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...).
> 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.
Why?
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...
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.
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
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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 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?
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".
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 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.
"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.
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.