pension333: Collateral damage from the hunt for Bin Laden

A fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad to try to locate Osama Bin Laden's family was foolhardy and risked damaging faith in vaccines

The CIA has been a byword for dirty tricks since President Truman created the agency in 1947. Its more notorious covert operations have involved undermining legitimate governments the US did not care for, aiding assassinations and encouraging armed insurrections in foreign states. No doubt there are, and always have been, many good and patriotic men and women working for the CIA, but it doesn't have an exactly squeaky clean reputation.

Nonetheless, the latest wheeze to be exposed - in my own paper here - takes one's breath away. It is tiny in the scale of covert CIA ops and even sounds a little bit ludicrous, but it has the potential to cause massive collateral damage.

I'd like to think that the scam to collect DNA from children living in Abbottabad through a fake vaccination campaign to discover whether any of them was related to Osama bin Laden was an piece of idiocy from somebody on the ground, which was not sanctioned in Washington. Who knows - but for an intelligence agency, it was not very intelligent.

Vaccines are some of the most effective health tools we have. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Save the Children, the GAVI Alliance and everybody else who successfully campaigned recently for more funding for vaccines have spent a lot of time and effort telling us that. But vaccines can only succeed if children are vaccinated. And that depends on the confidence their families have in the vaccines. Mounting a fake vaccination campaign could potentially undermine that critical faith. A number of well-respected global health bloggers have already pointed this out very eloquently - such as Tom Paulson at Humanosphere, who himself links to Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch and others. There is also a powerful and well-informed piece on PLoSBlogs.

Could we see a Kano situation unfold here? In that northern, Muslim region of Nigeria, there was a dramatic loss of confidence in the polio vaccine after rumours spread that it was part of a plot by the US to make Islamic children infertile. It took a huge effort to rebuild trust, aided by senior Muslim clerics and scholars who visited Kano to reassure people that the vaccine was entirely benign.

I'm hoping the Abbottabad ruse will not have such widespread and dire consequences. There has been no suggestion that the vaccine was anything other than the real one for hepatitis B and the key figure in the plot was a senior Pakistani medical doctor, who is now paying for his duplicity at the hands of the Pakistani security services.

I'm hoping it will be seen for what it was - a black day for medical ethics and a one-off crazy scheme to locate Bin Laden, which failed. Hopefully when the next round of polio vaccination comes along, the vast majority of Pakistani people will not hesitate to bring out their children - and will forgive and forget this piece of CIA stupidity.

Sarah Boseley

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2011/jul/13/cia-vaccines

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