Other
Dean
Articles:
THE CONSTANT GARDENER - DOES ART IMITATE LIFE?
Dr.
Carolyn Dean, MD, ND and
Elissa Meininger
September 15, 2005
NewsWithViews.com
John le Carr� is the author of The Constant Gardner, now turned into the latest blockbuster film that many movie reviewers believe is Oscar material. Its innocent title conceals the plot detailing the immorality and corruption of a fictitious drug company, in league with government officials and international aid agencies in using the Third World as a testing ground for developing drugs.
The publisher�s notes state, � The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time. The novel opens in northern Kenya with the gruesome murder of Tessa Quayle � young, beautiful, and dearly beloved to husband Justin, a British diplomat. When Justin sets out on a personal odyssey to uncover the mystery of her death, what he finds could make him not only a suspect among his own colleagues, but a target of Tess�s killers as well.
A master chronicler of the betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, John Le Carr� portrays the dark side of unbridled capitalism as only he can.�
For people just looking for Le Carre�s latest spy thriller, The Constant Gardener, they will not be disappointed.
However, to the health freedom community, The Constant Gardener has become a cult favorite as it centers on the question, �How close does art imitate life?�
Le Carre�s story takes place in AIDs-torn Kenya where a drug company, in order to cut corners and expenses, had made arrangements with the local government, with the help of the British Government, to test a new TB drug in anticipation of an epidemic expected sometime in the future. The arrangements, also assisted by international humanitarian aid agencies, were to encourage thousands of unsuspecting and impoverished Africans to become part of a dishonest drug testing project where deaths and other adverse reactions to the drug being tested are to be concealed so the drug can be eventually marketed with glowing clinical study reports.
For those who are unfamiliar with how drugs are developed and tested who find the plot a little farfetched, need to know that le Carr� devoted four pages of disclaimers in the back of his book to protect all the people he contacted during his research on the project.
The idea that Big Pharma, with the blessings of governments and humanitarian agencies, would permit such tests to be conducted is a very troubling thought. While we are not suggesting that the murder and mayhem that made le Carre�s story a thriller is something that happens, we are sad to say, our own government has been involved with such questionable drug testing among impoverished people both here and abroad.
In a scathing report put together in 1996 by the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) and the Washington Office of the government of Haiti entitled, �Measles Vaccine Experiments on Minority Children Turn Deadly�, such duplicity has occurred. NVIC is an organization founded by parents of vaccine-injured children that monitors the safety of vaccines. NVIC is responsible for passage of the 1986 law that provides compensation for parents of children killed or permanently damaged by vaccinations. www.909shot.com
The first part of the 1996 NVIC/Haiti report is as follows:
In an experiment to find out if they could give a high potency Edmonston Zagreb measles vaccine to babies as young as four months old in order to overwhelm their natural maternal antibodies and replace them with vaccine-induced antibodies, medical researchers at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Johns Hopkins University injected thousands of babies in the Third World with the experimental vaccine that reportedly caused chronic immune suppression and the deaths of an unknown number of babies. With the help of Kaiser Permanente, more than 1500 six-month old black and Hispanic babies in inner city Los Angeles were enrolled in the experiment starting in June 1990. The study was halted in October 1991 after repeated reports from vaccine trial sites in Africa that girl babies were dying in higher than expected numbers six months to three years after vaccination.
CDC Admits Informed Consent Violations - CDC director David Satcher admitted in a June 17 Los Angeles Times article that a National Institutes of Health (NIH) investigation of the 1990-91 Los Angeles study found that informed consent regulations had been violated because the parents were not told their babies would be injected with an experimental vaccine that had never been licensed by the FDA for use in America. Both Kaiser and the CDC have denied that any of the Los Angeles babies were harmed by the high potency EZ vaccine but did admit that one child, who received a standard potency EZ vaccine, died from a bacterial infection they maintain is unrelated to the vaccination.
The high potency EZ measles experiments began at four major sites in the mid-1980's including Haiti, the Senegal, Guinea Bissau and Mexico. Other trials followed in Cameroon, Gambia, Bangladesh, Togo, Iran, New Guinea, Peru, Rwanda, Sudan, South Africa, Egypt, Philippines, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Zaire and Los Angeles. Primary funding came from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Health Organization (WHO). In Haiti, infants were given the experimental vaccine at 10 to 500 times the usual dose levels. In a June 1996 article in Journal of Infectious Diseases, Johns Hopkins researchers report that infants with the highest antibody responses to high titer measles vaccine have the most profound immune suppression.
HIV Positive Babies Enrolled - Some of the infants in both Haiti and Zaire were HIV positive and already enrolled in a long term HIV study. They were deliberately included as part of the study design in order to evaluate the effects of vaccines in HIV positive infants. When study results were finally published in late 1993, deaths occurring in the HIV positive babies were left out of the mortality figures. It is unknown exactly how many of the vaccinated HIV-positive babies died, although at least 100 of the Haitian HIV-positive babies reportedly died.
Warnings Ignored - The measles vaccine experiment was only stopped two years after the director of one of the African sites warned the WHO and CDC experiment leaders in April 1990 that African mortality data raised a red flag about the high titer EZ vaccine. His reports were first ignored and then discounted and he was replaced as a principal investigator. After his mortality data was dismissed as incorrect for more than a year, with support from colleagues at Harvard, he published the mortality data in The Lancet in October 1991. WHO then called for all the sites to submit mortality data for independent analysis. The CDC has stated that enrollment for the LA study was halted in October 1991.
CDC Knew It Was An Experiment - In the LA Times article, the CDC's chief Satcher referred to the failure to tell the parents in LA that the EZ vaccine was experimental as a "little mistake" and not a deliberate attempt to deceive them. Kaiser maintains that the failure to inform the parents was an administrative "oversight." However, CDC grant announcements in 1989 clearly state that the vaccine trials are "experimental, developmental, test and research work." [Read]
Over the years NVIC�s newsletters have been filled with similar stories of what the ordinary person would judge as unethical and/or immoral acts in the name of developing new drugs. What makes watching The Constant Gardener interesting to someone familiar with these other reports, is that the main tension in the story occurs when the hero, Justin Quayle, interacts with his colleagues of longstanding, who he considered his friends. The plain fact of the matter is that each of these people had a stake in acting as they did. None of them were really bad people and all of them found an excuse to distance themselves from the ultimate outcome, the brutal murder of Tessa. What made Justin Quayle stand out as an unlikely hero is that confronted with true evil, he was compelled to take action, despite having been a passive, go-along-to-get-along middle management diplomat up until then.
In the real world of health freedom, there are only four kinds of people: a few evil people; a lot of well-meaning people who, like Quayle�s colleagues, are willing to blind themselves to the implications of things and shrink from taking action other than to protect their position; a whole lot of people who see something bad but who do nothing to change things; and a few people who see what is wrong and can�t live with themselves unless they make an effort to fix the problem.
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Notwithstanding the benefits of some types of medical intervention, if, after reading this story and others equally disturbing about our ailing medical system, you find yourself compelled to take action, we invite you to join us at an international meeting in Minneapolis this October to meet and greet some of the most interesting and committed health freedom fighters from all over the US, Canada, and Europe.
October
28-30, 2005
National Conference for Health Freedom Advocates
And World Health Freedom Assembly
Minneapolis, Minnesota www.nationalhealthfreedom.org
ACT
FOR HEALTH FREEDOM NOW: Go to www.friendsoffreedominternational.org
and purchase "Death by Modern Medicine" and view and purchase the
new movie on Codex and Free Trade called "We Become Silent" by Kevin
Miller. Proceeds from the sale of these products are crucial to help
fund our health freedom action. For state action go to www.nationalhealthfreedom.org.
� 2005 Carolyn Dean -
All Rights Reserved
Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor, naturopathic doctor, herbalist, acupuncturist, nutritionist, as well as a powerful health activist fighting for health freedom as president of Friends of Freedom International. Dr. Dean is the author of over a dozen health books, the latest of which is "Death By Modern Medicine".
Elissa Meininger, is Vice President of Friends of Freedom International and co-founder of the Health Freedom Action Network, a grassroots citizens' political action group. She is also a health freedom political analyst and can be heard on the natural health radio show SuperHealth, broadcast weekly on station WKY (SuperTalk AM 930) in Oklahoma City.
Website:
www.deathbymodernmedicine.com
Website: www.carolyndean.com
E-Mail: holeopharm@pol.net
In addition, be sure to mention that the Swiss health care system is considered the best in the world and manages to deliver it at half the cost of the American system.
