Contrary to popular belief, the “Swadeshi” Indian COVID-19 vaccine COVAXIN maker Bharat Biotech was backed since its inception by Bill Gates and the international pharma lobby. Bharat Biotech is the first Indian company to receive massive grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for vaccine against Rotavirus called Rotavac. The vaccine was given green light by the authorities even before its trials were complete and its efficacy is mired in controversy till today with cases pending in the Supreme Court.
Birth of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
As the story goes, in 1996, Bill Gates read an article in the New York Times that sparked his passion for health. That moment was one of the factors that led him to co-found the Gates Foundation with his wife, Melinda
So, over the next twenty years, Bill Gates poured massive funding in a huge international collaboration between scientists and policy makers across the globe to create a vaccine for Rotavirus.
The Bill Gates’ vaccine for Rotavirus was called Rotavac.
The Rotavac vaccine made waves as a case study for global health solutions created with help from a network of international powers. It was created in India.
Birth of “Swadeshi” Bharat Biotech
The central figure in the story of Rotavac is Duncan Steele, a virologist who has spent the bulk of his 35-year career studying rotavirus. He has spent time working at the World Health Organization (WHO) and another of Bill Gates’ funded Seattle-based global health nonprofit PATH, which coordinated Rotavac’s development. He now works in vaccine development at the Gates Foundation.
Steele collaborated with scientists at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi to looks for a cure for Rotavirus.
They found a strain in children at AIIMS which acted like a natural vaccine.
In late 1990s, as part of Indo-US Vaccine Action Program (VAP), a group of scientists at the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. modified this rotavirus strain so that it could be used as the basis for a vaccine.
The only problem now was the mass-scale manufacturing of Rotavac. India was the primary target for the new vaccine, but there weren’t any vaccine manufacturers that could do the job.
Hence, massive funding was poured by the network of international powers to create a “Swadeshi” Indian vaccine company – aptly named Bharat Biotech.
Dr. Krishna Ella, a molecular biologist with no experience developing vaccines or treating viruses was roped in. Despite his lack of expertise in the field or maybe because of it, the pharma lobby believed he was the right person for the job.
Bharat Biotech was headquartered in an area outside Hyderabad known as Snake Valley. Now, the area is known as Genome Valley and is now home to labs and offices of global pharma companies like Merck, Roche, Johnson & Johnson and even Monsanto.
Rotavac – The Controversial Vaccine
Years before the Phase 3 trial was complete, Bill Gates and Dr. Krishna Ella signed a contract agreeing to price Rotavac at $1 a dose. Maybe, because the results of these trials were never made public or are still controversial.
The Rotavac vaccine showed only 56% efficacy in phase III clinical trial and yet it was given a green light by the authorities. Jacob Puliyel, head of the Department of Pediatrics, St. Stephen’s Hospital, Tis Hazari, Delhi raised serious concerns over the Rotavac controversy:
“Do you know another vaccine with 50% efficacy that is used for public health programs? It is a toss-up if the vaccine will work for you. If 100% [of the] population is vaccinated it will reduce 50% [of the] rotavirus deaths. What are the numbers needed to treat [to prevent one death]?”
“I think the fact that this [vaccine] was announced before peer review, [means] it will never be properly reviewed. That is the story that must come out.”
In fact, the government announcement came before the study was even officially completed. According to the clinical trials registry, the estimated study completion date is April 2014, with an estimated primary completion date of December 2013, both months away.
A PIL filed in the Supreme Court by S Srinivasan from LOCOST, a Vadodara-based company that produces low cost medicines for the poor, asked for release of the segregated data from the Rotavac trial. The PIL said:
“concealment of this vital data does severe injustice to the thousands of infants who participated in this study, the researchers who painstakingly conducted the trials, and the medical/scientific community who depend on this data for their work.”
This case is still pending. Meanwhile, the vaccine continues to be used without vaccine recipients being informed of the risks – a clear violation of basic ethics.
The lack of transparency of data in the rotavirus vaccine case boils down to the motives of making profits off the vaccines. Misrepresenting research findings, cherry picking data, and concealing adverse events in clinical trials have become more common and are almost unquestioned practices to this end.
International Backers of Bharat Biotech
Bharat Biotech became the first Indian company to receive two grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) to develop new vaccines against Malaria and Rotavirus.
The Gates Foundation, still a young philanthropy, made a pledge to fund Rotavac’s development and eventually put nearly $65 million into the project.
Again, in 2015, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation poured a whooping $18,500,000 grant into Bharat Biotech “to support construction of a manufacturing facility eligible for World Health Organization prequalification, thereby ensuring availability and access to second generation liquid rotavirus vaccine for India and Gavi-eligible countries.”
In 2012, Bharat Biotech received USD 4 Million ‘Strategic Translation Award’ from the British Wellcome Trust for clinical development of a new life-saving conjugate vaccine for Invasive Non-Typhoidal Salmonella (iNTS).
Bharat Biotech’s research for the Typhoid fever vaccine named Typbar TCV was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Wellcome Trust and other donors.
Swadeshi vs Videshi COVID-19 Vaccine
There is a ridiculous argument being purposefully floated by vested interests pitting the so called “Swadeshi Vaccine” vs the “Videshi Vaccine”. The fact of the matter is that both of these vaccines and their manufacturers are funded by the same pharma lobby. The only reason they are being touted as “Made in India” is because India is their primary target.
British led GAVI has managed to infiltrate India’s healthcare policy-making thereby gaining a strategic position to dictate India’s response to coronavirus.
GAVI is largely funded by the British government and Bill Gates. While the UK is GAVI’s largest funder, its implementation follows what is known as the” Gates approach”. Known as the Vaccine Cartel or Pharma Cartel by critics, its vaccines have been accused of causing atleast 38 million premature deaths worldwide.
There are currently no laws in India that would protect victims of the COVID-19 vaccine side-effects according to legal experts. There is no law for vaccine compensation in India.
Moreover, governments have signed secret agreements with coronavirus vaccine manufacturers as per which the pharma companies cannot be held legally in case of an adverse reaction to the vaccine or in worst case if a patient dies from the vaccine.
In contrast, the US government paid over $57 million in compensation for vaccine injuries and deaths till March 2020 alone.
Truth of the Pharma Cartel
The pharma lobby behind these COVID-19 vaccines are directly tied to British Eugenics Movement. The Wellcome Trust, GAVI and the Galton Institute, have direct longstanding ties to the UK Eugenics movement.
The latter organization, named for the “father of eugenics” Francis Galton, is the re-named UK Eugenics Society, a group notorious for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to “improve racial stock” by reducing the population of those deemed inferior for over a century.
The new “wider definition of eugenics,” Galton has said, “would cover methods of regulating population numbers as well as improving genome quality by selective artificial insemination by donor, gene therapy or gene manipulation of germ-line cells.”
These vaccines are created for the developing world, specifically India – the very same areas the pharma lobby has called for reducing population growth.
Population control is a British policy to reduce the population of former colonies like India through various sterilization projects and other policies implemented through the United Nations and popularised by Hollywood to effectively keep nations under the Anglo-American orbit.
