Witness to a Crime

In 1981, I spent the summer in the remote village of Kapenguria, Kenya, working toward my master’s degree in health administration. I’ve written about that life-changing experience in my memoir, The Red Kitchen, and elsewhere. One of my assignments was to create the local hospital’s first census plus work in their Women’s Health Center.  Wandering around the village center one day, I found a small jail where Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta, was briefly imprisoned for his anti-colonial activities. To think that Kenya had only been free of Great Britain for less than two decades then.

Jomo Kenyatta was President from 1964 – 1978, followed by the less inspiring if not corrupt

President, Daniel Arap Moi.

After working with the nurse in the Women’s Health Center, sorting out the “donated” birth control devices that had already been declared unsafe in the U.S. and Europe, she invited Tessa, another intern and me to accompany her in the hospital’s Land Rover to a local girls school. The seventh and eighth graders lined up for a diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) vaccine “donated” to the hospital by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Pfizer in 2009 for $68 billion). 

I chatted with the girls while they waited in line and showed them pictures of my daughters. One girl showed me her “schoolbook” which was left by the UK and still used as a textbook. I flipped through it and found chapters on “How to Manage the Servants” and “How to Make a Proper Tea.”

On a happier note, the girls practiced their English with me, and in exchange, my rudimentary Swahili with them. They asked me lots of questions including “Did I know J.R.” (from the TV show Dallas). The community center sometimes ran American television shows on Saturday night for the village teenagers until the battery-powered projector ran down. Meanwhile, Tessa had moved up to the injection site and told me later that she was horrified at how the nurse kept using the same needle and merely wiped it with alcohol after each injection.

Now decades later, I realize I was a witness to a tragedy, if not a crime, in a well-documented account of how Bill Gates, pharmaceutical companies, often Anthony Fauci, and the World Health Organization (WHO) used uninformed citizens in many African countries to test their drugs and vaccines. “The continent’s populations have become his (Gates) guinea pigs,” writes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.

Supporting Kennedy’s statement, research journalist Celia Farber had this to say: “The racism is cloaked inside carefully crafted philanthropic manipulations such as ‘access’ to drugs. It’s never access to clean drinking water, education, sanitation, nutrition. It’s a very blighting message for the U.S. to constantly be browbeating Africans with our self-serving messaging that they are so sick, and we have just the drugs to save their lives. When the opposite happens, it’s swept away and hidden behind the false front of charity. I call it Pharma Colonialism.”

As early as 1977, researchers were questioning the risks of the whole-cell jab used in Wyeth’s DTP vaccine that I witnessed. It wasn’t until 1985 that several funded studies found that the vaccine was killing or causing severe brain injury, seizures, and death in an alarming number of vaccinated children; girls like the ones I met that day.

As late as 2002, Gates and WHO made the same DTP shot the focus of their African program and continued giving the toxic vaccine to some 156 million African children annually. The African nations, by virtue of being poor, financially struggling, or with corrupt leaders were often forced to agree to many vaccines in order to receive WHO assistance and financial reimbursement by Gates and whatever pharma company was testing their drugs on the “dark continent” as my father called it far too often.

In 2017 a study found that when the DTP immunizations were followed, at three months the girls had ten times the rate of mortality than unvaccinated children and many boys. “In other words,” writes Kennedy, well-substantiated by other studies, “Gates’s DTP vaccine – instead of saving 10 million lives, as he still claims – may have unnecessarily killed millions of African girls.”

The Village of Kapenguria, Kenya – Now with electricity; then it was lanterns and flashlights.

I became curious after reading Kennedy’s book as to just how much drug testing was being done outside of the U.S. According to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in 2018, “a growing number of American researchers turned to developing countries to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of drugs in clinical trials. A report from the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services found that 80% of approved marketing applications for drugs and biologics contained data from clinical trials conducted outside the United States.^”

According to the study:

• Cost is the primary reason – it’s cheaper to run clinical trials and save the big money for bringing the drug to market.
• Speedy recruitment of naive patients and faster completion of trials offshore represent considerable cost savings for pharmaceutical manufactures.
• Foreign governments also impose less regulatory oversight than the U.S. government. For-profit contract research organizations with extensive foreign connections provide another advantage for offshore testing.

But what about the ethics? Especially in countries where protections are inadequate as in Kenya in the 1980s. Pfizer leads the way. They set up what they call “medical camps” like in Nigeria to “treat” children suffering from an outbreak of bacterial meningitis, but were actually testing- not treating – their new drug Trovan. According to NLM’s study, “Patients and families were not aware that Doctors Without Borders was providing free, proven-effective antibiotics at a medical camp nearby. When Pfizer left Nigeria, it failed to offer long-term follow-up to its human trial participants. Trovan was later discovered to cause a high risk of acute liver failure.”

Again from NLM: “In a study of 33 new products tested in Latin America and approved by the FDA in 2011 and 2012, 21 (80%) of the 26 products were shown to offer no therapeutic advantage over existing treatments and to have considerable adverse effects. Moreover, many of these drugs were never marketed in the host country or were marketed at prices not affordable to local residents.”

What I believe about the “dark continent” is this: it’s not about pigmentation or how little we still know in the U.S. about an entire landmass. It’s only dark if you are talking about the role of pharmaceutical companies and eugenicists like Bill Gates and his pals at the WHO and the World Economic Forum. Preservation of and respect for human life appears to be negotiable in their world.

When I think about the DTP vaccine’s deleterious effect on Kenyan children, it’s with both outrage and a heavy heart. I vividly remember the girls’ gathered around me and how we giggled working our way through our universal curiosity. It was one of the best times of my life, having spent that summer in the village, being just me in the world and having my mind and heart opened in a new way.

Photo Credits: Two Kenyan school girls – Imani-Manyara, Kenyan students – Bill-Wegener.