Podcasts about cervarix

Today's Headlines: Over the weekend, three US troops were killed and dozens injured by a drone strike near the Syrian border in Jordan. These are the first US fatalities following months of strikes by Iran-backed militia groups in the region. In response, President Biden stated that the US will hold those responsible to account. Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice issued an interim response to South Africa's case against Israel for acts of genocide in Gaza, ordering Israel to prevent deaths and destruction but not explicitly calling for a ceasefire. Negotiations for a hostage deal involving Israel suspending military operations for two months in exchange for the release of hostages are reportedly getting closer to an agreement. On a different note, nine countries have suspended aid to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees due to allegations of employee involvement in the October 7th attacks. In other news, a New York City jury awarded writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in a defamation suit against Donald Trump, who plans to appeal. The FAA approved Boeing 737 Max 9 jets to fly again after implementing new inspection and maintenance procedures. A study found the HPV vaccine Cervarix effective in protecting women from cervical cancer, and a massive data breach affected 26 billion records across various companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Canva, Adobe, and MySpace. Resources/Articles mentioned in this episode: AP News: 3 U.S. troops killed in drone attack in Jordan by Iran-backed militia | AP News AP News: Top UN court orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza but stops short of ordering cease-fire NY Times: Negotiators Close In on Hostage Deal That Would Halt Fighting in Gaza for Weeks NBC News: U.S., U.K. among 9 countries pausing funding to UNRWA amid allegations 12 employees were part of Oct. 7 attack NY Times: Trump Will Be Able to Wait to Pay Full $83.3 Million Until All Appeals Are Exhausted NBC News: Highlights: Trump civil fraud trial is over; judge aims for decision by Jan. 31 NY Times: Grounded Boeing Max 9 Jets Could Resume Flying Within Days  Medscape: HPV Vaccine Shown to Be Highly Effective in Girls Years Later Cybernews: Mother of All Breaches: ​a Historic Data Leak Reveals 26 Billion Records Morning Announcements is produced by Sami Sage alongside Amanda Duberman and Bridget Schwartz Edited by Grace Hernandez-Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vaccine development is a tremendous scientific breakthrough benefitting countless human lives. In Part 1 of this ASCO Oncology, Etc. Education Podcast episode, you will hear from the pioneering co-developer of the HPV vaccine Dr. Doug Lowy who serves as Principal Deputy Director of the National Cancer Institute , He speaks about how he got into the cancer field through the influence of his parents (4:49), the path that led him to focus on HPV (8:04), and his collaborative professional partnership with fellow HPV vaccine developer Dr. John Schiller (9:31). He also discusses his ongoing trial of one-dose administration, which promises to boost HPV vaccine uptake and reduce the burden of cervical cancer globally. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. Learn more at https://education.asco.org, or email us at education@asco.org. TRANSCRIPT Pat Loehrer: Hi, I'm Pat Loehrer. I'm Director of the Center of Global Oncology and Health Equity at Indiana University. Dave Johnson: I'm Dave Johnson. I'm a Professor of Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. Pat Loehrer: And this is Oncology, Etc. Dave, what have you been reading lately? Dave Johnson: Well, you and I have talked about a couple of books, but I thought in light of our guest today, I would mention a book I actually read probably nearly 60 years ago called The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif - very interesting book, written, if memory serves me correctly, in the '30s, about many of the early bacteriologists and physicians who were interested in microbes; Pasteur, for example, and others. And I don't remember all the details, but it certainly was one that was influential for my choice of Medicine as a career, much like Arrowsmith. It was a really impactful book. I doubt many of our listeners today would've read that book, but if one is interested in the history of Medicine, it's a really interesting book to read. Pat Loehrer: You said 60 years ago. Okay, when I was reading books back then, it was about Dick and Jane. Dave Johnson: It's my understanding that you're not past Dick and Jane yet. Pat Loehrer: Good, good point. Good point. Well, it's such an incredible honor today, we have Dr. Doug Lowy as our interviewee today. Doug is the Principal Deputy Director of the National Cancer Institute and Chief of the Intramural Laboratory and Cellular Oncology Program at the Center for Cancer Research. He has served as Acting Director more than any other person - he served as Acting Director between April of 2015 and October of 2017, between April of 2019 and October of 2019, and most recently, he served as an Acting Director until Monday of this week, October 3rd. I had a chance of seeing Doug, I think, about a year ago, a week after he took over, and this is great to have that bookend here. He has had this title of Principal Deputy Director since July of 2010 and he leads many of the NCI's key scientific initiatives. He graduated from Amherst College, I think in Art History, I may be wrong on that, received his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine, trained in Internal Medicine at Stanford, and did a Dermatology Residency at Yale. His focus has been on papillomavirus and the regulation of normal and neoplastic growth. The papillomavirus is in close collaboration with Dr. John Schiller with whom he's co-authored 150 papers over the last 25 years. In the 1980s, he studied the genetic organization of papillomaviruses and identified oncogenes that were encoded by the virus, and he's been integrally involved and instrumental in the development of the papillomavirus vaccine. His laboratory did work with the RAS gene family and other suppressor genes, and as you can guess, he's just one heck of a smart guy. For his body of work and together with Dr. Schiller, they received the Federal Employee of the Year Award in 2007 and the Partnership for Public Service Award, the Dorothy P. Landon American Association for Cancer Research Prize for Translational Research, the Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal in 2011. In 2007, he got the Medal of Honor for basic research from the American Cancer Society, and President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2014. And in 2017, he received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, which is considered one of the most prestigious honors in biomedical research. He is listed in the Institute of Scientific Information as one of the most highly-cited authors in Microbiology, and obviously, he's a member of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Medicine. Although these are notable honors, I'm told that none of them match the opportunity to speak with Dave and I today, and we really thank you so much, Dr. Lowy, for joining us. Thank you. Dr. Doug Lowy: Pat, I am speechless. Pat Loehrer: I so wish that Dave Johnson was, but could you tell us a little bit about your upbringing and your early life? Dr. Doug Lowy: Sure. I grew up in The Bronx, in New York City. I'm the younger of two boys. My brother is two and a half years older than I am. Both of my parents were general practitioners. My parents were both Americans, but my father had a classic sophomore slump when he was an undergraduate and was unable to get into a medical school in the United States. And so, he actually went to medical school in Austria, in the University of Vienna, and needed to learn German in order to go to medical school. But my parents were both very successful private practitioners. They had separate practices but practiced in the same office, and I learned about medicine, in large part, through them. They would go to lectures, and from the time I was probably nine or 10 years old, they would be telling me about cancer, and I became interested in that area. And then, when I was 16, my mother developed a deep melanoma on her leg, and so, cancer literally came home. And luckily, she had very good surgical treatment and lived for almost another 40 years - she lived until she was 80 and actually died of metastatic stomach cancer. But I got involved in thinking about cancer really through my parents. They talked with me about the role of tobacco in the development of lung cancer, and I heard about the Hammond and Horn report from the mid-1950s when it came out. Pat Loehrer: That was when Dave was reading the Microbe Hunters. Dr. Doug Lowy: I was reading it at about the same time. I must say that, although I found it very interesting, it didn't really speak to me, and now that's what I need to go and do. Although, in retrospect, that's what I've ended up going and doing. Pat Loehrer: Was it because of your mother that you had an interest in dermatology? How did you swing into there? Because we think of you mostly as a translational researcher. Dr. Doug Lowy: The dermatology was really when I was at NYU. I worked in the laboratory of Jan Vilcek, who had recently come from Czechoslovakia to NYU, and in his lab was Alvin Friedman-Kien, who was a dermatologist. And Alvin subsequently was among the first people to identify the AIDS epidemic through the Kaposi sarcoma. But Alvin talked with me about dermatology, and potentially, this might be an interesting field for me to go into. And then, when I went to Stanford, I did Internal Medicine for internship and a year of Medicine, and I did a rotation in Dermatology. And I was very impressed that the people who smiled the most were the dermatologists. And they had time also to think about what was going on with patients. And since I was at Stanford, it was a tertiary care facility and so we were taking care of people who were terribly sick, largely people with lymphoma and other types of cancer. And I thought that I might be better suited to taking care of people who were less sick than that. Dave Johnson: Is that where your interest in Papillomavirus started? Dr. Doug Lowy: Well, that was indirect. I first went into dermatology and then said, "Well, I want to be doing research. What can I do in research that might be connected both with dermatology as well as with cancer?" And the closest that I was able to come was Papillomaviruses. And when I started working on them, they were not yet clearly associated with cancer the way they are today. It was known that they were associated with an uncommon condition called Epidermodysplasia Verruciformis or EV and this is a condition where people have widespread HPV infection. And on sun-exposed areas, a subset of them develop skin cancer, but it's distinctly uncommon. The real interest, if you will, came from the identification of HPV infection and cervical cancer, which is one of the more common cancers, especially on a worldwide basis. And that was really the link with cancer. Pat Loehrer: You had an incredibly long-term collaboration with John Schiller, and as I mentioned, you published more than Dave and I have written letters to our wives with this man. Tell us a little bit about that relationship, that friendship, and that professional partnership. Dr. Doug Lowy: John, actually, he was at the University of Washington in Seattle doing his PhD, and it was so long ago that he sent me a letter, and I had been doing research on retroviruses. He sent me a proposal that he was doing his PhD in bacterial genetics, but he wanted to learn about mammalian viruses and so was writing to me about doing work with retroviruses. I wrote back to him and said, "That's very interesting, but I had just started working on papillomaviruses." And I thought the room for development and learning more was even greater there than with mouse retroviruses, which is what I was working on and what he was proposing to do some post-doctoral research on. Of course, he had never heard of papillomaviruses, so he had to look them up. But he developed a project with papillomaviruses and was able to get an NIH award to come as a postdoctoral fellow to work in my lab, and he actually did the research that he proposed, and it led to our improved understanding of the genetic organization of papillomaviruses. But then, it was clear that John and I got along very well, and it looked like both of us might be able to work together. So, he ended up getting tenure after he had been at NIH for about 10 years. And it's just been an amazing collaboration for me because John knows a lot of things that I don't know, and he thinks that I know some things that he doesn't know. And working together has been terrific, really, because when one of us doesn't want to do anything about something, the other one tends to step in. And so, it's been an amazing partnership that we have had for this time. Dave Johnson: This is really important. One of the reasons we agreed to do this podcast is to provide insight to up-and-coming faculty and fellows about mentoring and partnerships. What is the most important aspect of your partnership with Dr. Schiller? Dr. Doug Lowy: I think treating him as an equal colleague from day one, that probably is important. And then, since I was senior and he was junior, trying to make sure that he got credit when discoveries were made because the default, otherwise, was going to be that it was Doug Lowy who was doing things, whereas it was very clear that John was a key part of this collaboration. Dave Johnson: Now that your relationship is a long-lasting and mature one, how do you make those decisions now? Dr. Doug Lowy: Well, we've just worked together for a long time, and we enjoy talking, and actually, over the last few years, we are collaborating less rather than more. We're still very close colleagues, and we're in the same lab. But since I've been Deputy Director, especially during the last seven and a half years, I've been Acting Director for about three and a half out of the last seven and a half years, and there just isn't enough time to devote to the lab. And it would've been inappropriate for me to have been considered a co-principal investigator with John, who has gone off and done a lot of amazing research, more or less independent of me. Like everything else in this world, it develops, it continues to evolve, but we still are very close colleagues. As Pat was mentioning, this is my first week in several months not being Acting Director, and yesterday, John and I simply reveled in the opportunity to talk informally for 30 minutes without having to look at my watch because I needed to go someplace else. Dave Johnson: I'm glad you've reviewed that. I think a lot of junior faculty and fellows think that being in a leadership position is a cush job, and I'd tell them that it defies the laws of Physics because all poop flows uphill in this setting, and you have to deal with it. Pat Loehrer: I do want to spend some time talking about the NCI and your role there, but talk a little bit about how you have seen and where you envision that vaccines, particularly, HPV and maybe hepatitis vaccine - where you see it's been, and where it's going, and the impact that this potentially has on cancer worldwide? Dr. Doug Lowy: Well, one of the areas that John and I are continuing to work on closely is more research on the HPV vaccines. We noticed, quite a number of years ago, that the HPV vaccine performance was quite different from that of other so-called subunit vaccines. So, this is not an attenuated live vaccine, but instead is a subunit - it's just made up of one protein of the papillomavirus, the protein that gives rise to the outer shell of the virus. And what we noticed in a clinical trial that we were doing with colleagues in the intramural program, but who are medical epidemiologists - they are the leaders of the research, and what was happening was that although everyone was supposed to get three doses, there were some young women who were getting either two doses or one dose, in the trial, and this is in Costa Rica, where historically, cervical cancer has been the number one cancer of women. And it turned out that there was no difference in level of protection whether the women got one dose, two doses, or three doses. And even more surprising was that the antibody levels over the first few years were remarkably stable. And this led John and me to wonder whether it might be possible to get away with just a single vaccine dose. So, a lot of the research that we have been doing with our colleagues over the last few years is to develop stronger evidence that one dose of the vaccine would be sufficient to confer strong protection that's long-lasting. We've now carried out the studies in Costa Rica, with the initial trial to more than 10 years, and the antibody levels continue to be very stable, and the protection does not seem to have waned. Because this was not a pre-specified outcome, it's not enough to change standard of care. So, we and our colleagues are conducting a non-inferiority efficacy trial that is comparing two doses versus one dose of two different FDA-approved vaccines. One, GARDASIL 9, which is the HPV vaccine that's available for sale in the United States. But also Cervarix, which is made by GlaxoSmithKline, it's approved by the FDA, but it's no longer sold in the United States. And we anticipate that the results will read out in another couple of years. And if the results show that one dose and two doses are pretty comparable, we're expecting that this will lead to a worldwide change in recommendations for the HPV vaccine. So, whether you are in a high-income country or a low or middle-income country, that one dose is what will end up being recommended. Pat Loehrer: They could almost completely eradicate this disease, the most common cancer around the world. It's huge. Dr. Doug Lowy: So, Pat, the problem is that although the vaccine was approved 15 years ago, only about 10% of eligible young women in low and middle-income countries have actually been vaccinated up to now. And we think that the logistics and the cost of one dose could really be transformative, especially for those young women. It also would save the United States a great deal of money because needing only one dose would be far less expensive, and the government actually pays for about half of the HPV vaccine that is delivered to teenagers through the Vaccines for Children program.   Dave Johnson: Well, this concludes part one of our interview with Dr. Doug Lowy, Principal Deputy Director of the National Cancer Institute and Chief of the Intramural Laboratory of Cellular Oncology in the Center for Cancer Research. In the second part of this episode, Dr. Lowy will give his insight to vaccine hesitancy in the COVID era and the evolution of accomplishments over the past 50 years working at the National Cancer Institute. We want to thank all of our listeners for tuning in to Oncology, Etc. an ASCO Educational podcast, where we will talk about just about anything and everything. So, if you have an idea for a topic or a guest you would like for us to interview on the show, please email us at: education@asco.org.   Thank you for listening to the ASCO Education podcast. To stay up to date with the latest episodes, please click, Subscribe. Let us know what you think by leaving a review. For more information, visit the Comprehensive Education Center, at: education.asco.org. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.   Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy, should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.    

Primary Ovarian Insufficiency is a difficult and little understood diagnosis for infertility with ramifications for your general health as well as for your fertility. We talk with Dr. Alex Quaas, a Board Certified Reproductive Endocrinologist with Reproductive Partners of San Diego and an Associate Professor at UCSD.In this episode, we cover:What is Primary Ovarian Insufficiency (POI)?Is there a difference between the labels/diagnoses - Primary Ovarian Insufficiency, Premature Ovarian Failure, Premature Menopause? What are the symptoms (other than an inability to get pregnant)?Is there a decrease in egg quality and increase chromosomal abnormalities?How is POI diagnosed?How does the diagnosis differ from PCOS?What causes primary ovarian insufficiency?Is there any correlation between POI and taking Accutane (a treatment for acne) as a teen?Is there a link between premature ovarian failure and the HPV vaccine (Gardasil or Cervarix)?Can losing one ovary lead to Primary Ovarian Insufficiency?Are those with autoimmune diseases more susceptible to POI?Can IVF lead to Primary Ovarian Insufficiency? Is there any evidence that aggressive stimulation of the ovaries during a typical IVF cycle can contribute to POI?How effective is IVF with woman with Primary Ovarian Insufficiency? What are the odds of a spontaneous pregnancy for a woman with POI?What is the role of the infertility nurse in helping women with POI?Is there a medical way to slow down the diminution of ovarian egg reserves?Are their lifestyle choices that contribute to POI or contribute to increasing a woman's ovarian reserves?Are there supplements or vitamins that help improve fertility for women with Primary Ovarian Insufficiency?Has alternative medical approaches or Eastern Medicine been effective with increasing fertility for women with POI?What are the other health implications for women with Primary Ovarian Insufficiency?This podcast is produced  by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire infertility patients and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following expert-based content:Weekly podcastsWeekly articles/blog postsResource pages on all aspects of family buildingPlease leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamilySupport the show (https://creatingafamily.org/donation/)

It is Time to Dismantle the World Health Organization Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, April 19, 2021   The ultimate international authority for infectious diseases is the World Health Organization (WHO). Due to its widespread acceptance by the world's national governments, it has been extremely successful in assuming the helm to monitor regional and global infectious diseases and dictate medical intervention policies to international health agencies. The organization has become the final word to rule whether the spread of a serious pathogen is a pandemic or not. For the majority of the medical community, the media and the average person, the WHO is the front line command post for medical prevention (i.e., vaccination) and treatment.  Consequently its rulings are often regarded as the gold standard.  On matters of global health, the WHO holds dominance.  For approximately a year the WHO has propagated the belief that the first line of defense for curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic is self-isolation, distancing, masks and, ultimately, vaccination. Although it approved Ivermectin as a cost-effective treatment against SARS-CoV-2 infections, it disapproved hydroxychloroquine in favor of Gilead Bioscience’s and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease’s (NIAID) Anthony Fauci’s novel and costly drug Remdesivir.  Much of it’s funding efforts have been reserved for mass-vaccination with the new generation of experimental vaccines. Throughout these efforts, the WHO has allied itself with the US's and UK’s national health systems, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and his Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) initiative.  Most people wrongly assume the WHO acts independently from private commercial and national government interests for the welfare of the world's population. The legitimacy of the WHO as a gold standard of health is dubious. The organization has frequently been accused of conflicts of interests with private pharmaceutical companies and mega-philanthropic organizations such as the Gates’ Foundation, as well as being riddled with political alliances, ideologies, and profiteering motives. Despite it’s mega-pharmaceutical interests and consultants representing private vaccine interests, in the past the WHO has had the audacity to ridicule the pharmaceutical industry of corruption. “Corruption in the pharmaceutical sector occurs throughout all stages of the medicine chain, from research and development to dispensing and promotion…. A lack of transparency and accountability within the medicines chain can also contribute to unethical practices and corruption.” These are similar charges that have been leveled against the WHO. An article in the National Review called the WHO "scandal plagued" with "wasteful spending, utter disregard for transparency, pervasive incompetence, and failure to adhere to even basic democratic standards." In his book, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial, University of Amsterdam professor emeritus Dr. Stuart Blume raises the serious problem of the WHO’s most influential advisors on emergency health conditions, such as the current Covid-19 pandemic and earlier the 2009 H1N1 swine flu scare that never was, serve as consultants for the vaccine industry. During times of global emergencies and crises, the WHO confers with a separate group of advisors outside its formal sitting Strategic Advisory Group of Experts or SAGE; the names of this group’s members are not made public.  We would add that the WHO’s level of incompetence has resulted in serious misinformation about pandemics, medical risks of vaccines and other health-threatening chemicals.  For example, during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the organization reported it could not find any evidence of human transmission. However, the WHO has repeatedly kowtowed to China’s demands and unscrupulously accepts whatever statistics and statements the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) provides. Responding to a petition signed by over 700,000 signatories demanding the resignation of the current WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom, Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso told the Japanese parliament that the organization “should be renamed the Chinese Health Organization” for favoring China’s policy to stall and obstruct international investigations and for lauding unsubstantiated praise on the country’s transparency and handling of the pandemic. Back on December 31, 2019, Taiwan – which has been barred from WHO membership due to China’s political maneuvering – had been warning of a possible human-to-human transmission contrary to the wet-market narrative, but this was largely ignored in order to avoid upsetting the CCP. The UK’s Sunday Times reported that Chinese scientists were forced to destroy their proof of the virus shortly after its discovery. In the province of Hubei, authorities ordered the cessation of further testing and the destruction of existing samples. Other researchers who made efforts to warn the public were punished.  Writing for The Hill, University of Texas at San Antonio professor Bradley Thayer wrote, “Tedros apparently turned a blind eye to what happened in Wuhan and the rest of China and… has helped play down the severity, prevalence and scope of the Covid-19 outbreak.” Thayer concludes, “Tedros is not fit to lead the WHO.” He has no formal medical training as a physician or any international management experience in global health. Many others have voiced similar criticisms pointing out Tedro’s unsuitable background.  Moreover, the Director General’s conflicts of interest with China abound. Immediately before and after his tenure as the Health Minister for Ethiopia’s ruling Communist party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, China had donated an estimated $60 million to the terrorist government and its social programs. Now heading the WHO, Tedros appears to continue lobbying on China’s behalf. In 2017, the Washington Post noted the fundamental problem:  “[China] worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help Tedros defeat the United Kingdom candidate for the WHO job, David Nabarro. Tedros’s victory was also a victory for Beijing, whose leader Xi Jinping has made public his goal of flexing China’s muscle in the world.” Upon assuming his new position at the WHO, Tedros had left Ethiopia’s healthcare system in ruin.  As one young healthcare worker reported, there was no “bare necessities of a health care office…. Sterile gloves, paper exam gowns and covers, cotton swabs, gauze, tongue depressors, alcohol prep pads, chemical test strips, suturing equipment, syringes, stethoscopes… were non-existent. This is a fact in most health care centers in Ethiopia.”  During the more recent re-investigation of SARS-CoV-2 origins, the Chinese authorities refused to provide raw case data and created repressive conditions to curtail reliable analysis and disclosure. The WHO’s final report concluded that the virus had an animal origin and did not escape Wuhan’s high security pathogen laboratory. But there are viable reasons to discredit the report as untrustworthy at best and perhaps intentionally deceptive.  First, the entire agenda of the investigation was staged theater rather than a deep investigation to uncover empirical evidence. The team simply inspected seafood and open-air markets. Consequently, the WHO team returned empty handed and without laboratory records for a proper forensic examination. To call the entire WHO effort gross incompetence would be an understatement. Based upon all the evidence that has emerged, a large number of professional medical voices are calling the entire investigation a farce. Most problematic is the appointment of Peter Daszak on the WHO’s group to carry out the investigation. Daszak, the founding president of the shadowy non-profit organization EcoHealth Alliance, has headed many hunting adventures worldwide to identify the emergence of potential pathogens that could become pandemics. With the intention to divert attention away from an escaped laboratory virus, Daszak stated on a Going Viral podcast there was no evidential reason to visit and inspect the Wuhan laboratory. According to Independent Science News, despite Daszak’s denial of a lab origin, “EcoHealth Alliance funded bat coronavirus research, including virus collection, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and thus could themselves be directly implicated in the outbreak.” The research at the Wuhan lab included ‘gain of function” efforts on coronaviruses, and received funds directly approved by Anthony Fauci. Newsweek reports the NIH had given a total of $7.4 million to the Chinese lab for the research. The organization has received over $100 million from a variety of sources, including the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the NIH and undisclosed amounts from the Chinese government. Daszak himself has authored 25 studies funded by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, think tanks, universities, military institutions, and ministries directly connected with the Chinese Communist Party.  Given the halls of power within the WHO, we are outlining some of the more salient reasons why the organization's declarations about infectious diseases, pandemics and vaccination should not be trusted.  Vaccine Promotional Misconduct For many years the WHO's recommendations for certain vaccines were kept secret. Writing in a 2006 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Marc Girard uncovered "scientific incompetence, misconduct or even criminal malfeasance" over the intentional inflation of vaccines' benefits while undermining toxicity and adverse effects. Dr. Girard testified as a medical expert for a French court in a criminal trial against the WHO after French health officials obliged the organization to launch its universal Hepatitis B vaccine campaign. The campaign resulted in the deaths of French children. Girard gained access to confidential WHO documents. He noted that the WHO's "French figures about chronic liver diseases were simply extrapolated from the U.S. reports." He further accused the WHO serving "merely as a screen for commercial promotion, in particular via the Viral Hepatitis Prevention Board (VHPB), which was created, sponsored, and infiltrated by the manufacturers." Now during the Covid-19 pandemic, as early as last July, the WHO approved of China’s first vaccine for emergency use, long before it had undergone proper clinical trials and much earlier than Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines’ approval. Orchestration of Pandemic Panics Before the current COVID-19 pandemic, there was the H1N1 swine flu scare in 2009. However, at the very start the WHO's fear mongering of a global contagion that could exceed the death counts of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was solely based on false rhetoric rather than empirical evidence.  The fabrications are believed to have originated from the WHO's senior consultant on viral outbreaks who happens to carry the reputation of being one of the world's leading pandemic alarmists: Dr. Albert Osterhaus, nicknamed "Dr. Flu." At the time, Osterhaus was head of the Department of Virology at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. When the swine flu scare appeared, he was also the president of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI), an organization funded by the major vaccine manufacturers including Baxter, MedImmune, Glaxo, Sanofi Pasteur and others. It was also Osterhaus who transformed an otherwise potentially bad flu season into a global pandemic. The WHO has been criticized harshly in the media for changing the definition of a "pandemic" and in doing so has been charged with benefitting the pharmaceutical industry. The British Medical Journal reported that the WHO failed to report conflicts of interest in its H1N1 advisory group. The journal's Editor-in-Chief Fiona Godlee wrote, "WHO must act now to restore its credibility, and Europe should legislate." The former head of the prestigious Cochrane Database Collaboration’s vaccine studies, Dr. Tom Jefferson, told a Der Spiegel interviewer, “the WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies... built this machine around the impending [H1N1] pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence and careers, and entire institutions.” When the 2009 H1N1 influenza strain appeared, the WHO rushed forward to mangle its earlier criteria that would realistically define a pandemic. The organization intentionally removed reference to a pathogen’s “severity” as a necessary requirement. “Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy,” Dr. Jefferson continues, “about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of a pandemic?.... that’s how swine flu has been categorized as a pandemic.” Moreover, the WHO’s decision to label the outbreak as a pandemic was not based upon its own permanent vaccine experts but on the recommendations of a non-disclosed group of outside consultants.  According to a financial forecast published by JP Morgan, the collaboration between the WHO and Osterhaus's ESWI to orchestrate the pandemic would have profited the pharmaceutical industry up to $10 billion. Der Spiegel reported: “The WHO and those in charge of public health, the virologists and the pharmaceutical laboratories....  created a whole system around the imminence of a pandemic. There is a lot of money at stake, as well as networks of influence, careers and whole institutions! And the minute one of the flu viruses mutates we’d see the whole machine roll into action.” In 2010, the EU’s Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe launched an investigation into the evidence that the WHO had created “a fake pandemic” in order to financially benefit the pharmaceutical giants’ vaccine market and to strengthen the influence private drug interests have over the health organization. The Assembly’s chairperson Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg charged the WHO’s fake pandemic as “one of the greatest medical scandals of the century that resulted in “millions being needlessly vaccinated.” Epidemic of Conflict of Interests According to former World Bank geopolitical analyst Peter Koenig, about half of the WHO's budget is derived from private sources -- primarily pharmaceutical companies but also other corporate sectors including the telecommunication and agro-chemical industries. It also receives large donations from large philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and GAVI. Eleven years ago, Gates had committed $10 billion to the WHO; after the US, his Foundation is its second largest donor providing 10 percent of its funding.  His financial commitment aligned with his global ambition to “make this the decade of vaccines.” Koenig also believes that Tedros’s appointment was due to Gates' influence. This may carry some truth because Tedros is a former Chair of GAVI’s Vaccine Alliance. Barbara Loe Fisher at the National Vaccine Information Center estimates that "only about 10 percent of total funding provided by GAVI ($862M) was used to strengthen health systems in developing countries, such as improving sanitation and nutrition, while nearly 80 percent was used to purchase, deliver and promote vaccines."  There is also the deep personal and financial relationship between Gates and the Chinese Communist government that demands further investigation. Gates is a member of the Chinese Academy of Science. For the moment, the WHO has been advising against Covid-19 vaccine passports as a mandate to travel. Nevertheless, China has already launched encrypted digital certificates as proof of vaccination. Given Gates’ close relationship with Chinese officials, perhaps he is awaiting on China to establish a precedent for other nations to agree on a global mandate that will eventually be propagated by the Gate’s network and the World Economic Forum and its Great Reset.  During a 2020 TED talk, Gates had already revealed that digital vaccine passports may be necessary; that part of his speech was edited from the original video, however, Robert Kennedy Jr. tracked down the original footage.  Gates has also 1) commissioned MIT to develop injectable a quantum dot dye system for children, 2) funded MicroChips, a company developing implantable chip-based devices, and 3) purchased 3.7 million shares in Serco who is developing tracing technology to track pandemic infections and vaccine compliance. Finally, Gates shares the Chinese Communist Party’s interests in collecting and ‘mining” citizens’ DNA. A 60 Minutes expose presented the covert activities of BGI Genomics, a CCP-linked firm that has exported Covid-19 tests to “collect, store and exploit biometric information” on American citizens. Independent investigations reveal that the Gates Foundation has collaborated with BGI and it was through Gates’ influence over Obama that the Chinese company entered the US market.  BGI’s RT-PCR kit was promoted by the WHO back in May 2020 for first line emergency diagnostic use. The rationale was that the test was highly sensitive, specific and user-friendly. Subsequently the EU, FDA, and the Australian, Canadian and Japanese health ministries rapidly purchased and deployed it. On its website, the Gates Foundation acknowledges its role in having the PCR tests supplied to the WHO. “Nine Chinese PCR tests were approved by WHO during 2020 under its Emergency Use Listing (EUL) mechanism, with one of the foundation’s partners supplying tests to WHO” Three months later, Sweden filed complaints after reports of a high percentage of false positives from the Chinese tests.  There is in our opinion little doubt that the WHO is another one of Gates' bought off entities for furthering his personal agenda to promote vaccines, genetically modified seeds and chemical agriculture in the developing world.  Vaccine Adverse Effects Monitoring System Needs Overhaul The WHO's Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety is the group responsible for administering vaccine programs in poorer, developing countries. It is also responsible for gathering data on incidents of vaccine injuries. Any deaths following vaccination campaigns are ignored and ruled as coincidental. This policy is based on the erroneous assumption that if no one died during a vaccine's clinical trials, then the vaccine should be regarded as automatically safe and unrelated to any deaths that might occur later. Consequently, the WHO's monitoring system is seriously flawed and requires a major overhaul.  One of the more controversial incidences was the WHO's collaboration with the Bill Gates’ GAVI campaign to launch the Pentavalent vaccine (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, HIP and Hepatitis B) in Africa and later in South and Southeast Asia. In India, health officials recorded upwards to 8,190 additional infant deaths annually following Pentavalent campaign.  The WHO’s response was to reclassify its adverse event reporting system to disregard "infant" deaths altogether. Dr. Jacob Puliyel, a member of the Indian government's National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization concluded,  “deaths and other serious adverse events following vaccination in the third world, that use WHO-AEFI classification are not recorded in any database for pharmaco-vigilance. It is as if the deaths of children in low (and middle) income countries are of no consequence.” WHO's Double Standards of Vaccine Safety A more recent scandal erupted during the WHO's Global Vaccine Safety Summit convened in December 2019.  Days before the summit, one of the WHO's medical directors for vaccination, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, appeared in a public advertisement touting the unquestionable safety of vaccines and ridiculing parents who speak out against vaccination. She assured viewers that the WHO was in control of matters and monitored any potential adverse risks carefully. However, during the Summit, the same Dr. Swaminathan acknowledged vaccine health risks and stated, "We really don't have very good safety monitoring systems." Another Summit participant, Dr. Heidi Larson stated, "We have a very wobbly ‘health professional frontline’ that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. When the frontline professionals are starting to question or they don’t feel like they have enough confidence about the safety to stand up to the person asking the questions. I mean most medical school curriculums, even nursing curriculums, I mean in medical school you are lucky if you have half a day on vaccines.” And more noteworthy were the statements by Dr. Martin Howell Friede, Coordinator of the WHO's Initiative for Vaccine Research,  "... I give courses every year on how do you develop vaccines, how do you make vaccines. And the first lesson is while you’re making your vaccine if you can avoid using an adjuvant please do so. Lesson two is if you’re going to use an adjuvant use one that has a history of safety. And lesson three is if you’re not going to do that, think very carefully." In other words, what the WHO presents to the public contradicts what is discussed behind closed doors, another example of the veil of secrecy the organization operates within.  Now we are witnessing more countries halting further administration of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine, a vaccine Trump had committed $1.2 billion towards its development. Subsequently the CDC paused Johnson & Johnson’s similar engineered adenovirus vaccine in order to investigate its association with an otherwise rare condition of fatal blood clotting. The WHO on the other hand has ignored these nations’ ethical responsibility to adhere to the precautionary principle. Its own review claimed there were no blood clot links to AstraZeneca’s vaccine; later the WHO changed its tune to “plausible” after EU regulators found a causal link and the New England Journal of Medicine published two studies providing specific details confirming these adverse reactions.  Although acknowledging these risks, the WHO has continued to recommend that mass vaccination proceed as if there were no red alarms.   WHO's Depopulation Efforts with Vaccines Without doubt, the most nefarious activity conducted by the WHO is its alleged support and distribution of vaccines to poorer developing countries that may have been intentionally designed to decrease population rates.  Back in 1989, the WHO sponsored a symposium at its Geneva headquarters on "Antifertility Vaccines and Contraceptive Vaccines." The symposium presented proposals for vaccines that were later discovered to have been laced with the sterilizing hormones HCG and estradiol; the former prevents pregnancy and triggers spontaneous abortions and miscarriages, and the latter can turn men infertile.   In 2015, the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops reported its discovery of a polio vaccine laced with estradiol that was manufactured in India and distributed by the WHO. A year earlier, Dr. Wahome Ngare from the Kenyan Catholic Doctors Association uncovered a tetanus vaccine specifically being administered to women, also distributed by the WHO, that contained the HCG hormone. All of the polio vaccine samples tested contained HCG, estrogen-related compounds, follicle stimulating and luteinizing hormones, which will damage sperm formation in the testes. Even more disturbing, this vaccine was going to be administered to children under five years of age.  However, this is not the first time the WHO appears to have made efforts to use vaccination campaigns for depopulation.  A decade earlier, in 2004, the WHO, UNICIF and CDC launched a vaccination campaign to immunize 74 million African children during a polio outbreak. The initiative encountered a serious obstacle. In Nigeria, laboratory tests on the WHO's vaccine samples resulted in the presence of estrogen and other female hormones. And in the mid-1990s, a tetanus vaccine being administered to Nicaraguan and Filipino girls and women in their child-bearing years was discovered to contain HCG, which accounted for a large number of spontaneous abortions that were reported by Catholic health workers.  Illegal Vaccine Experiments In 2014, The Economic Times of India published a report that provided details of a joint venture between the WHO and the Gates Foundation to test an experimental HPV vaccine on approximately 16,000 tribal girls between the ages of 9 and 15 unwittingly. The experiment was conducted in 2008, and the vaccine is now what we commonly know as Gardasil. Many of the girls, the report states, became ill and some died.  The following year the WHO and Gates Foundation conducted a similar experiment on 14,000 girls with the HPV vaccine Cervarix. Again "scores of teenage girls were hospitalized."  Investigations led by Indian health officials uncovered gross violations in India's laws regarding medical safety. In numerous cases there was no consent and the children had no idea what they were being vaccinated for. The Indian Supreme Court has taken up a case against the duo for criminal charges.  There are many other questionable activities that the WHO has been involved with over the years. However, the above provide sufficient evidence to argue the case that, at least within the upper echelons of the WHO, global health does not stand in high priority.  The organization employs over 7,000 people around the world and most of these have deep concern for improving the lives of populations in poor and developing nations. On the other hand, the WHO's leaders are there largely because the powers of Washington, London and the pharmaceutical industry benefit by the organization advancing its agendas.  Of course, the WHO is not the only health entity with a legacy of corruption.  Corruption appears to be systemic throughout global health and national health agencies.  This topic was featured last year in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. Author Dr. Patricia Garcia writes,  "Corruption is embedded in health systems. Throughout my life—as a researcher, public health worker, and a Minister of Health—I have been able to see entrenched dishonesty and fraud. But despite being one of the most important barriers to implementing universal health coverage around the world, corruption is rarely openly discussed." Bear in mind, the WHO, along with Bill Gates and his Foundation, and Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease, are leading the efforts to get the COVID-19 vaccine administered as quickly as possible. Already the Gates Foundation has given $1.75 billion for developing and distributing these vaccines. Do you believe we can trust their judgment and the intense public relations effort that will immediately follow after such a vaccine reaches the market? 

Why the World Health Organization Deserves Our Distrust Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, May 8, 2020   Many more questions are being raised than there are answers being discovered concerning the recent strains of coronavirus. Where and how did it originate? Was it the result of human engineering and manipulation or is it a strain that mutated naturally?  What are the best tests to determine exposure and infection? Why are so many infected individuals asymptomatic? Are all elderly people equally susceptible to infection and how much do co-morbidities determine outcomes? These are just several of the important questions that still require definitive answers. The ultimate international authority for infectious diseases is the World Health Organization (WHO). Because of its acceptance by the world's national governments, it has been extremely successful in its mission. The WHO is the final word in determining whether the spread of a serious pathogen is ruled as a pandemic or not. For the majority of the medical community, the media and the average person, the WHO is the front line command post for medical prevention (i.e., vaccination) and treatment.  Consequently it's rulings are often regarded as the gold standard by which many nations design their health policies and intervening protocols to protect their citizens.  On matters of global health, the WHO holds dominance. We are currently being told by the Director General of the WHO that the solutions for curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic are self-isolation, distancing, masks, and, for those in acute stages of infection, ventilation. To date there is no drug that has been found to be universally safe and effective. Therefore, all efforts, with massive funding, are being devoted to rapidly get a coronavirus vaccine on the market.  And in this effort, the WHO is a close ally and advocate in the US's federal health system, notably the CDC and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Most people assume the WHO acts independently from private commercial and national government interests for the welfare of the world's population. However, at best this is an assumption. Moreover, the very legitimacy of the WHO as a gold standard of health is questionable. The organization has been accused of conflicts of interests with private pharmaceutical companies and mega-philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as being riddled with political alliances, ideologies, and profiteering motives.  An article in the National Review called the WHO "scandal plagued" with "wasteful spending, utter disregard for transparency, pervasive incompetence, and failure to adhere to even basic democratic standards." We would also add that its level of incompetence has resulted in serious misinformation about the medical risks of vaccines and other health-threatening chemicals.  For example, during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, the organization reported it could not find any evidence of human transmission. Now we know it is perhaps the most transmittable respiratory viral infection encountered in modern medical history. Given the halls of power within the WHO, we are outlining some of the more salient reasons why the organization's declarations about infectious diseases, pandemics and vaccination should not entirely be trusted. Vaccine Promotional Misconduct Very few will know that for a long time, the WHO's recommendations for certain vaccines were kept secret. Writing in a 2006 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Marc Girard uncovered "scientific incompetence, misconduct or even criminal malfeasance" over the intentional inflation of vaccines' benefits while undermining toxicity and adverse effects. Dr. Girard was called upon as a medical expert by the French courts in a criminal trial against the WHO after French health officials obliged the organization to launch its universal Hepatitis B vaccine campaign. The campaign resulted in the deaths of French children.  Consequently, Girard gained access to confidential WHO documents. He notes that the WHO's "French figures about chronic liver diseases were simply extrapolated from the U.S. reports." He further accused the WHO serving "merely as a screen for commercial promotion, in particular via the Viral Hepatitis Prevention Board (VHPB), which was created, sponsored, and infiltrated by the manufacturers." Orchestration of Pandemic Panics Before the current COVID-19 pandemic, there was the H1N1 swine flu scare in 2009 that came and went as a church mouse. However, at the very start the WHO's fear mongering of a global contagion that could exceed the death counts of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was based on false assumptions.  The fabrications are believed to have originated from the WHO's senior consultant on viral outbreaks who happens to be one of the world's leading pandemic alarmists: Dr. Albert Osterhaus who carries the nickname "Dr. Flu." Osterhaus is head of the Department of Virology at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. At the time of the H1N1 pandemic, he was the president of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI), an organization funded by the major vaccine manufacturers including Baxter, MedImmune, Glaxo, Sanofi Pasteur and others. It is ESWI's agenda to vaccinate the entire world against the swine flu. It was also Osterhaus who transformed an otherwise potentially bad flu season into a global pandemic. The WHO has been criticized harshly in the media for changing the definition of a "pandemic" and in doing so has been charged with benefitting the pharmaceutical industry. Moreover, the British Medical Journal reported that the WHO failed to report conflicts of interest in its H1N1 advisory group. The journal's Editor-in-Chief Fiona Godlee wrote, "WHO must act now to restore its credibility, and Europe should legislate." According to a financial forecast published by JP Morgan, the collaboration between the WHO and Osterhaus's ESWI to orchestrate the pandemic would have profited the pharmaceutical industry up to $10 billion. The popular German magazine Der Spiegel reported: “The WHO and those in charge of public health, the virologists and the pharmaceutical laboratories....  created a whole system around the imminence of a pandemic. There is a lot of money at stake, as well as networks of influence, careers and whole institutions! And the minute one of the flu viruses mutates we'd see the whole machine roll into action.” Epidemic of Conflict of Interests According to former World Bank geopolitical analyst Peter Koenig, about half of the WHO's budget is derived from private sources -- primarily pharmaceutical companies but also other corporate sectors including the telecommunication and agro-chemical industries. It also receives large donations from large philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is believed, according to Koenig, that the appointment of the WHO's current Director General, Dr. Tedro Adhanom, was due to Gates' influence. Tedros is the former Chairman of Gates funded GAVI Vaccine Alliance. GAVI's sole mission is to vaccinate every child in the world. The WHO and the US and British governments are the primary partners and the largest funder is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There is in our opinion little doubt that the WHO is another one of Gates' bought off entities for furthering his personal agenda to promote vaccines, genetically modified seeds and chemical agriculture in the developing world. Barbara Loe Fisher at the National Vaccine Information Center estimates that "only about 10 percent of total funding provided by Gavi ($862M) was used to strengthen health systems in developing countries, such as improving sanitation and nutrition, while nearly 80 percent was used to purchase, deliver and promote vaccines." The WHO as America's Poodle According to the Kaiser Family Foundation's fact sheet for the US government and WHO, the US is the largest contributor to the global organization. The CDC also provides its technical support and has liaisons at the WHO's Geneva headquarters and regional offices. In summary, there is a strong rationale to suggest that the WHO, aside from its global health programs in other countries, is largely doing the bidding of the US government to advance corporate interests and American neoliberal hegemony. Vaccine Adverse Effects Monitoring System Needs Overhaul The WHO's Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety is the group responsible for administering vaccine programs in poorer, developing countries. It is also responsible for gathering data on incidents of vaccine injuries. Any deaths following vaccination campaigns are ignored and ruled as coincidental. This policy is based on the erroneous assumption that if no one died during a vaccine's clinical trials, then the vaccine should be regarded as automatically safe and unrelated to any deaths that might occur. Consequently, the WHO's monitoring system is seriously flawed and requires a major overhaul. One of the more controversial incidences is the WHO's collaboration with the Bill Gates funded GAVI Vaccine Alliance campaign to launch the pentavalent vaccine (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, HIP and Hepatitis B)  in Africa and later in South and Southeast Asia. In India, health officials recorded upwards to 8,190 additional infant deaths annually following pentavalent vaccination.  The WHO response was to reclassify its adverse event reporting system to disregard "infant" deaths altogether. Dr. Jacob Puliyel, a member of the Indian government's National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization concluded, “deaths and other serious adverse events following vaccination in the third world, that use WHO-AEFI classification are not recorded in any database for pharmacovigilance. It is as if the deaths of children in low (and middle) income countries are of no consequence.” The WHO's Director General's Troubled Past Given the enormous number of experts in infectious disease and control, it is astounding that the WHO's current Director General is Dr. Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus. He was a leading politician in the militant communist Tigray People's Liberation Front that ruled Ethiopia between 1991 to 2018.  Tedros served dual roles as the country's Health and Foreign Minister. According to the British journalist Thomas Mountain, who has lived in neighboring Eritrea for many years and has reported on the corrupt Tigray regime, Tedros had a direct role in the atrocities alleged to have been committed by the government.  It was Tedros who has been reported to have been responsible for the removal of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders following Ethiopia's brutal massacre of Ogaden citizens in Somalia, which was immediately followed by a cholera outbreak. As noted above, his approval to head of the organization may likely have been vetted by Bill Gates. Looking back at his past three years at the WHO, Mountain remarks, "For almost three years he remained quiet about the almost total lack of preparation at the WHO for what numerous panels had warned was inevitable, a highly contagious and deadly virus quickly spreading across the world." WHO's Depopulation Efforts with Vaccines Without doubt, the most nefarious activity conducted by the WHO is its alleged support and distribution of vaccines to poorer developing countries that may have been intentionally designed to decrease population rates.  Back in 1989, the WHO sponsored a symposium at its Geneva headquarters on "Antifertility Vaccines and Contraceptive Vaccines." The symposium presented proposals for vaccines that were later discovered to have been laced with the sterilizing hormones HCG and estradiol; the former prevents pregnancy and triggers spontaneous abortions and miscarriages, and the latter can turn men infertile.  In 2015, the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops reported its discovery of a polio vaccine laced with estradiol that was manufactured in India and distributed by the WHO. A year earlier, Dr. Wahome Ngare from the Kenyan Catholic Doctors Association uncovered a tetanus vaccine specifically being administered to women, also distributed by the WHO, that contained the HCG hormone. All of the polio vaccine samples tested contained HCG, estrogen-related compounds, follicle stimulating and luteinizing hormones, which will damage sperm formation in the testes. Even more disturbing, this vaccine was going to be administered to children under five years of age. However, this is not the first time the WHO appears to have made efforts to use vaccination campaigns for depopulation.  A decade earlier, in 2004, the WHO, UNICIF and CDC launched a vaccination campaign to immunize 74 million African children during a polio outbreak. The initiative encountered a serious obstacle. In Nigeria, laboratory tests on the WHO's vaccine samples resulted in the presence of estrogen and other female hormones. And in the mid-1990s, a tetanus vaccine being administered to Nicaraguan and Filipino girls and women in their child-bearing years was discovered to contain HCG, which accounted for a large number of spontaneous abortions that were reported by Catholic health workers. Illegal Vaccine Experiments In 2014, The Economic Times of India published a report that provided details of a joint venture between the WHO and the Gates Foundation to test an experimental HPV vaccine on approximately 16,000 tribal girls between the ages of 9 and 15 unwittingly. The experiment was conducted in 2008, and the vaccine is now what we commonly know as Gardasil. Many of the girls, the report states, became ill and some died. The following year the WHO and Gates Foundation conducted a similar experiment on 14,000 girls with the HPV vaccine Cervarix. Again "scores of teenage girls were hospitalized."  Investigations led by Indian health officials uncovered gross violations in India's laws regarding medical safety. In numerous cases there was no consent and the children had no idea what they were being vaccinated for. The Indian Supreme Court has taken up a case against the duo for criminal charges. WHO's Double Standards of Vaccine Safety A more recent scandal erupted during the WHO's Global Vaccine Safety Summit convened in December 2019.  Days before the summit, one of the WHO's medical directors for vaccination, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, appeared in a public advertisement touting the unquestionable safety of vaccines and ridiculing parents who speak out against vaccination. She assured viewers that the WHO was in control of matters and monitored any potential adverse risks carefully. However, during the Summit, the same Dr. Swaminathan acknowledged vaccine health risks and stated, "We really don't have very good safety monitoring systems." Another Summit participant, Dr. Heidi Larson stated, "We have a very wobbly ‘health professional frontline' that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. When the frontline professionals are starting to question or they don't feel like they have enough confidence about the safety to stand up to the person asking the questions. I mean most medical school curriculums, even nursing curriculums, I mean in medical school you are lucky if you have half a day on vaccines.” And more noteworthy were the statements by Dr. Martin Howell Friede, Coordinator of the WHO's Initiative for Vaccine Research, "... I give courses every year on how do you develop vaccines, how do you make vaccines. And the first lesson is while you're making your vaccine if you can avoid using an adjuvant please do so. Lesson two is if you're going to use an adjuvant use one that has a history of safety. And lesson three is if you're not going to do that, think very carefully." In other words, what the WHO presents to the public contradicts what is discussed behind closed doors, another example of the veil of secrecy the organization operates within. Suppression of the Dangers of Depleted Uranium The use of depleted uranium pervades military missiles and bombs. Tons of depleted uranium were deployed during the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  It is estimated that the US fired over 300,000 rounds of depleted uranium, or 1,000 tons, during the 2003 Iraq war. In both countries, the WHO has been very active in providing health needs to the populations affected.  However, in regions where bombing was most intense, such as in Fallujah Iraq, there has been a high prevalence of congenital birth defects. This was uncovered by an on-the-ground investigation conducted by the Brussels Tribunal.  According to a BBC documentary, there is no longer any doubt about depleted uranium's association with genetic damage and birth defects.  According to an article published in the British Medical Journal in 2013, the WHO intentionally suppressed the scientific evidence .  The question remains why?  Hans von Sponeck, a former Assistant Secretary General for the United Nations has suggested that "the US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where DU has been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers."  Here we find a likely case of the WHO doing the bidding of the US government and its military adventures in regime change. There are many other questionable activities that the WHO has been involved with over the years. However, the above provide sufficient evidence to argue the case that, at least within the upper echelons of the WHO, global health does not stand in high priority.  The organization employs over 7,000 people around the world and most of these have deep concern for improving the lives of populations in poor and developing nations. On the other hand, the WHO's leaders are there largely because the powers of Washington, London and the pharmaceutical industry benefit by the organization advancing its agendas. Of course, the WHO is not the only health entity with a legacy of corruption.  Corruption appears to be systemic throughout global health and national health agencies.  This topic was featured last year in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. Author Dr. Patricia Garcia writes, "Corruption is embedded in health systems. Throughout my life—as a researcher, public health worker, and a Minister of Health—I have been able to see entrenched dishonesty and fraud. But despite being one of the most important barriers to implementing universal health coverage around the world, corruption is rarely openly discussed." Bear in mind, the WHO, along with Bill Gates and his Foundation, and Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease, are leading the efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Do you believe we can trust their judgment and the intense public relations effort that will immediately follow after such a vaccine reaches the market?  

10 years ago, an HPV (Human papillomavirus infection) vaccine called Cervarix was released in Australia. When given at a young age, this vaccine is 100% effective in preventing cervical cancer, an illness that was killing over 250,000 women every year. BTI emeritus faculty member, Dr. Robert Granados, joined us to discuss a discovery in his lab that would eventually become a key component of Cervarix.

This is Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.The recent WannaCry ransom ware outbreak across the world is the latest alarm about cyber security that demands immediate efforts at different levels, including international cooperation.It has been found that measures as simple as official Microsoft patch installation and security software update can work to fend off WannaCry in the largest cyber-attack in more than a decade. The hacking highlights the need for Internet users to heighten cyber security awareness.However, it also calls for systematic efforts as well as international cooperation to tackle cross-border challenges in a digitally connected world in order to affect a universal defense.A senior research fellow on cyber policy and security at Stanford University told the Xinhua News Agency that international cooperation on cyber security will be essential for a safer and more secure cyberspace.Herb Lin deplored the fact that countries have different views on how they intend to use cyberspace and the rules they want to apply have so far made it difficult to achieve international cooperation.Some experts foresee more attacks like WannaCry, which has hit more than 200,000 computers in some 150 countries since May 12. The vast majority of successful hacks require only the most basic techniques.This is Special English.Pharmaceutical company Merck recently won approval from the China Food and Drug Administration to sell its human papillomavirus vaccine, Gardasil, to help women fight cervical cancer.Developed by the US-based company in 2006, the vaccine has proved effective in protecting against the virus, better known as HPV, the chief cause of cervical cancer. The virus is found in almost all cervical cancer cases.Gardasil is the first HPV vaccine in the world and the second to be licensed for use in China.In July, Cervarix, an HPV vaccine developed by pharmaceutical GlaxoSmithKline, received approval to be sold on the Chinese mainland after almost 10 years of seeking approval.Gardasil is expected to be commercially available on the mainland in three to six months, which means women will no longer have to seek vaccinations outside of the mainland, in places such as Hong Kong.After breast cancer, cervical cancer is the second-most common cancer in women aged between 15 and 44 in China. China reports more than 130,000 cervical cancer cases a year, accounting for 28 percent of the global total.The HPV vaccine, as the first anti-cancer vaccine in the world, has proved effective in preventing cervical cancer and is seen as a breakthrough in the fight against the condition.Today, such vaccines are in use in around 120 countries and regions, including the United States, Australia and most European countries.You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.A 100-year-old medical technique could be used to achieve pregnancy in infertile women without the need for expensive in vitro fertilization treatments. That's according to researchers from the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute. The often overlooked historical technique, which involves "flushing" the woman&`&s fallopian tubes with iodised poppy seed oil, has been proven to be successful in aiding fertility.Research teams in Australia and the Netherlands say that the procedure, called HSG, was first carried out in 1917 and involved flushing the tubes with the oil during an X-ray. Professor Ben Mol from the University of Adelaide says that over the past century, pregnancy rates among infertile women reportedly increased after their tubes had been flushed with either water or oil during the X-ray procedure. Until now, it has been unclear whether the type of solution used in the procedure was influencing the change in fertility.He said the results have been even more exciting than scientists could have predicted, helping to confirm that an age-old medical technique still has an important place in modern medicine.According to the results of Mol&`&s study, around 35 percent of infertile women who underwent the procedure achieved successful pregnancies within six months of the HSG being performed.This is Special English.Some 1,730 new plant species were discovered globally in the last year, some of which have food and medicinal value. That's according to an annual report released recently by the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, based in England.Involving 128 scientists from 12 countries, RBG Kew&`&s State of the Worlds Plants report presents data never seen before on patterns affecting plants in different regions.New species of Manihot were discovered in Brazil that have the potential to be developed into better food crops, and new species of the climbing vine genus Mucuna, used in the treatment of Parkinson&`&s disease, were found in South East Asia and South and Central America.Kathy Willis, director of science at RBG Kew, says they have tried to make sure that this year&`&s State of the World&`&s Plants report goes beyond the numbers to look at the natural capital of plants -- how they are relevant and valuable to all aspects of our lives.The report also reveals that plants with thicker leaves and bark, more efficient water use, deeper roots, and higher wood density are better able to cope with future climate change.The report also highlights information on how new technology is helping to speed up the discovery and classification of plants that are providing important sign posts to the next food crops and actions in protecting some of the most important plant species globally.You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.Climate change is more real than ever. A new study has found a steady growth of moss in Antarctica over the past 50 years, and suggested that the continent will be greener in the future.The study was published recently in Current Biology, a scientific journal that covers all areas of biology. The research is led by Matthew Amesbury, a researcher at the University of Exeter in Britain.The Antarctic Peninsula might sound like a remote and untouched region, but the study showed that the effects of climate change are felt there, and it has been warming faster than the rest of the continent.The research team looked at 150 years&`& worth of data and found clear change points in the last 50 years, which showed the increase of moss cover. That could shift the ecosystem in Antarctica, driving it to simulate what has been observed in Arctic.Last month, the sea ice cover in the Arctic was record low, and that of Antarctic was near record low too, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.This is Special English.The World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa has been held with calls for increased support for youth and addressing unemployment and poverty.Officials during the forum at the Dead Sea said providing financial and moral support to the youth in the Middle East and reforming education were key in addressing the pressing challenges facing the region.The forum attracted more than 1,100 political and business leaders from more than 50 countries. The participants agreed that the world is facing many problems including high unemployment rate, fast population growth and political regional challenges. The problems are relentlessly seeking to thrive on the hopelessness and despair of the younger generation. The forum said providing hope and support are vital for the youth in the region.Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan said at the forum that what young people need most is for all to take a bet on them, and to support them, morally and financially, so they can create their own impact.The forum agreed that as 31 percent of young people in the region are unemployed, new initiatives and urgent action are needed. You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing. You can access the program by logging on to crienglish.com. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. Now the news continues.More than 30 national library curators and representatives from 20 countries and regions in Asia and Oceania gathered in Beijing to discuss the building of sustainable regional library networks.The participants came from countries including Australia, Japan, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. They shared their experience in international cultural exchanges at the two-day conference hosted by the National Library of China.The National Library of China is promoting the establishment of the "Silk Road" international library alliance, and most of the participating libraries are from countries along the ancient trading route.The annual conference is hosted in turn by the participating libraries. This year marks the third time that China has hosted the event.This is Special English.A Peking opera adaptation of the Western masterpiece "Faust" was staged recently in Germany's western city of Wiesbaden, starting its premiere tour in the country.The opera was co-produced by China National Peking Opera Company and Italy&`&s Emilia Romagna Theater Foundation. It was performed as part of the International May Festival, a world-known traditional theater festival.The opera is based on the Western masterpiece "Faust", written by Johann Wolfgang Goethe more than 200 years ago. The Peking Opera adaptation combines music, vocal performances, mime, dance, and acrobatics.Since its debut in 2015, the opera has been staged over 70 times worldwide. It offers a creative blend of Western classics with oriental culture as well as presents a perfect cooperation between Chinese artists and performers from Italy and Germany.The opera has been added to this year&`&s German-Chinese cultural program, a national event in Germany featuring the theme "China Today" to celebrate the 45th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries. You&`&re listening to Special English. I&`&m Mark Griffiths in Beijing.The first International Tea Expo has been held in east China's Zhejiang province, attracting tea vendors and companies from both home and abroad.The expo is held in Hangzhou, the provincial capital, at the venue where the G20 Summit was held. Over 1,000 enterprises from more than 30 countries participated in the event.President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to be read at the opening ceremony, extending his hope that the expo would give exposure to Chinese tea culture. He said he hopes the event will grow into an important platform for exchanges and cooperation between China and the rest of the world.The letter also included a call for the expo to promote both the tea industry and tea culture.This is Special English.The first China-themed library in Mexico has opened in a bid to promote cultural exchange.Books on Chinese history, culture, medicine and music, as well as digital and video archives, can be found at the new Chinese Library at Mexico City&`&s Anahuac University.Officials from China and the prestigious private university were on hand to inaugurate the 14th library of its kind worldwide, as part of celebrations marking 45 years of diplomatic ties between the two countries.Chinese officials say the library provides an opportunity for Mexico to know China better. It will also be a new platform for deepening educational, academic and cultural exchange between the two countries.The library currently has 6,000 books and 80,000 digital archives with information on China&`&s politics, economy, culture, science and technology, as well as education and history.Special software is provided, in both Spanish and English, for those who wish to learn Mandarin Chinese.This is Special English.As part of the celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, an exhibition about the revolution has opened at the British Library.（全文见周六微信。）

Recently, an HPV vaccine Cervarix has been approved by the China Food and Drug Administration. The move has been supported by medical professionals as HPV vaccination could significantly reduce the incidence of cervical cancer. How useful will it be in protecting female health? Also, can men benefit from it too? It shall become the first HPV vaccine entering China's market in 2017.

T&A, both diagnosed with HPV at varying points in their lives, get to the bottom of why there's so much conflicting information around HPV out there.  Expert, Dr. Diane Harper, who has been heard on NPR, Katie Couric, CNN, and other sites, fills us in on the 101 of HPV to the research and why it's important to have regular checkups for healthcare and prevention.  How does HPV work? Why is it so common? How can I prevent it? Do the vaccines work? Why don't they test men?! All of your questions are answered in a clear, concise way, thanks to Dr. Harper!  We know you'll feel as relieved as we do after listening to this episode.   Show Notes HPV is a tiny virus that has been with us forever-literally since the time of dinosaurs! (4:15) It literally bounces around on skin.  It does not live in blood or other bodily fluids (5:53) What are the avenues of transmission for HPV?  Hint: it’s not only our sexual organs (06:04) It’s definitely a survivor.  The way  it infects the skin cells allows it to hide from the immune system (06:54) Find relevant links & FULL Show Notes HERE: http://www.tatalksex.com/hpv-should-i-be-afraid-of-it-the-truth-behind-the-std-with-dr-diane-harper-ep-66/

Today in FirstWord:

Today in FirstWord:

Dr Colm O’Mahony (consultant at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, UK) talks to Professor Christopher Fairley (director of the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, University of Melbourne, Australia) about the near disappearance of genital warts in Australia’s young women following the start of their human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programme.They also discuss the UK’s decision to provide Cervarix, rather than Gardasil, through its HPV programme.

Virologist Michelle Ozbun and the TWiV team review the biology of human papillomaviruses.

Vincent, Dick, and Alan talk about Nobel prizes for telomere research, bacteriophages that protect aphids from wasps, salicylates and pandemic influenza mortality, and hand washing. Links for this episode: Bacteriophages encode toxins that protect aphids from wasps 14 year old dies after receiving HPV vaccine Salicylates and pandemic influenza mortality Canadian microbiologist says hand washing is not proven to prevent influenza Surgical mask vs N95 respirator for preventing influenza Americans unsure about receiving pandemic H1N1 influenza vaccine DnaTube (thanks Jim!) Laboratory Director certification (pdf - thanks Megan!) Plant production of pharmaceuticals (pdf one and pdf two - thanks Ed!) Weekly Science Picks Alan sciencelineDick Younger by Judith Sulzberger MDVincent FluView