X amount of covid virus is infectious, you start at 0.0001 X and then increment up, to find the amount that causes normal infection, and not some lethal mega dose.
> Edit: I would also add that medical trials also have well established methods of determining effective and dangerous exposure levels, and these are used in almost every Phase 1 trail.
Yeah, so the scientist I heard this from didn't say it would be impossible to find the right dose, just that we didn't know the dose yet and we'd have to find it before running a challenge trial.
He thought this erased the time savings of a challenge trial versus the normal process.
> Now picture what would have happened if we had been willing to do challenge trials early on for COVID.
Nothing significant would have changed. For example, on July 22, 2020 HHS announced $1.95B in funds for Pfizer for large scale manufacturing and distribution of 100 million doses of their vaccine. On Nov 18, 2020 the phase 3 clinical trials were completed. We didn't wait to know that they worked or not to start ordering the doses. It still took until April or so of 2021 to get that manufacturing and distribution completed because we'd never made nanoparticle vaccines commercially before at all and distribution itself was hard once we had the doses.
Obviously the covid vaccine was an unprecedented effort, but do remember reading how the high rate of infection in the US made it statistically easier to test. Within a few months you could observe the gap between the control and treated group.
With vaccines for things like cancer, that take decades to develop and at a low rate, you need to wait a very long time even if you have a large group.
It contains the tension between utilitarianism and the deontological act/omission distinction that the trolley problem is meant to isolate, but clinical trials are philosophically very different in that (1) the risks you cause during a trial are statistical rather than leading reliably to death of any one person, (2) trial participants can and are compensated for this risk, and (above all) (3) the trial participants have consented. In other words, there very little tension/inconsistency in saying that throwing the trolley switch is unethical but running human challenge trials is ethical.
The labor market (how to get money if you don't have enough) creates a perverse incentive. I wonder if anyone has reaearched the "volunteers" and their position in both labor and wealth.
I wonder why I never hear this argument applied to government spending in general. In non-authoritarian countries, spending money is the primary means for the government to inflict their will on the public, regardless whether it will have a positive impact on society.
I think it's a question of "treat the symptom" sometimes as well. Some people really cannot make ends meet due to their locality and don't deserve to be stiffed by a migratory economy.
they are being forced by statistics. It's a supply/demand problem. If you get people in a bad economical situation and then give them enough money you will get them to do your thing. Just increase the amount of money until you get enough people signing up.
> For those we can’t cure, we can treat symptoms. We may not be able to remove the virus causing a cold from your system, but we can give you painkillers for your headache, tissues for your nose, or cough suppressant medicines. It’s not an ideal solution, but it is part of a realistic answer.
This is such a gamble. For example, I am one of the 1/10 of the population who has Long COVID from an early infection prior to vaccines thought no worse than a cold. There are also folks who got vaccinated and experience the same syndrome I do. I would never risk these odds to have to deal with over 3 years of constant debilitating pain when I was a previously healthy 29 year old now pushing 32. At this rate, I will likely see 5 full years of my life in a struggle before any treatment hits the shelves given there are very few things that can "treat the symptoms".
> At the start of this piece, I said I wasn’t fussed with the risk. Looking back at this later, I’m supposed to call this hubris. I still itch across most of my upper body. I’m alternating acetaminophen and ibuprofen. As I edited this piece weeks after the trial, I struggled with fatigue that made it difficult to work. Being released from the hospital only to develop worse symptoms is more than a little strange, but it did mean being taken care of by my partner and eating homemade meals at the worst moments, both of which I enjoyed. All in all, though, I don’t think it was hubris at all. The risks were reasonable, the pay made up for the itch, and I think the benefit to science doubly so.
Imagine if this were more debilitating like another illness (ME/CFS, Long COVID, Cancer, etc). Would you seriously risk years of your life for $5k? The only way I'd ever do this is as a sacrifice to the good of humanity. But we all know that our sacrifices aren't seen as anything further than a small paycheck in the grand scheme of pushing science forward. That needs to change and we need to devote more gratitude to people who are participating. Give them actual funds to sustain their symptoms with or find ways to dedicate their name towards the good of science often.
I believe not. I was part of a phase 1 clinical study for a vaccine, and I recall asking a question along these lines. They mentioned some medical care may be covered, but otherwise not. This was a few years ago so I could be mistaken.
Yeah so they're mostly seeking people who are willing to trade a small risk of some horrible lifelong autoimmune condition for $5k right now. Not surprising two of the other guys in the study have been to prison.
Either human challenge trials should not reimburse at all, and seek the true believers in it, or they should cover all future medical bills for any chronic immune conditions that emerge in the next 3 months (and just one of those outcomes probably blows up the economic utility of challenge trials).
I took the risk not for the money (about 5k over a year) but for a genuine interest, also this was for a covid vaccine during the pandemic, so figured some folks need to volunteer..
(Source : I work in vaccine research, including challenge studies, in the UK, but only in IT/Digital, I'm not clinical).
In the UK at least (and as I understand it in most countries that subscribe to the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki), all of our studies have to have insurance to cover such eventualities (which are exceedingly rare these days). In addition, we provide clinical contacts for the participants throughout the trial and follow-up, and ensure that participant NHS medical records (and central NHS databases such as for the COVID vaccines) are updated with the necessary details for any future related care.
Money/Payment is always a careful balance. You don't want people taking part in the trials purely for the money (i.e. doing something they wouldn't otherwise be comfortable doing), but you need to ensure they aren't disadvantaged by taking part in the trial.
My vietnam vet dad, drafted, let the army knock all of his teeth out + break his jaw so they could (test?|practice?) some new orthodontia method to straighten GI teeth.
As someone who has spent a fortune on having pretty teeth I absolutely would not be willing to have my jaw and teeth beaten out of me and that fact always blows my mind. I have no idea what the status of ortho care was back then but the rest of my family have nice teeth without having chewed a grenade.
And he has had nonstop teeth/jaw issues since his service.
Damn, what combination of: an insane pain tolerance, high levels of curiosity, big desire of beauty. I wonder how many other people this procedure was tested on?
Did he ever say what persuaded him to allow this? A sense of duty or something else? I’m struggling to envision any force compelling enough to make me agree to have my teeth knocked out and my jaw broken. Love of country sure as hell wouldn’t be on the list.
It absoultely wasn't #1, he was drafted not patriotic. I think he was just broke and took advantage of a 17yo kid and probably offered him a few grand to have 50 years of VA doc appointments that never help him out.
IIRC they literally broke out every tooth/re-aligned jaw and then wired everything together.
I used to work in my downtown and I would regularly run into a guy who would push around an empty wheelchair most days. Some days though he would be sitting in it. I asked him about it, and he said he did drug and medicine trials, and some days he couldn't walk because of them so he would need the wheelchair to move around. No idea how truthful he was because I don't know how that stuff works here in Canada (and this was years and years ago too) but he came to mind after reading this article.
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[ 8.9 ms ] story [ 3172 ms ] threadThat sounds like an effective tactic if your goal is to cause random wide scale death and misery. If it was actually only to catch one man, it would be just for the people responsible to become vaccine test subjects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Some of the evidence is compelling, others is speculative, but a lot of the same bad actors show up in a lot of very similar global (and local) affairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
This is an old geopolitical problem: rich democracies tended to surround themselves with alliances of despots. Athens, Rome and America. The corporate interests hypothesis is interesting. But the resilient one is that dictators reliably deliver foreign policy goals that electeds' voters value.
I think, more broadly, that American, British, and French "anti-communist" foreign policy has consistently been about ensuring that American, British, and French companies continue unfettered access to a colonized nation's resources. Your actual governmental or economic structure is irrelevant, so long as Shell Oil or United Fruit Company are only answerable to their shareholders, and not the people of the country they're exploiting.
Anti-communism, colonialism, nation-building, all these justifications eventually become just rationalizations for protecting specifically the colonizer's economic interests. The Great Hunger, the Bengal Famine, the Banana Massacre, the excesses of the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, the Mandate for Palestine, the Belgian fucking Congo, all of these result from optimizing for foreign economic interests without any regard for local social interests.
Is the truth too "biased" for you?
> The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose
Whenever one falls down the CIA rabbit-hole, it never continues surprise just how much pain they have inflicted on the world.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
The misery inflicted into generations of the peoples found under the thumb of Uncle Sam's is almost unimaginable, it's all under wraps though, since winners write history the US is not currently seen as one of the major sources of instability and social strife in so many countries it involved itself in.
When Americans look at Latin America and see the mess it exists in there's no self-reflection about their part in causing it. American needs trumped over all the rights to self-determination of these peoples, be it assisting United Fruit Company to destroy Guatemala, the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, etc. And all the aftermath of the USA forcing countries in its "sphere of influence" to abide by what the USA wanted, if you attempted to go out of line there'd be a CIA team taking your government down in no time.
It's just wishful thinking but I wish to see the USA reckoning with all the misery it caused in my lifetime. It's personal to me since one of my relatives was killed during the Brazilian dictatorship, he was simply trying to be an active part of an union.
Under wraps, and yet here you are talking about it on an American website, seemingly without much fear of repercussions or being censored for it. Is it as easy or welcome to talk about Chinese committed atrocities on Chinese websites?
My comment about China is meant more in relation to the boogeyman created out of China to push USA's interests, I don't condone authoritarianism at all (it should be pretty clear after I mention a dead relative by the hands of a dictatorship) but I do have very high reservations about whatever the USA pushes for manufacturing consent across the globe, right now it's the China boogeyman.
The whole play of the USA is also to keep the veil of a freedoms' paragon as a misdirection for its transgressions, it's layered in misdirection using language such as "defense of freedom", "free market", "business interests" while behaving schizophrenically by supporting dictators who align to its interests (e.g.: Saudi Arabia, multiple dictatorships in Latin America). It's all bullshit. Owning that it's all bullshit won't ever happen, it needs to keep the discourse to keep the façade of a force for good.
At least China is more honest, they are dicks, they are ruthless, they can be aggressive, but no one else was misled to believe otherwise. That's not the case with the USA.
And my rant over your "whatabout" point ends here.
I would argue that, based on the activities of the CIA and other arms of the government, the answer is unambiguously "NO".
I understand that one of the key ways that e.g. Putin remains acceptable to his population despite being unambiguously a strongman is to basically say "I am no better than any of them, except that I never said I would be".
Doesn't really make sense to measure tragedies in terms of 9/11s, but I wonder how many 9/11s the US has caused in the name of killing Bin Laden.
Twenty more years of that rate would be 7,480 cases, not 100,000. It's also risible to suggest that any of that nonsense has seriously hindered eradication, caseloads in that region remain very low, the hotspots are elsewhere.
https://www.who.int/news/item/22-12-2023-statement-following...).
Why?
We're fully aware the vaccine does cause some polio infections, and the countries that are seeing cases are still in the middle of their vaccination campaigns.
Oral polio vaccine (OPV) contains an attenuated (weakened) vaccine-virus, activating an immune response in the body. When a child is immunized with OPV, the weakened vaccine-virus replicates in the intestine for a limited period, thereby developing immunity by building up antibodies. During this time, the vaccine-virus is also excreted. In areas of inadequate sanitation, this excreted vaccine-virus can spread in the immediate community (and this can offer protection to other children through ‘passive’ immunization), before eventually dying out.
On rare occasions, if a population is seriously under-immunized, an excreted vaccine-virus can continue to circulate for an extended period of time. The longer it is allowed to survive, the more genetic changes it undergoes. In very rare instances, the vaccine-virus can genetically change into a form that can paralyse – this is what is known as a circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV)."
- WHO
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/pol...
Why is it so hard to get clear data on this topic.
Please show me clear data from reputable sources on all of this. It would end a lot of the the vaccine controversy.
Let's take something like tetanus boosters. They are recommended once every 10 years not because you "need" one per se but the cost and expense of running a trial longer than that made it no longer worth the effort.
WHO
> Until 2015, over 90% of cVDPV cases were due to the type 2 component in OPV. With the transmission of wild poliovirus type 2 already successfully interrupted since 1999, in April 2016 a switch was implemented from trivalent OPV to bivalent OPV in routine immunization programmes. The removal of the type 2 component of OPV is associated with significant public health benefits, including a reduction of the risk of cases of cVDPV2.
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/pol...
A tangent, but isn't this a problem? We should welcome skepticism, if we can easily refute it: no problem.
Wikipedia says polio is asymptomatic in 72% of cases, and feels like a mild-ish flu in 24% of cases. So in total 96% of cases are probably not detected at all.
It has killed off trust in Western vaccination programs not just in Pakistan but also in Africa and a whole other lot of places. The ripple effects from that have been immense...
There is a reason why the label "medical" should not be abused. The US campaign against Bin Laden, Hamas using hospitals to hide command centers and hostages or as a shooting range, Israeli agents infiltrating a hospital to execute suspected Hamas operatives, German police placing Red Crosses on their medical vans [1]... the list of abuses is long, and at least for war-related action international agreements actually ban that kind of abuse - we're seeing in Palestine right now why.
[1] https://www.l-iz.de/leben/faelle-unfaelle/2021/12/ausgekreuz...
It's also an opinion piece and the estimate is not a direct quote, so I'm wondering if they might have incorrectly paraphrased what their source told them.
"In Afghanistan and Pakistan, fears that the vaccine contained contraceptives were one reason given by the Taliban in issuing fatwas against polio vaccination.[47][43][48]"
Even outside of that, the talibans would have shot those health workers eventually like they did with the 9 year old girl that wanted education, they do not like outsiders showing people their environment can be better.
The connection is bullshit. Afghanistan has a long and proud history of killing polio vaccination workers. Also, any other aid worker. Especially women.
https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/analysis-attacks-ai... (2008)
I was in Afghanistan for over two years over two deployments. Outside of the cities Afghans:
1. Don't know who Osama Bin Laden is.
2. Don't know that he was killed.
3. Don't know that the CIA ran a (not fake, real) vaccination campaign to locate Bin Laden. Or what the CIA is for that matter, or what or who the US is.
4. Barely know that there is a central government, who runs it, or what city is the capital.
They only know their local clan and the immediate local leader.
They're not running around scared of CIA agents they are scared of all outsiders and any outsider who can provide relief or comfort that the local leader cannot instantly becomes the enemy of the local leader.
This is also true in Pakistan and several African nations.
This Lancet editorial suggests that the vaccination campaign was fake: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
This is the campaign that is usually referred to when people talk about the fake vaccination campaign to locate bin Laden, but it was conducted in Abottabad, Pakistan. Are you referring to a different campaign that was conducted in Afghanistan?
In the past (PRE CIA PROGRAM) in other countries it has been that the foreign aid workers have been assassinated because their program:
* is a sterilization conspiracy
* corrupts the young women hired and trained to locally administer the vaccines
* was proselytizing and spying on the locals
And I don't fault them for thinking any of that just look at the nutjobs in the west who ramble on about vaccines.
It was a fake campaign because they gave one out of three doses and then left.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10267364/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7529292/
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
Now picture what would have happened if we had been willing to do challenge trials early on for COVID.
I encourage you to check out 1DaySooner, which the author mentions at the beginning of the article: https://www.1daysooner.org/
Nothing much most likely. The mRNA vaccines were designed very rapidly after the virus itself had been sequenced. The thing that took time was moving through the different trial phases. Given that there was more than enough spread of the virus in the wild, deliberately exposing people might have shaved off a few weeks at most.
But the real bottleneck afterwards was production and roll-out of the vaccines anyway. So realistically, challenge trials would not have had any meaningful impact.
I dont think that is accurate. You can run a challenge trial from exposure to outcome in weeks, whereas it takes many months and tens of thousands of people to get enough cases in the wild.
It may still be that production was the critical path, but challenge trials are much faster.
The time constraints were the sequencing of multiple innoculations (most vaccinations require at least two doses spaced at 2+ weeks for preferred effect, with additional subsequent boosters increasing effectiveness), time from final innoculation to infection, observing course of illness, if any, and monitoring for any fall-off in immunity over time. Even on an accelerated basis that's a 90-day period, roughly, and longer-term assessments of 1--2 years are of clinical interest. Though once it became clear that vaccination showed greatly-increased immunity within weeks of treatment, authorisation of the vaccine was virtually assured.
At which point ramping up production and distribution were the challenges.
The initial mRNA vaccines were prototyped within days of the SARS-COV-2 virus being sequenced. It took nearly 18 months to go through the testing, production, and distribution of the vaccine to the point that anyone who wanted a vaccine could obtain one. Little of that lag had much to do with trial phases, though identifying better treatments (several of the vaccine lines proved less effective, notably the Chinese-created vaccine AFAIU) also had value. Parallel development and testing was effectively pursued in this case.
A major argument in favor of a challenge trial was that, for people who are young and otherwise healthy, COVID-19 isn't particularly deadly. However, we don't know what would have happened if we accidentally gave participants 10x the normal dose of COVID.
I dont think that is accurate. You dont have to know the actual viral quantity transmitted to create a representative transmission event. That is to say, if you know people can catch covid sitting side by side, that can be your challenge.
Even if the scenario isn't perfect, you still know how many people caught it vs placebo.
If you're okay with potentially killing most of the trial participants, I suppose you could still get useful data, but the ethics become significantly more questionable IMO.
Edit: I just re-read your post. I think you're saying, you wouldn't actually give anyone the COVID virus directly, you'd just find someone who was known to have contracted COVID in the wild and bring them in to purposefully expose trial participants. That is an interesting idea which I've never seen discussed in the context of a challenge trial. I'd be interested to read more about why this is not typically done.
We know and knew what a normal exposure was: being in close proximity to one or more contagious people for somewhere between a few minutes and many days.
If you have someone sit next to an infected person for an hour, how do you get to this hypothetical 10x super dose?
Edit: I would also add that medical trials also have well established methods of determining effective and dangerous exposure levels, and these are used in almost every Phase 1 trail. You start with extremely low exposure, then increase it until you see dangerous outcomes. This could easily be done with a covid serum to find the infectious but non-lethal level. for example, if you think X amount of covid virus is infectious, you start at 0.0001 X and then increment up, to find the amount that causes normal infection, and not some lethal mega dose.
Yeah, so the scientist I heard this from didn't say it would be impossible to find the right dose, just that we didn't know the dose yet and we'd have to find it before running a challenge trial.
He thought this erased the time savings of a challenge trial versus the normal process.
Nothing significant would have changed. For example, on July 22, 2020 HHS announced $1.95B in funds for Pfizer for large scale manufacturing and distribution of 100 million doses of their vaccine. On Nov 18, 2020 the phase 3 clinical trials were completed. We didn't wait to know that they worked or not to start ordering the doses. It still took until April or so of 2021 to get that manufacturing and distribution completed because we'd never made nanoparticle vaccines commercially before at all and distribution itself was hard once we had the doses.
Obviously the covid vaccine was an unprecedented effort, but do remember reading how the high rate of infection in the US made it statistically easier to test. Within a few months you could observe the gap between the control and treated group.
With vaccines for things like cancer, that take decades to develop and at a low rate, you need to wait a very long time even if you have a large group.
People are not being forced into this (by the US at least).
https://www.humanimmunomeproject.org/
> For those we can’t cure, we can treat symptoms. We may not be able to remove the virus causing a cold from your system, but we can give you painkillers for your headache, tissues for your nose, or cough suppressant medicines. It’s not an ideal solution, but it is part of a realistic answer.
This is such a gamble. For example, I am one of the 1/10 of the population who has Long COVID from an early infection prior to vaccines thought no worse than a cold. There are also folks who got vaccinated and experience the same syndrome I do. I would never risk these odds to have to deal with over 3 years of constant debilitating pain when I was a previously healthy 29 year old now pushing 32. At this rate, I will likely see 5 full years of my life in a struggle before any treatment hits the shelves given there are very few things that can "treat the symptoms".
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.09.23298266v...
> At the start of this piece, I said I wasn’t fussed with the risk. Looking back at this later, I’m supposed to call this hubris. I still itch across most of my upper body. I’m alternating acetaminophen and ibuprofen. As I edited this piece weeks after the trial, I struggled with fatigue that made it difficult to work. Being released from the hospital only to develop worse symptoms is more than a little strange, but it did mean being taken care of by my partner and eating homemade meals at the worst moments, both of which I enjoyed. All in all, though, I don’t think it was hubris at all. The risks were reasonable, the pay made up for the itch, and I think the benefit to science doubly so.
Imagine if this were more debilitating like another illness (ME/CFS, Long COVID, Cancer, etc). Would you seriously risk years of your life for $5k? The only way I'd ever do this is as a sacrifice to the good of humanity. But we all know that our sacrifices aren't seen as anything further than a small paycheck in the grand scheme of pushing science forward. That needs to change and we need to devote more gratitude to people who are participating. Give them actual funds to sustain their symptoms with or find ways to dedicate their name towards the good of science often.
51:53
https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-cases-coronavir...
They don't cover related medical treatment for adverse events?
Either human challenge trials should not reimburse at all, and seek the true believers in it, or they should cover all future medical bills for any chronic immune conditions that emerge in the next 3 months (and just one of those outcomes probably blows up the economic utility of challenge trials).
That said, it can be challenging proving your medical problem is due to the intervention.
But all patients need to be followed up for measures of safety and any adverse event need to be paid for by the sponsor.
In the UK at least (and as I understand it in most countries that subscribe to the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki), all of our studies have to have insurance to cover such eventualities (which are exceedingly rare these days). In addition, we provide clinical contacts for the participants throughout the trial and follow-up, and ensure that participant NHS medical records (and central NHS databases such as for the COVID vaccines) are updated with the necessary details for any future related care.
Money/Payment is always a careful balance. You don't want people taking part in the trials purely for the money (i.e. doing something they wouldn't otherwise be comfortable doing), but you need to ensure they aren't disadvantaged by taking part in the trial.
As someone who has spent a fortune on having pretty teeth I absolutely would not be willing to have my jaw and teeth beaten out of me and that fact always blows my mind. I have no idea what the status of ortho care was back then but the rest of my family have nice teeth without having chewed a grenade.
And he has had nonstop teeth/jaw issues since his service.
IIRC they literally broke out every tooth/re-aligned jaw and then wired everything together.