Nigeria polio shootings in Kano 'kill 12'

[Bosonic]

Source: BBC

Twelve people, including polio vaccinators, have been killed in two shootings at health centres in northern Nigeria, witnesses have told the BBC.

In the first attack in Kano four polio vaccinators were shot dead by gunmen who drove up on a motor tricycle.

Thirty minutes later gunmen opened fire at a health centre outside Kano city as women waited with their children.

Some Nigerian Muslim leaders have previously opposed polio vaccinations, claiming they could cause infertility.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21381773

[OKNancy]

1. Ignorance is the greatest terrorist. n/t

[Blue_Tires]

8. +1

[valerief]

2. Dr. Tiller comes to mind. Tragic story. nt

[lunatica]

3. Sometimes I wonder how the human race made it this far

Or maybe we're just another dead end leg of the homowhatever race. Extinction by stuperstition. Or idiocracy.

[tclambert]

4. That means every other country will have to keep vaccinating because polio won't be wiped out

for yet another decade. Wild polio only exists in three countries anymore--Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Until it's wiped out in those three, everybody else still has to protect themselves against a potential outbreak.

[longship]

5. And because of low vaccination rates,

polio could break out here. It's literally only an airplane flight away.

I remember polio when I was in grade school in Detroit. Kids in school would disappear one day. And others walked through the halls on braced legs. When the Salk vaccine became available, everybody got it because everybody was scared shitless.

Now, because of stupid idiots like Jenny McCarthy and her beau Jim Carrey, vaccination rates in the USA are falling below herd immunity (about 90% vaccinated).

The world could be rid of this, but in Africa, religious leaders are telling people that the vaccine is a western conspiracy to make Africans sterile. Does anybody wonder why someone lashes out against those evil vaccinators?

[Solly Mack]

6. Damn

[SemperEadem]

7. ignorant assholes with guns

with absolutely no proof behind their stupidity, they go out and murder innocent women and children. Ignorant fucks.

[struggle4progress]

9. Polio workers in Nigeria shot dead

At least nine health workers gunned down in northern city of Kano amid increasing hostility towards polio immunisation drive
David Smith, Africa correspondent
Friday 8 February 2013 12.55 EST

At least nine women who were vaccinating children against polio have been shot dead in northern Nigeria by gunmen suspected of belonging to a radical Islamist sect.

The killings drew comparisons with a series of incidents in Pakistan last December where five female polio vaccinators were gunned down, apparently by Islamist militants. It also signalled a fresh wave of hostility towards immunisation drives in Nigeria, where some clerics have claimed the vaccines are part of a western plot to sterilise young girls and eliminate the Muslim population.

The attacks took place in Kano, the biggest city in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north, where families generally feel more comfortable allowing women inside their homes than men.

On Friday morning gunmen arrived by motor tricycle and opened fire in the Hotoro Hayi neighbourhood, killing at least eight female vaccinators, witnesses told Associated Press. Four people were killed in a second attack, in the Unguwa Uku neighbourhood, according to witnesses ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/08/polio-workers-nigeria-shot-dead

[Catherina]

10. We can thank the CIA

Polio Workers Gunned Down in Nigeria
Attack comes on heels of series of attacks on polio workers in Pakistan
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Nine polio health workers have been killed in two attacks in northern Nigeria on Friday, following a spate of recent attacks on polio workers in Pakistan.


Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

The Associated Press reports that the attacks took place in two neighborhoods of the largest city in Nigeria's north, Kano, when gunmen opened fire on the vaccinators.

...

A series of attacks have killed polio workers in Pakistan in recent weeks, possibly fueled by blowback from the fake vaccination drive used there to find bin Laden. The New York Times reported:

Some militants (in Pakistan) accuse polio workers of using vaccination campaigns as a cover to spy on behalf of the United States — a claim that has been fueled by the revelation that the C.I.A. used a vaccination drive as cover for the effort to find Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in early 2011.

According to the World Health Organization, Nigeria and Pakistan are two of the three countries where polio remains endemic. Afghanistan is the third.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/02/08-3


Related: UK Guardian: CIA organised fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden's family DNA



And we can thank them from all over the world. Their "Scientists" who just got caught in Bolivia trying to destabilize Evo Morales' government aren't doing anything to help the worldwide suspicions that you can't trust US NGOs because they're CIA covers. Great going CIA.

[idwiyo]

11. Thank You! I am going to bet that shortly someone is going to claim there is no relationship between

these events and in any case, it's all worth it. Or something like it.

[Catherina]

15. Didn't take long

Are we that naive or is it that we think the rest of the world is that naive? I can't make up my mind.

[idwiyo]

17. Wish I knew the answer. Maybe it's because lots of Westerners know very little about medical testing

In Africa?

I do hope though that recent news about use of Depo Provera in Israel doesn't filter down to countries like Nigeria and Pakistan. Coupled together with unethical testing and population control in Zimbabwe in 70's it will be devastating for the medical personel on the ground.

[Catherina]

18. Pfizer beat them to the punch

...

In all, 11 children died in the trial: five after taking Trovan and six after taking an older antibiotic used for comparison in the clinical trial. Others suffered blindness, deafness and brain damage.

...

The distrust of Western medicine that the dispute engendered was one of several factors that led many families in northern Nigeria to refuse to let their children be vaccinated against polio. (Other factors were rumors that the polio vaccine contained the AIDS virus or represented a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls.) Northern Nigeria is still one of the world’s last remaining epicenters of polio.

Trovan was introduced in 1998 and became a lucrative product for Pfizer, but it was later withdrawn in Europe and restricted in the United States after the drug was blamed for cases of fatal liver damage.

Last year, a secret 2009 State Department cable exposed by WikiLeaks said that a Pfizer official in Nigeria told American diplomats that the company had hired private investigators to “uncover corruption links” to Nigeria’s former attorney general in order to pressure him to drop the Trovan lawsuits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/africa/12nigeria.html

...

The government alleges that Pfizer researchers selected 200 children and infants from crowds at a makeshift epidemic camp in Kano and gave about half of the group an untested antibiotic called Trovan. Researchers gave the other children what the lawsuit describes as a dangerously low dose of a comparison drug made by Hoffmann-La Roche. Nigerian officials say Pfizer's actions resulted in the deaths of an unspecified number of children and left others deaf, paralyzed, blind or brain-damaged.

The lawsuit says that the researchers did not obtain consent from the children's families and that the researchers knew Trovan to be an experimental drug with life-threatening side effects that was "unfit for human use." Parents were banned from the ward where the drug trial occurred, the suit says, and the company left no medical records in Nigeria.

Pfizer and its doctors "agreed to do an illegal act," the criminal charges state, and behaved "in a manner so rash and negligent as to endanger human life."

Internal Pfizer records obtained by The Washington Post show that five children died after being treated with the experimental antibiotic, though there is no indication in the documents that the drug was responsible for the deaths. Six children died while taking the comparison drug.

Suspicion stirred by news of the drug trial has been so intense in Kano, the lawsuit says, that parents last year refused to allow their children to be immunized against polio, frustrating a program aimed at wiping out one of the disease's last refuges.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052902107.html

Nigeria's health minister appointed a panel of experts to look into Pfizer's actions, but its final report was suppressed without explanation. Last year, The Post obtained a copy, which revealed that the panel had concluded Pfizer's actions violated Nigerian law, the international Declaration of Helsinki and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The panel said Pfizer administered an oral form of Trovan that apparently had never been given to children with meningitis. It said there were no records documenting that Pfizer told the children or their parents that they were part of a drug trial. And it said an approval letter from a Nigerian ethics committee, which Pfizer used to justify its actions, was a sham concocted long after the trial ended.

"The families of the children who [Pfizer] used as laboratory guinea pigs were led to believe and in fact understood that the Defendants were providing their children with volunteer relief, clearly focused humanitarian medical intervention and nothing more," the lawsuit says.

Parents were not told that alternative treatments were available, it adds.

...

The lawsuit contends that Pfizer researchers left the area during the epidemic, took all medical records and "obliterated any evidence" of the trial.

...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052902107_2.html

[Catherina]

16. Wikileaks dumped 4,598 cables about the US collusion in Nigeria

THE CIA's involvement in political assassinations in that oil rich country have not been forgotten and the Wikileaks dumps proved they're still not done there. How could they be? Nigeria has the world's 7th largest proven oil and gas reserves and has the *impudence* to be working with Russia's GazProm on territory Shell Oil thinks it exclusively owns.

I didn't read all the wikileaks cables on Nigeria but you can bet the Nigerians did and it doesn't look like everyone is too happy about it either. Pimping for Shell Oil when Shell does this to your country? Nope, not going to go over too well with everyone and understandably so.

Nigeria is Africa’s leading oil producer and the eighth biggest exporter in the world, accounting for 8% of US oil imports. Although a recent UN report largely exonerated the company, critics accuse Shell, the biggest operator in the delta, and other companies, of causing widespread pollution and environmental damage in the region. Militant groups engaged in hostage-taking and sabotage have proliferated.

http://nok-ind.tumblr.com/post/2157466928/wikileaks-cables-shells-grip-on-nigerian-state

CIA and Nigeria
Posted on July 2, 2012 by shulquist

Wikileaks identified the US embassy in Nigeria as a forward operating base for wide and far reaching acts of subversion against Nigeria which include but not limited to eavesdropping on Nigerian government communication, financial espionage on leading Nigerians, support and funding of subversive groups and insurgents, sponsoring of divisive propaganda among the disparate groups of Nigeria and the use of visa blackmail to induce and coerce high ranking Nigerians into acting in favor of US interests.

...

The Nigerian government has given the U.S. the authority to conduct strikes against the group on Nigerian soil in an US State department letter.

The Nigeria Guardian called the move by Nigeria “a tacit partial surrender of the nation’s sovereignty to the United States of America.”

The letter from Nigeria will open the West African nation up to drone strikes by the U.S. on Nigerian soil.

http://laboratoryofhiddenalternatives.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/cia-and-nigeria/

[Igel]

21. The bin Ladin "scam" was in the last few years.

This was happening in Pakistan in 2001 and 2002. For the same reason: It's a Western plot to render the women sterile (permanently or temporarily), depriving the ummah of good Islamic warriors and weaking the ummah overall.

The CIA incident was just confirmation of what was already widely believed. No word on whether that CIA "plot" to find bin Ladin actually administered contraceptives, sterility drugs, or, perhaps, polio vaccine.

We noticed this kind of obscurantist violence more after the bin Ladin incident because it played into domestic US politics and anti-US overseas politics. We didn't care so much when it made the Islamic fundamentalists look bad all on their own and there was nobody to blame but the locals. Where are the political points to be scored on that? I figure it goes to show what's really important.

Before polio, it was other vaccination programs and social work programs whose workers were gunned down because of the extreme suspicion and xenophobia that's bred in some areas by some strains of religious zeal. What happened in 2001 was that this kind of sonsense spread as the jihadi contagion spread.

[jzodda]

12. There is no connection

In Nigeria its about fertility. A rumor started a long time ago in Nigeria that Polio vaccinations cause infertility. The aid workers have been battling this false rumor for a long time and it has caused sporadic violence.

[Catherina]

14. The people on the ground contradict you

You can't have the CIA running all over the world, hiding as NGO workers and expect people to trust NGO workers.

This is a mess the CIA has created. In Central America, where I am right now, it takes a lot of work and time to convince people you're here for honest purposes thanks to all the shenanigans the CIA pulls that never make US papers.

This month's story is what "scientists who came to study the effects of high-altitude" just pulled in Bolivia and got busted as CIA/Pentagon agents. The cover doesn't fool anyone anymore and innocent NGO workers get lumped into that mess.

Why is blowback such a difficult concept for Americans to wrap their heads around? Action? Reaction.

Gunmen Kill Nigerian Polio Vaccine Workers in Echo of Pakistan Attacks
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: February 8, 2013

...

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

...

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/world/africa/in-nigeria-polio-vaccine-workers-are-killed-by-gunmen.html?_r=0

[Igel]

22. New definition of blowback.

I still like the old one. Sloppy reading gives sloppy inferences.

Anyway, the point that's made that you don't like is precisely the one your link confirms.

It was widely believed (even before 2003) that the West was trying to sterilize Muslim women. Xenophobia. This wasn't just US efforts-this was WHO efforts with French and 3rd world doctors as staffers. It's all in that little word "now," in "Frankly, now I can't go to them and say, 'The CIA isn't involved'." Well, she can, but they have a rebuttal. Before she could and, well, they still had a rebuttal. It's a plot against the ummah. Can't argue with conspiracy theories--they metastasize and mutate to accommodate any evidence. In fact, they often claim the counterevidence as support.

The CIA incident claimed as justification is just that. Justification for a long-held belief. Before that it was some other belief--"all outsiders are evil and trying to destroy us." There's no social trust, and no good basis for creating any. In country or especially out-country.

[Catherina]

24. Thanks for chiming in. Unfortunately, they've been caught too many times n/t

[Posteritatis]

13. Pretty sure we can thank the assholes who are murdering doctors instead. (nt)

[Democat]

20. Some people prefer to blame the US government for everything

No matter what some evil person or group does anywhere in the world, it's the US government's fault.

[Posteritatis]

23. Yep. Love that "95% of humanity has no agency whatsoever" attitude. (nt)

[daleo]

25. Sometimes people in other parts of the world distrust the west for good reasons

Sometimes bad reasons, sometimes for no particular reason at all. It all gets mixed together.

Americans and other westerners sometimes act the same way towards foreigners. Consider drone attacks by western powers that kill innocent bystanders, for instance. The families of those people probably find our behaviour just as unfathomable as we find the killing of innocent medical helpers.