The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is under investigation in a 2014 India Supreme Court case for funding Merck’s HPV vaccine trials of Gardasil, despite knowing the serious adverse reactions, injuries and deaths caused by treatment. According to a report by published by Narayana Kumar in The Economic Times of India, several tests had been conducted in 2009 on 16,000 school girls between the ages of 9 and 15 in Andhra Radish, India. Through the vaccine trials, 120 girls became seriously ill and seven died. Those who fell ill suffered from adverse reactions to the vaccination and experienced symptoms including seizures, severe stomachaches, headaches and mood swings. Consent forms to oversee the HPV vaccination were illegally signed by wardens from the hostels where the young girls resided or by illiterate parents via their thumbprint. Many young girls and their parents did not understand the tests or the risks entailed until they were significantly involved in the trial.
After these adverse reactions became known, a report funded by the BMGF was released explaining that there was no correlation between the adverse affects and the vaccine, so that the process to approve Gardasil for use in India could proceed. A writ of petition submitted to the Supreme Court of India by Kalpana Mehta, Nalini Bhanot and Dr. Rukmini Rao state that the BMGF were “criminally negligent trialing the vaccines on a vulnerable, uneducated and under-informed population school administrators, students and their parents who were not provided informed consent or advised of potential adverse effects or required to be monitored post-vaccination.”
Sources:
Narayana Kumar, “Controversial vaccine studies: Why is Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under fire from critics in India?,” The Economic Times (India), August 31, 2014, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-08-31/news/53413161_1_hpv-vaccine-cervarix-human-papilloma-virus
Christina England, “India Holds Bill Gates Accountable For His Vaccine Crimes,” Vactruth, October 5, 2014, http://vactruth.com/2014/10/05/bill-gates-vaccine-crimes/.
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