The New York Times reported on August 26 that more than 1.2 million doses of polio vaccine arrived in Gaza as part of an effort to vaccinate more than 640,000 Palestinian children with the aim of preventing an outbreak of the potentially paralyzing disease, but Israel’s continued military campaign and blockade of humanitarian aid poses an obstacle to the vaccines being distributed.
One case of paralytic polio has been confirmed in a 10-month-old child in Gaza who became paralyzed in one leg, which was the first case of polio in Gaza in a quarter-century.
Last week, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, expressed concern about this development while reporting that the child “is currently in a stable condition.”
In the US during the pre-vaccine era, most people infected with polio never developed the disease, most people who did had mild flu-like symptoms and fully recovered, and it was in less than one percent of cases that paralysis occurred, sometimes resulting to permanent disability or death.
Poliovirus is transmitted via a fecal-oral route, and its global decline was largely due to advances in sanitation, better nutrition, and other improvements to societal standard of living. As noted in the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) journal Pediatrics, nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality observed in the US during the twentieth century occurred before there were vaccines available to help explain the decline, which was instead mainly due to factors related to an increasing standard of living.
Changes in the diagnostic criteria for poliomyelitis also resulted in an artifactual decline of cases in the US falsely attributed to vaccination. Prior to 1955, large numbers of paralysis cases due to other causes, such as coxsackie virus infection, were incorrectly attributed to poliovirus, and diagnostic changes introduced that year created a perceived decline in paralytic polio that was largely a statistical artifact.
A famous example of potential misdiagnosis is President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Americans are taught in school was wheelchair-bound for life because of a poliovirus infection, but whose symptoms some scientists have argued were more likely caused by an autoimmune disease known as Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS).
The reappearance of polio in Gaza, the New York Times reported on August 16, is a result of “the destruction of the territory’s waste and water systems, which, along with malnourishment bordering on famine, has caused a multitude of grave health threats for Palestinians sealed in the territory.”
The Times also incorrectly reported that the vaccination effort “would involve giving recipients two rounds of injections”. While the polio vaccine used in the US and other developed countries is the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), which is administered by injection, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) is still widely used in developing countries, and it is the orally administered vaccine that would be given to Palestinian children if the vaccination campaign were able to proceed, according to the WHO.
The Times also failed to inform its readers in both of its aforementioned articles that the strain of poliovirus found in wastewater in Gaza is not the wild type but vaccine-derived poliovirus.
The inactivated vaccine is less effective and does not prevent infection and transmission of the poliovirus, whereas the “live” virus vaccine administered orally does confer immunity in the intestinal tract. However, the live-virus vaccine also carries the risk of itself causing paralytic polio in rare cases, and vaccinated individuals can shed vaccine-strain virus that can revert to virulence and hence infect and cause disease in others.
In the US, every case of paralytic polio occurring after 1979 was caused by the oral polio vaccine, which is why the switch was eventually made around the turn of the century to exclusive use of the less effective but safer “killed” vaccine.
Illustrating how the US government has long placed the policy goal of achieving a high vaccination rate over the goal of properly informing the public so individuals can make their own informed choice, in 1984, with the risk of paralytic polio being greater from the vaccine than from the wild virus and an inactivated vaccine already available, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared with respect to the continued use of the oral polio vaccine, that “any possible doubts, whether or not well founded, about the safety of the vaccine cannot be allowed to exist in view of the need to ensure that the vaccine will continue to be used to the maximum extent consistent with the nation’s public health objectives.” (Emphasis added.)
In 2019, the WHO reported that the world had crossed the threshold whereby more cases of polio were being caused by the vaccine than by the wild virus. The polio strain found in wastewater samples in Gaza and in the confirmed child case of paralytic polio was “circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2)”.
The horrific sanitary conditions and widespread malnutrition in Gaza are the result of Israel having waged a genocidal military campaign against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip for over ten months now, with indiscriminate bombardment that has systematically targeted the civilian infrastructure, including Gaza’s health care system, and killed over 40,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, coupled with a blockade policy that has been condemned by international human rights and aid organizations as the illegal use of deliberate starvation as a weapon of war.
In December of last year, the government of South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), sometimes called the “World Court” because it is the international community’s highest authority on interpretation and application of international law, accusing Israel of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention. The following month, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling finding that Israel was committing a plausible genocide and ordering the Israeli government to take actions to demonstrate its commitment to compliance with the convention. Israel ignored the order.
In May, the ICJ ordered Israel to halt its military assault on Rafah in southern Gaza, where civilians had been ordered to flee by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and where 1.5 million Palestinians, over half the population of Gaza, were sheltering. As with the provisional measures the ICJ had previously issued, Israel ignored the Court’s order and proceeded with its genocidal campaign.
In a separate case brought before the ICJ by the UN General Assembly, the Court was asked to determine the legal consequences of Israel’s persistent occupation of Palestinian territory, and it issued its advisory opinion on July 19, ruling not only that a multitude of aspects of Israel’s occupation violate international law but that the occupation itself is illegal, amounting to an apartheid regime.
In May, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a separate body at the Hague in the Netherlands, announced that he was seeking arrest warrants for three top Hamas officials, including Ismail Haniyeh, whom Israel assassinated in Tehran, Iran, on July 31, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, the ICC has yet to issue the warrants, which require the approval of a three-judge panel.
The US government under the administration of President Joe Biden has been supporting Israel’s genocide while cynically feigning to care about the lives of Palestinian civilians and colluding with Israel in a public relations campaign aimed at creating the false perception that the only obstacle to a cessation of hostilities is Hamas’s rejection of an Israeli ceasefire proposal, when in fact Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly made clear that Israel will not end its genocidal military operation in Gaza before achieving the stated aim of eliminating Hamas and otherwise making demands transparently intended to ensure that no ceasefire can be achieved—a policy that has angered families of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups during the murderous attacks in Israel on October 7 last year.
While it is unlikely to happen given the perversity of the existing world governmental order, the US government could theoretically also be charged with violating the 1948 Genocide Convention for its complicity in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
