Since then, with funding from a $20 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the CVD and CVD-Mali have worked to develop a measles vaccine to immunize infants in developing countries who are too young to receive the currently licensed measles vaccine. That candidate vaccine has shown highly promising results in animal models. A field site in Mali has been established and a Malian clinical trials team has been trained to carry out phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials of the new vaccine. 

In April 2005, the CVD received an additional grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for $3.6 million to study the impact of vaccinating children in Mali against the disease-causing bacterium Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib),

The University of Maryland has a long history of joint projects with USAID—which, as mentioned in Part 6, is known to front for the CIA  and, as mentioned in Part 7, partnered with the Gates Foundation to foist genetically modified tech on African nations that don’t welcome it. The projects include CARPE, or Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment as well as a contract to explore “promising candidate vaccine for Malian children,” including the Clinical Research and Trial Preparation Site in Endemic Areas Initiative.  On the face of, there’s nothing wrong offering aid to better a county’s public health system, though predictably there are ethical problems with implementing vaccines in the rural sites in Mali targeted for trials. From the study, Problems in comprehension of informed consent in rural and peri-urban Mali, West Africa:

RESULTS: Participants had difficulty comprehending several concepts relevant to informed consent: 90% of respondents did not understand withdrawal criterion, 93% did not understand the existence of study side effects, and 74% did not understand that they were enrolled in an investigation as opposed to receiving therapy. The response rate and percentage of correct answers was generally much higher in the village nearer an urban center than the more rural village. The percent of correct answers exceeded 50% for five questions in the urban village and for only two question in the more rural setting.

Problems with medical aid ethics are predictable in particular when foreign aid fronts for separate agendas. In an article originally published by Foreign Policy Magazinein March, 2012, Joshua Keating reports the Malian coup d’état led by US-trained Captain Sanogo:

On March 22 [2012, Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo]and a renegade group of officers calling themselves the National Committee for the Reestablishment of Democracy and the Restoration of the State overthrew the government of President Amadou Toumani Touré… U.S. military officials have acknowledged that Sanogo "participated in several U.S.-funded International Military Education and Training (IMET) programs in the United States, including basic officer training," though it's not yet clear which courses he took. He has affirmed receiving U.S. training in several interviews, but has declined to elaborate.

It turns out that Mali’s former President  Amadou Toumani Touré, though he encouraged Western investment and technology such as vaccination, could not stop civil unrest that threatened transnational oil and uranium operations in Mali. From a 2012 Guardian article titled Coup Threatens to Plunge Mali Back Into Darkness of Dictatorship:

This military coup was born out of the deep anger at the way in which the ousted president, Amadou Toumani Touré, had been conducting the war against a Tuareg-led insurgency in the north of the country. Stories of soldiers being sent to the front without the necessary weaponry and almost starving to death out in the vastness of the Sahara, a place as alien and distant to them as Siberia is to a Muscovite, had turned public opinion against him.

Popular anger was exacerbated by a series of ignominious defeats in recent weeks, especially the loss of a crucial strategic base near the desert town of Tessalit that gave the insurgents complete control of most of the north of the country, bar the major towns of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal…

The international community had long been prepared to back the Touré regime despite the numerous accusations of corruption, involvement in cocaine smuggling and lack of resolve in its fight against Islamic terrorism that had dogged it in the last few years…

So, as it happens, Touré had to go. Apparently familiarity bred Western contempt and at least some of that familiarity was forged through aid given to the country under Touré’s administration. A 2013 article for the website OilPrice.net which revels in the language and rationales of the biofuel industry (moral outrage at “theocracy,” “Sharia law” and the human rights abuses of “Islamic militants,” etc.)  clumsily exposes the transnational profit orgy arising from the disaster of post-colonialism:

Mali and oil are as complex as it can get. Though mineral rich, the landlocked country has no- established- oil or gas reserves worth commercial exploitation. Still, the 'unexplored' aspect of the country lends it gravitas as the potential for oil and gas is very promising and could well be a game changer… The present conflict began in the summer of last year [the conflict actually began in January, 2012]with the Tuaregs fighting for an independent country in Northern Mali. It gained traction later on with many Islamic militants joining forces to establish a country governed by sharia laws. In fact, the militants do not want to stop with Mali, but are ambitious for a sprawling Islamic Caliphate. Imposing severe Islamic standards the militants severed communication lines and imposed severe punishments for disobedience, interpreting Islamic laws suiting their needs. Should the world have remained mute to the human rights violations in Northern Mali? Don't forget, there were [sic] enriched Uranium nearby. France depends on oil and uranium from neighbouring Nigeria and couldn't possibly tolerate Mali to become another Afghanistan. Moreover France and Mali have had a defence agreement in place for years.

Also, after have its military deployed in Afghanistan for over a decade France understandably will do whatever it takes to prevent another Afghanistan to be created within a 2 hour flight. When Malian president requested help from its former colonial master, France obliged, stressing it would be under the UN mandate. And so the French intervened. (And, thanks to the presence of Canadian oil companies in Mali, Canada was one of the first countries to lend a helping hand France.) Further, on January 16, a gas facility in Algeria was attacked by militants. After four days, more than forty oil workers, mainly foreigners, were killed. Allegedly, the militants were the ones fighting previously in Northern Mali.

And guess what: the oil-rich Taoudeni Basin is located at the north, the area seized by islamists. Neo-colonial agenda or not, the fact is that Timbuktu has been wrestled back.

How did the militarized profit orgy work out for those worrisome human rights issues that OilPrice.net mentions?  From Human Rights Watch International:  

Soldiers loyal to Mali’s coup leader have forcibly disappeared at least 20 soldiers allegedly linked to an April 30, 2012 counter-coup, and committed torture and other abuses against dozens of others …Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the abuses were committed by members of the security services, including soldiers, policemen, and national guardsmen who have supported Sanogo since the March 22 coup.

Immediately following the coup, US Special Forces were wreaking havoc  and engaging in not-so-proverbial orgies all over Mali.

Things that occasionally come dimly to light in the shadowy media coverage of Africa create what appears to be a less than random pattern that repeats itself over and over again, from country to oil-targeted country around the globe. 


Gates sponsored malaria vaccination campaign, Venezuela. Photo credit: Kike Arnal

Venezuela

In 2011, the World Justice Project, a global policy think tank pronounced that Venezuela ranked the worst on the organization’s Rule of Law Index, reporting that,

Venezuela ranks relatively well in terms of religious freedom (ranking 15th), accessibility of the civil courts (ranking 21st), and protection of labor rights (ranking 27th). However, it is the worst performer in the world in accountability and effective checks on executive power. Corruption appears to be

widespread (ranking 54th), crime and violence are common (ranking 66th), government institutions are non-transparent, and the criminal justice system is ineffective and subject to political influence (ranking 66th). The country also displays serious flaws in guaranteeing respect for fundamental rights, in particular, freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to privacy. On the other hand, while the property rights of companies are generally weak, the property rights of ordinary people appear to receive significantly better protection.

Curiously Venezuela didn’t make the cut for “worst” on another, older justice index  which lists the most oppressive and opaquely governed countries on the planet such as Belarus, where all nine opposition candidates were arrested after an election; Burma, where the military junta rules by decree and owns all newspapers; Chad, which has never had a fair or free election and which only recently abolished prison sentences for journalists who insult the president; China, where human rights lawyers are routinely “disappeared” and which is not an electoral democracy;  and North Korea, also  not exactly an electoral democracy. The circumstances are more or less similar for the rest— Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s leading newspaper, El Universal, reported the Rule of Law Index’s findings without comment other than to say that the World Justice Project is sponsored by the Gates Foundation. The World Justice Project is also sponsored by weapons makers Boeing and  General Electric, Intel,  Microsoft, Viacom , Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford Foundation among others, most of which are tied to the infamous corporate bill mill, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other members of ALEC includes nearly all the oil companies forced into joint ventures when Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chávez nationalized the country’s oil:  ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Statoil, ConocoPhillips, and British Petroleum were forced to grant Venezuela’s national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.(PDVSA), a minimum 60% stake. The latter might have something to do with the Rule of Law Index’s issue with the property rights of companies in Venezuela.

The Rule of Law index’s analysis of Venezuela happened to overlap a US media campaign to promote Chávez’s opposition, namely Leopoldo  López, touted in the New York Times as the descendant of the country’s founder, Simón Bolívar:  “an aristocratic, Harvard-educated economist who is a descendant of the liberator’s sister, Juana.” López is currently  charged with having led the violent “exit plan” resistance that sparked six months of armed “barricade” protests that allegedly led to 43 deaths and López’s suspected  sponsorship of a conspiracy involving party ally Antonio Ledezma and close associate Columbian paramilitary leader Lorrent Saleh to bomb bridges, public buildings and carry out assassinations against leftist political leaders. Both Ledezma and Lopez await trial at the Ramo Verde military prison outside Caracas. Also under investigation are the trio’s ties to former Columbian President Alvaro Uribe, currently under investigation by Columbia’s Supreme Court for drug trafficking, corruption and mass murder. Uribe,  a guest of honor and popular neoliberal speaker for US corporations and conservative think-tanks, “visiting scholar” at Georgetown University and member of the board of directors of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has been tied to death squads co-sponsored by Drummond Coal, Chiquita Banana and Coca-Cola. International human rights organizations have called for López’s release pending trial.

But other than omitting particulars, the index’s analysis isn’t incorrect.  Crime was soaring in Venezuela, the country was overrun with rapacious Cuban officials, the criminal justice system was as corrupt as it had ever being during the former oligarchy, and government opponents were often imprisoned in chaotic circumstances. Chávez (and NicolásMaduro after him) had been accused of pocketing vast sums from public coffers and making disastrous populist decisions, such as showing leniency to criminal gangs that held feudal rule over districts throughout the country.  But Chávez was nevertheless democratically elected and the country’s media is still largely owned by members of the former oligarchy.  The issue of crushing poverty under the oligarchy has reportedly improved by 80%. Several criminal gangs were recently disbanded for facilitating the opposition’s scheme to destabilize currency in the wake of the failed, allegedly US-backed attempted coup d’état against Chávez in 2002.

It’s also interesting that following a rash of vaccine and public health philanthropy in Latin America and the Caribbean, Venezuela’s current President Maduro accused right-wing opponents of fomenting another coup with US support in the oil-rich country following President Obama’s executive order declaring Venezuela a threat to national security, a charge repudiated  by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in what it called an “application of unilateral coercive measures that are contrary to international law.”

Aside from denouncing vaccine safety critics as “child killers” and investing in a fracking corporation, in 2011, Bill Gates celebrated the development of the new malaria shot in conjunction with GlaxoSmithKline.  In 2010, the US and Venezuela both refused to exchange ambassadors following accusations that the 2002 coup against Chávez had been supported by the US.  The year before, launched the Amazon Malaria Initiative was launched by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency cited as a major implementer of neoliberal privatization schemes around the world and,  again, a front for the CIA.

Relations with Venezuela have been strained since, but by 2012, the experimental malaria vaccine was being used for the Yanomami, presumably to address a deadly epidemic of malaria.

In 2010, it was widely reported that malaria had wiped out three Yanomami villages in the Amazonian rain forest. It was claimed malaria was brought in by illegal gold miners.  The problem with the story is that malaria is endemic to the Amazon, not communicable between humans and indigenous people may be the least susceptible due to generational exposure. Though survivors were said to be infected with malaria , the report was unclear whether these survivors were effectively sickened by the disease or whether the disease in fact caused the majority of deaths.  The counter argument has been that the miners brought in a new strain, were bitten by mosquitoes which then spread the disease to members of the tribe.

A regional health official, Dr. Carlos Botto, said the initial accounts and tests have shown there was some type of epidemic and evidence of malaria. But he said the number of deaths remained unclear and further tests were needed to determine if other diseases could be involved. He said other officials were analyzing results of the five-day medical mission.

“What’s certain is that there was an epidemic with deaths,” Botto said in a telephone interview. He said the number of deaths reported by those in the communities was just an estimate…

 “I’ve never seen it like this,” said Shatiwe Luis Ahiwei, another Yanomami health worker who assisted in the medical mission and said about 100 more malaria cases had been identified in the area, more than half of them the deadly falciparum strain. The sick have had symptoms including high fever, shivering, vomiting and bloody diarrhea…

Isolation has left the Yanomami vulnerable to many illnesses such as measles, yellow fever and hepatitis that have been spread by outsiders.

Indigenous rights activist Christina Haverkamp said that the government response has been slow and inadequate, and that doctors need access to helicopters to reach people in other areas where similar situations have been reported.

“Many Yanomami are dying and need help,” said Haverkamp, a German who runs the organization Yanomami-Hilfe and has worked among the Yanomami for two decades in Venezuela and Brazil.

Malaria is common in the Yanomami region, and Haverkamp said she has caught it four times over the years. But she said she has never seen such a serious outbreak.

“It’s a catastrophe and also a scandal that they still don’t … have it under control,” she said.

Officials in President Hugo Chavez’s government insist they have improved and expanded medical care through a program called the Yanomami Health Plan, investing in clinics and also training some of the Yanomami to be health workers for their own villages.

American missionaries belonging to the group New Tribes Mission used to aid sick villagers, but in 2005 Chavez expelled them, accusing them of conducting espionage.

“With the missionaries, health care was better under control,” at least in areas where they worked, Haverkamp said.

Nationwide, the Health Ministry says 39,658 malaria cases have been reported so far in 2010, an increase of about 42 percent compared to the same period last year. The report does not list fatalities.

Haverkamp suggested the spike in the mosquito-borne illness among the Yanomami may be due to an influx of malaria-infected Brazilian gold miners working in illegal camps near indigenous settlements, and she said the military should evict the miners.

The missionaries that Chávez expelled in 2005, the New Tribes Mission, were profiled a book by Norman Lewis, The Missionaries: God Against the Indians, that described the brutal tactics of certain global missionary groups as well as the casual understanding in Latin America that several fronted for military and industrial interests. New Tribes, whose missionary work in Venezuela stretched back to 1946, has been cited for violent conversion tactics in many countries or plying trust from indigenous leaders while scoping natural resources for various industries and maintaining ties to the CIA.  From Fox News:

Anthropologists, military officials and others have accused the group of watching indigenous people die of malnutrition while living in luxurious camps, forcing communities to give up ancestral traditions and creating a sophisticated enclave of airstrips and settlements to exploit gold, quartz and even uranium deposits.

"This is not a problem that has developed in the Chavez government," said Alberto Muller, a retired general and ex-governor of the region who left office in 1985. "Since my time as governor, (the missionaries) have really alarmed me."

Since first establishing a presence in Venezuela in 1946, the group has repeatedly been investigated, though each time the controversy fizzled out.

Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel  started calling New Tribes a security threat as early as 1981. Tomas Antonio Marino Blanco, a navy captain, recently revived claims first made in 1978 that New Tribes missionaries have helped U.S. defense contractors from Westinghouse conduct mineral prospecting.

The group denies the accusations and is seeking to meet directly with Chavez to discuss the issue. It also says it is willing to open its camps to government observers to quell suspicions.

As with Ebola speculations, how an outbreak occurred can distract from the effects of the remedy. As with the vaccine drive used in the Neptune Spear operation to kill Bin Laden, the Amazonian malaria vaccine drive brought up questions of agendas as well as safety. In the fine print of reports of the malaria vaccine’s success, the vaccine  was 34.8% effective in reducing severe malaria for the combined age-group category  and carried heavy risks. In a maneuver commonly used by the pharmaceutical companies to undercut perceived risks, the “placebo" used to compare the malaria vaccine was a rabies vaccine known to cause neuroparalytic accidents. Normally, placebos used in double blind trials are supposed to be benign— a saline shot or a sugar pill—though vaccine trials generally use non-inert, toxic placebos like aluminum that would produce their own side effects. But in this case, even when compared to a vaccine with particularly high risks for neurological adverse events, the malaria vaccine still proved more dangerous.

Whether the vaccine had been safe, effective and warranted or not, and regardless of the sincerity of various health workers who implement health programs in the Amazon, it’s unfortunately necessary to ask whether certain health campaigns in resource-rich regions which happen to be the targets of corporate hegemony might be cover for something else. As it happens, Yanomami-Hilfe, the organization mentioned by Fox News, is sponsored by the transnational Bayer AG and its tropical disease project, Innovative Vector Control Consortium, which is in turn co-sponsored by the Gates Foundation.  

Bayer— the original manufacturer of Ceresan, from which the mercury preservative in vaccines is derived—has a long history of involvement with political conflict and human rights abuses going back to its activities under the Third Reich and, more recently, its investment in “conflict minerals”—namely coltan from the Congo.  The documentary Blood Coltan illustrates the trail of death and war that’s raged around the coveted mineral since the US-backed assassination of Congo’s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Coltan, also known as tantalum, is used to produce cell phones, computer chips, weaponry and aircraft components. A 2003 UN report exposed corporations—including Bayer—that invest in Congolese coltan.  Though Bayer sold its coltan-processing subsidiary H.C. Starck to the Carlyle Group in 2007, coltan may still be relevant to the issue at hand since Venezuela’s announcement in 2012 that significant deposits of coltan have been discovered, making Venezuela one of only seven countries in the world with reserves of “blue gold.” The Carlyle Group owns and invests in private security and surveillance companies (United Defense, Booz Allen Hamilton), electronics and aircraft, all of which depend on technology requiring coltan and, since the UN report naming companies that invest in coltan, the pressure has been on to find supposedly conflict-free sources. Under Carlyle’s ownership, H.C. Starck voluntarily agreed to do just that.

The argument that questioning the sincerity of global medical philanthropy could cost lives ignores the fact that rush for resources (blue gold, black gold, etc.) leaves trails of death as well. 

Ukraine

The same pattern of medical philanthropy preceding military machination had been seen in the Ukraine prior to US and EU installation of a regime with widely reputed neo-Nazi ties as Michael Hughes reports in Huffington Post,

The Obama administration has vehemently denied charges that Ukraine's nascent regime is stock full of neo-fascists despite clear evidence suggesting otherwise. Such categorical repudiations lend credence to the notion the U.S. facilitated the anti-Russian cabal's rise to power as part of a broader strategy to draw Ukraine into the West's sphere of influence. Even more disturbing are apologists, from the American left and right, who seem willing accomplices in this obfuscation of reality, when just a cursory glance at the profiles of Ukraine's new leaders should give pause to the most zealous of Russophobes.

UNICEF’s surveillance of “anti-vaccine” attitudes in Eastern Europe, including the Ukraine, might mesh neatly with panoptic intelligence operations.  The  lengthy report, which cites Seth Mnookin as a source and borrows from his thought-as-virus (“Panic Virus”) approach,  involved data collected and synthesized from social media in four languages by Attention USA, a PR and “competitive intelligence” agency that uses NSA-style corporate surveillance technology such as Radian6 and  Sysomos and has clients like Microsoft and the Washington Post-owned, for-profit higher education corporation  Kaplan University and several pharmaceutical companies. The document also names American vaccine safety advocacy blogs and publications such as Dr. Tenpenny, Mothering Magazineand The Refusers as primary negative “influencers” in Eastern Europe.

The UNICEF report’s conclusions should answer the question raised in Part 2 of this series over whether attitudes towards vaccination in the US and American publications and advocacy groups that question safety might be viewed as “contagious” abroad and thus threatening to military operations that were dependant on foreign trust of vaccine philanthropy—threatening enough on their own to conceivably  launch a mass media campaign to inoculate against them.

After Homeland Security’s Lisa Monaco received the bracing letter from public health school deans, it’s possible that the nature of “rescue” campaigns in resource-rich regions used as cover may shift to other tactics. Yet war always leaves a trail of disease and decimation of health infrastructure in its wake—itself a gift that keeps giving in generating an opening wedge for panoptic operations.

Endless war, mass surveillance and globalization may partly rest on a bed of permanent contagion.  Again, because of the nature of covert operations, it’s difficult to gauge to what extent vaccine philanthropy has been used as a Trojan horse for wars motivated by control of resources. But the often damaging effects of these campaigns are clear and it becomes harder to justify staying silent about the dual use of philanthropy in the hopes that the more driving intention of the two-sided agenda is to save children around the globe from disease. It does at times. But it too often does double the damage as the Hippocratic principle "first do no harm" is corroded by the rules of war in the merger of irreconcilable aims.  If the central point has not always been health and human welfare to begin with, we can’t legitimately expect this to be the consistent outcome.  If we accept that global medical philanthropy often has a weaponized agenda, then we tacitly accept that public health may move towards war-level collateral and that the system cutting its teeth on secrecy and a military partnership in our name will come home, becoming an entry point for domestic repression and the same colonial divide and conquer strategies waged against other populations. 

The next segments of the series looks into the astroturf groups who “come down from the hill after the battle to shoot the wounded,” sow divisions and rationalize the collateral of all these ideological, social and actual wars.

Adriana Gamondes is a Contributing Editor to Age of Autism and one of the blog’s Facebook administrators.