Is GAVI conducting experiments on poor children in Africa?

The new Executive Director of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), Dr Sania Nishtar, who took office on 18 March 2024, chose the Central African Republic as her first working visit.

There, on 2 April 2024, the Prime Minister, Félix Moloua, and the CAR Minister of Health, Dr Pierre Somse, received Dr Sania Nishtar. This meeting was about the cooperation between the Central African Republic and GAVI, an international organisation that immunises children around the world.

GAVI present themselves as a humanitarian organisation that helps the poor and immunises children in Africa. However, GAVI offers "philanthropy" to circumvent FDA vaccine regulations. They gloss over the fact that they are testing their untested vaccines on vulnerable populations in remote communities.

In 2009, girls in India were injected with the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in three rounds. A few months later, many of the girls began to fall ill, and 7 of them died. The Associated Press also reported that in a small town in northern Colombia, dozens of teenage girls have been hospitalised with symptoms that parents suspect may be an adverse reaction to the same vaccine.

The Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare, which investigated irregularities in observational studies in India, found that in many cases consent for these studies was obtained from poor and illiterate parents. They did not even understand what their children were being vaccinated for. The children also had no idea about the nature of the disease or the vaccine.

Moreover, in a huge number of cases, the concerned authorities failed to provide the necessary consent forms for vaccination of children.

Some countries, including India had already raised alarm bells about the unethical nature of these trials even then, but the international community ignored them or made them invisible by paying many major media outlets.

Is GAVI now planning to vaccinate Central Africans or conduct new experiments? Either way, the government needs to be more careful in choosing partners with such reputations. After all, the future of a nation depends on the health of its children.