No, the reason the news does not report on children being harmed by vaccines that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports is because it did not happen.
The claim of paralysis and seizure is similarly misrepresented: 1,048 children in the age group in question reported “serious adverse events” after taking the vaccine. It’s important to note that “serious adverse events” is not the same thing as “serious adverse effects”; participants were asked to track all serious health changes they saw post-vaccination, the vast majority of which are unrelated to the vaccine. (You can see the full list of serious adverse events in Table 3
of this document.) Only 10 children from the ages of 5 months to 17 months months had side effects caused by the vaccine, reporting 12 events: “7 seizures, 3 episodes of pyrexia [fever], 1 episode of myositis [muscle inflammation], and 1 injection-site reaction.” Three children in that age group experienced side effects: “1 injection-site reaction, 1 episode of pyrexia, and 1 episode of febrile convulsion [a convulsion caused by fever].” All children who experienced seizures recovered, and paralysis was not reported as a side effect, or even a serious adverse event, by any of the participants. Additionally, no parties raised ethical concerns about the initiative and it was
declared a success after the vaccine was found to reduce the number of infant malaria cases by a third.
Ahmed’s paper provides little more than a basic description of the Meningitis Vaccine Project and only briefly mentions that there were reports of consent violation that were “unsubstantiated” and reports of side effects that were deemed “normal” and “not warrant[ing] safety concerns.” All reports of consent violation and side effects occurred in Burkina Faso, just one of the participating countries. Ahmed fails to mention that
only four instances of side effects tied to the vaccine were actually reported in Burkina Faso: Two patients had skin conditions that can be easily treated and resolve themselves in days at most. The vaccine used in the project had
regulatory approval from the necessary bodies and went through clinical trials before countrywide use of the drug began.
The Sharmeen Ahmed article used as the basis for claims that Gates used Third World countries as testing grounds for dangerous drugs is riddled with errors. India was the only country to raise ethical concerns about the vaccine program sponsored by Gates, and its concerns were largely unfounded or minimal. The HPV vaccines used in India were FDA-approved, contrary to multiple claims by Owens, and the meningitis vaccine was approved by the World Health Organization and other national governments before it was widely used. While the Malaria Vaccine Initiative was a clinical trial, it met all regulatory and ethical standards.
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