Dessalines Is Rising!!
Ayisyen: You Are Not Alone!

Genocide by vaccination in Haiti - Is this a way to sterilize Haitian women, as was done to Puerto Rican women?
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HLLN Links on Failed or Contaminated Vaccines
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U.S. Patterns in Haiti
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Dessalines' Law
Jean Jacques Dessalines

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Haitians Didn't take this Bitter Pill in 1990, Won't take it in 2007: HIV/AIDS Origin n Haiti
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En Memoires Des Arawaks et Tainos D'Haiti

Haitians May Sue Over HIV Research Claim - A HBN First, by Philomena Robertson, HBN NY, Hardbeatnews.com, November 9, 2007 (See also: Defamed! -Page 1, - Page 2, Pg. 3)


Hardbeatnews, BROOKLYN, NY, Fri. Nov. 9, 2007: Haitian Americans, outraged by recent research claiming that Haitians were responsible for the transfer of HIV from Africa to the Caribbean and the US, are looking into the possibility of legal action, HBN has learnt.

Head of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, Marguerite Laurent, told HBN Thursday that the organization is “examining all our options and studying what the doctors have reported to determine whether there is legal basis for asking for retraction or damages.”

The research, conducted largely by Professor Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, claims that HIV was brought from Africa to Haiti and then to the United States by Haitians. The AIDS virus entered the United States via Haiti in about 1969, the research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims.

Worobey's team says they performed a genetic analysis of stored blood samples from the earliest AIDS patients, all of whom were recent immigrants from Haiti. The researchers also looked at genetic data from 117 more early AIDS patients from around the world.

Once all the genetic data was assembled, the researchers loaded it into a computer and used Bayesian statistics to analyze it. For the hypothesis that HIV went from Africa to the U.S. first, the probability turned out to be 0.003 per cent - virtually nil, they claimed. For the hypothesis that HIV went from Africa first to Haiti and then on to the U.S., the probability is 99.8 per cent, researchers stated.

The Worobey team also believes that HIV was brought to Haiti by an infected person from central Africa in about 1966, which matches earlier estimates. That unknown single infected Haitian immigrant then likely arrived in a large U.S. city like Miami or New York in 1969.

It is this fact that has truly incensed the HLLN and Laurent chides the media for being biased in its coverage. “It was reported in the mainstream media as if it were gospel,” Laurent said “There was no indication that it was the opinion of one scientist.”

The HLLN leader questions why the media did not acknowledge the challenges to this particular theory that were on record even before the Worobey research was made public.

Agonizing over the potential impact of the situation on an already “fragile population” Laurent said it is “just criminal” how the research, which she claims is not based on facts, could destroy the image of Haitians and increase the likelihood of discrimination.

For her, it brings back memories of the 1980’s and 1990’s when the Haitian community faced heightened discrimination and were deemed an at risk group and barred from donating blood.

The unpleasant memories are shared by Chairman of the Consortium for Haitian Empowerment, Harry Fouche, who says his initial reaction to the research was “here we go again.”

Fouche says although he’s an economist and not a physician, he does know “something about methodology of research and I set it aside as being a very poor piece of work.”

Dismissing the claim of one Haitian being responsible for carrying the disease from Africa to Haiti, Fouche said it’s another in the series of attacks leveled against the Haitian community. However, the former Haitian Consul General in New York was quick to asset that Haitian Americans “will vigorously defend ourselves and denounce this latest campaign.”

Fouche also questions the relevance of the research at a time when the disease is so widespread and all the focus should be on finding a cure. Haiti’s Ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph is also incensed by the whole situation. Speaking to HBN Thursday, Ambassador Joseph said for a study that boats almost 100 percent accuracy, “There are too many conditional caveats and too many probabilities.”

Joseph is challenging the author of the study to produce more details on that single Haitian who purportedly brought HIV from Africa to Haiti. He says until the author can come up with these specifics, “He should retract whatever he has said.”

According to the ambassador, there are several ways to discredit the research but one surefire way is to refute the claim that Haitians who managed to leave Haiti were actually traveling back to the country during the period of Duvalierism.

The question of relevance is also being raised by the President of the JMC Strategies LLC, an organization that prides itself on creating strategies for a developing world. Jocelyn McCalla who champions “social change, human and civil rights” for Haitians, insists that “whether the HIV virus made a pit stop in Haiti is really socially irrelevant at this stage of the game.”

This latest research also stirs up memories of earlier claims regarding Haitians and the spread of AIDS but McCalla says he does not believe these “findings will carry the same weight as they did more than 25 years ago.”

“Much has been learned about HIV, how it is communicated and how it spreads, no one scientist holds the belief that a particular ethnic group has genetically tainted blood,” added the activist.

Worobey’s research has not only drawn reactions from social advocacy groups, medical practitioners have also added their voice to the issue.

In a statement, the Association of Haitian Physicians Abroad said the study shows clear bias and is seriously flawed. Although a more detailed critique of the Worobey study is to be conducted, the AHME noted that some aspects of the methodology is shrouded in secrecy and the findings “lack scientific validation.”

Questioning the motive of the study, the AHME concludes that the study does “not advance our knowledge of the HIV epidemic but it continues with a dangerous precedent of victimizing an ethnic group with flimsy data.”

This notion is shared by Coordinator for the Consortium for Haitian Empowerment, Gina Cheron, who insists, “We have to react against it and make it known that the study is not reliable and not valid and the scientific approach was not well formulated.”

Cheron is concerned that the latest uproar could “exacerbate any stigma that already exists against Haitians.” She appeals for public support for whatever initiatives are deemed necessary to counter the potential ill effects of the research and its coverage in the main stream media.

And as deliberations continue as to how best to proceed, Haitian Americans are being encouraged to stand in solidarity with each other. Executive Director of the Bedford Haitian Community Center, Joseph Dormeus said the research represents an “attack on all Haitians” and as such he’s challenging his fellow nationals to stand up and fight the same way they did before.

The outrage is also shared by many in the black community who see it largely as racism and not research. Worobey for his part has insisted that learning more about the genetic make-up of the various strains of HIV could only help vaccine development. But he added, "The main challenge of developing a vaccine against HIV is its tremendous genetic diversity." – Hardbeatnews.com

Haitian HIV Link Criticized Hardbeatnews.com, November 2, 2007

Hardbeatnews, WASHINGTON, D.C., Fri, Nov. 2, 2007: Dr. Mike Worobey is the same scientist who has long insisted that HIV comes from the sub-species of chimp that exists in countries to the west of the Democratic Republic countries, like Cameroon, and Gabon.

Now the scientist is blaming Haitians for transferring the disease from Africa to the Caribbean and the rest of the world, much to the angst of many.

Worobey, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, claims in a controversial new study that new findings confirm long standing suspicions a certain HIV strain that touched off the US AIDS epidemic was imported from Haiti.

The study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims a map of the virus shows conclusively that the strain came to the United States via Haiti, probably by a single person, in around 1969. The authors made their conclusion by genetic analysis of 25-year-old blood samples.

Professor Worobey told BBC Caribbean their data had shown that it was unlikely the virus could have been in the US prior to it being in Haiti.

“There is a greater than ninety-nine percent probability given the data that it was in Haiti first and moved to the US afterwards,” he was quoted as saying.

But Dr. Paul Farmer, professor of medical anthropology at Harvard University and a founder of Partners in Health, an international research and aid organization active in fighting AIDS in Haiti, told the Miami Herald, ''This does a disservice to the Haitian community, who feel like they already went through this 20 years ago. This is very slender evidence on which to base such a grand claim.''

''People are going crazy,'' Dr. Laurinus Pierre, executive director of the Center for Haitian Studies in Little Haiti was quoted as saying. He added that he has fought stigmas against Haitians from the first days of AIDS, in which researchers blamed the epidemic on the ''Four Hs'' -- homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs and heroin addicts.

The professor also suggests that that the HIV virus jumped from Haiti to Trinidad and Tobago and refutes claims that the AIDS woes in Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago could have been brought in by North American sex tourists. Haiti is home to more people living with HIV than any other country in the region – a whopping 190,000 people according to UNAIDS. National adult HIV prevalence in 2005 was estimated at 3.8 percent. – Hardbeatnews.com

AIDS study spurs Haitian outrage
BY FRED TASKER AND JACQUELINE CHARLES, Oct. 31, 2007, Miami Herald


A new scientific finding that AIDS came to the United States from Africa via Haiti, probably arriving in Miami as early as 1969, stoked controversy among researchers and Haitians on Tuesday -- reopening deep wounds over the medical community's role in perpetuating a stigma against people from the island.

Published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study aims to better explain the origin of AIDS, whose history involves a virus with a sketchy story line that began in Africa in the 1930s and emerged in Los Angeles in 1981.

The findings were based, in part, on blood samples taken from about 20 Haitian patients at Jackson Memorial Hospital as early as 1979. The samples were frozen, stored at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and reanalyzed by the study's authors, including a researcher at the University of Miami.

''We were seeing patients at Jackson Memorial with what we now call AIDS, and at the time we didn't even know it,'' said Dr. Arthur Pitchenik, co-author of the study and a professor of medicine at the University of Miami Medical School. ``I started seeing Haitian immigrant patients with TB. They would get better from the TB only to die three to six months later from what we now call AIDS.''

Dr. Michael Gottlieb, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the original discoverers of AIDS, said the analysis placed the HIV virus that causes it in the United States nearly a decade earlier than previously believed.

''It's pretty clear evidence for Haiti as a stepping-stone,'' he said. ``The suggestion that the infection was further below our radar than I'd previously suspected is kind of unnerving.''

''This is very credible work,'' added Dr. Margaret Fischl, a pioneering UM AIDS researcher. ``Their approach is the way it should be done. Some of my colleagues think this is really remarkable work.''

The findings drew immediate anger from Miami's Haitian community and raised concerns among some AIDS scientists, as well.

''People are going crazy,'' said Dr. Laurinus Pierre, executive director of the Center for Haitian Studies in Little Haiti. Pierre said he has fought stigmas against Haitians from the first days of AIDS, in which researchers blamed the epidemic on the ''Four Hs'' -- homosexuals, Haitians, hemophiliacs and heroin addicts.

In February 1990, the Food and Drug Administration barred Haitians from donating blood in the United States, a policy that ignited scores of protests and highly publicized boycotts of blood drives. By December 1990, the FDA had scrapped its policy and developed a more rigorous screening of all blood donors.
To many, the policy pushed an already taboo subject in the Haitian community deeper in the shadows and discouraged many from seeking treatment, a phenomenon some say the latest findings could cause to happen again.

''This does a disservice to the Haitian community, who feel like they already went through this 20 years ago,'' said Dr. Paul Farmer, professor of medical anthropology at Harvard University and a founder of Partners in Health, an international research and aid organization active in fighting AIDS in Haiti. ``This is very slender evidence on which to base such a grand claim.''

''I don't think this is very helpful,'' said Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, a professor of medicine at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York. ``People love to play history, and it would be great to figure out who Patient Zero was. But there are doubts.''

The study's lead author, Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist, defended his methodology Tuesday and denied any disservice to the Haitian community.

Worobey and his co-authors analyzed the frozen blood samples from about 20 of Pitchenik's Haitian patients at Jackson from the late '70s and early '80s. They set up a medical timeline that they say indicates the HIV virus arrived in Haiti in 1966 and in Miami by 1969.

Worobey said he estimated the timing of the virus' arrival by taking samples of the virus from the late 1970s to 2000. By knowing the rate at which the viruses mutate, he said he was able to create a picture of what the virus looked like in 1969. And by comparing viruses from the United States and Haiti during this time, he could deduce when the virus arrived in the States.

''It's a common technique used in genetic analysis and human evolution,'' Worobey said Tuesday.

The study concludes that AIDS arrived in Haiti after Haitians went to the Democratic Republic of Congo as workers after that country won independence in 1960.

It debunks the original ''Patient Zero'' theory that said the HIV virus came to Los Angeles via a gay Canadian flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas. That theory was created by Dr. William Darrow and others at the CDC and turned into the 1987 book And the Band Played On, by journalist Randy Shilts. Darrow later repudiated his own study.

Pitchenik said he realized this week's study would be controversial in the Haitian community.

''I want to stress that this has nothing to do with race or sex or color of skin, and we should not stigmatize any particular group,'' he said.

``It's not whether you're Haitian or homosexual. It's the high-risk behavior you engage in. Whether you have unprotected sex, whether you're a drug user sharing needles.''

In Haiti, where 6 percent of the population was HIV-infected in 2003, the situation has improved, with HIV rates dropping to 2 percent by 2006, the CDC says.

This report was supplemented with material from Miami Herald wire services.

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Don’t let new AIDS study scapegoat Haitians
By Edwidge Danticat, The Progressive, November 7, 2007

A new study on the early path of the AIDS epidemic threatens to stigmatize Haitians and Haitian-Americans once again.

Late last month, a group of researchers published a study that concluded that the explosion of the AIDS pandemic in the United States resulted from the virus first being brought from the Congo to Haiti around 1966 and then to the United States “after a single migration of the virus out of Haiti in or around 1969.”

Now I am not a scientist and I don’t pretend to understand every detail of the research conducted by the group, led by Michael Worobey of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. (The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)

But prominent physicians argue that the group’s conclusions are highly debatable. And, by pinning the blame on a Haitian “immigrant host,” they could have potentially devastating consequences.

Worobey and his colleagues based their study on the blood samples taken from five Haitians in the early 1980s, patients who all happened to have been treated by a collaborator in the study, Dr. Arthur Pitchenik of the department of medicine at the University of Miami. Dr. Pitchenik had collected and sent their blood samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The Haitians’ blood samples were later compared with 117 other samples from non-Haitians, and the Haitians appeared to have the oldest strain outside of Africa.

The scientific value of the research, we are told, is — aside from historical curiosity — to help study mutations for a potential AIDS vaccine, which would indeed be good news for everyone.

But one of the critical problems with the study is how sweeping a conclusion it draws from research that involves such a tiny group of people. “This is very slender evidence on which to base such a grand claim,” Dr. Paul Farmer, a professor of medical anthropology who has been fighting the AIDS epidemic in Haiti, told the Miami Herald.

What’s more, the study places inordinate significance on its Haitian “immigrant host” when other carriers are equally if not more plausible.

First of all, there were only a relatively small number of Haitians working in the Congo, and of these, many chose not to return to Haiti because it was under a brutal dictatorship at the time.

Second, there were plenty of missionaries, aid workers, Peace Corps volunteers and revolutionaries returning from the Congo to the United States and other parts of the world who also could have spread the virus.

Previous claims on the origins of the AIDS epidemic have proven to be wrong, so we should look at the current one with a great degree of caution. The hunter theory that blamed Africans for eating bush meat, the vaccine theory that blamed scientists for making guinea pigs out of millions of people, and the Patient Zero theory that blamed one promiscuous Canadian flight attendant all have for the most part been abandoned.

The problem with the Haitian hypothesis is that by the time it is further elaborated, vetted, debated, clarified and scientifically contested, the lives of thousands of people may be irrevocably altered, just as they were in the early 1980s, when as the only high-risk group identified by nationality, Haitians lost jobs, friends, homes and the freedom to emigrate.

At that time, a struggling Haitian tourism industry was crushed. Children, including myself, were taunted or beaten in school by their peers. One child shot himself in a school cafeteria in shame. Haitians who tried to donate blood faced a ban by the Food and Drug Administration, which eventually realized that banning donors by nationality was not the answer as much as more thorough screening of the entire blood supply.

Already, in one public discussion in Miami, a caller on a radio talk show jeered that all Haitians should be kept out of the United States.

The truth is, as long as the pandemic exists, it is all of our problem, however it started, whoever carried it, and whoever is now infected by it.

Stigmatizing Haitians will do nothing to solve that problem.

Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American writer living in Miami. She won the American Book Award in 1999 for “The Farming of Bones.” Her most recent book, “Brother, I’m Dying,” is a finalist for the National Book Award . She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

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HIV/AIDS report unleashes ‘deadly lies and destractions’ about Haiti
By FinalCall.com News, Updated Nov 15, 2007, 10:52 am

A One-on-One Interview with Haitian activist Noluthando Williams

When the report “The Emergence of HIV/AIDS in the Americas and Beyond” was released in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Oct. 30, claiming that the AIDS virus entered the United States through the island-nation Haiti, Los Angeles-based Haitian activist Noluthando Williams declared that they unleashed an array of deadly lies and deadly distractions.

The report, authored by M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Andrew Rambaut, Gabriela Wlasiuk, Thomas J. Spira, Arthur E. Pitchenik, and Michael Worobey, highlights their study of 25-year-old blood samples, which they purport tracks the virus’ trek out of Africa, through Haiti, and into America in or around 1969.

Ms. Williams, a member of the Pan African Activist Coalition and the Coalition in Solidarity With Haiti, expressed her thoughts about the motive and impact of the report with Final Call Staff Writer Charlene Muhammad on the day of its release.

THE FINAL CALL (FC): What was your first reaction to this report?

Noluthando Williams (NW): First, the only thing that I find to be correct about the report is that AIDS surfaced in the U.S. in the 1960s. The truth is not that Haiti was a route for HIV and AIDS to enter into the U.S.—the truth is it is still in 2007, going into 2008, a high priority for the U.S. military, as well as the nations that they’re in alliance with, to keep Haiti politically subjugated, because Haiti is still too important to freedom-seeking people throughout the world.

[Haiti] is still the hero of freedom; the nation that we all look up to. They know that there are still enough of us who know the truth that they’re trying to make us look down on Haiti, but never. I believe that this is just an extension of a larger campaign to completely squash the People’s Movement in Haiti. In 1804, [Haiti] was able to take down all of the major superpowers, Napoleon’s France—deemed the greatest of the time—and Great Britain’s Navy, which was supported by the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. never wanted to get to that place again; hence, we have this report.

FC: The Haitian people’s strength and determination have remained in tact despite the U.S.-backed overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, his subsequent exile, and current UN occupation, to cite a few challenges. What else do you believe could be beneath the surface of this report in terms of the people’s spirit? We do know that the will to fight remains within the Haitian people, but under the UN occupation, is a physical battle a real threat to the West currently?

NW: For those who will come in contact with Haitians abroad, this report is propaganda. We’re supposed to feel that they should be locked up in detention camps. They are planning to destabilize the country. There has been progress, but only because of the determination, creativity and fierce refusal of the grassroots movement to bow down. The U.S. embassy is the most important entity in Haiti, unfortunately, not any Haitian institution. Even though they already had a new building, they just built an elaborate one, because Haiti is so strategically placed in terms of Venezuela and Cuba. The U.S. wants to make sure Haiti is in no way beneficial to those strong points as well.

FC: Can you enlighten us, from your last visit to Haiti, on the condition of the people who are suffering from the pandemic?

NW: First, if you look at HIV and AIDS and primary transmission, poor people do not necessarily have more sex than wealthy people, or savage kind of sex. But poor people are considered expendable by multiple parties—by people who have political motivations; people who want to be involved in genocide campaigns; or mad scientists who are callous and careless. That’s happened before and that’s why there is a higher rate of HIV and AIDS.

I’ve been in Haiti and I just wasn’t seeing people with high rates of HIV and AIDS, but they’re making it seem like, “Oh my God! Whole villages are shut in with AIDS.” I’m not saying that it is not an epidemic or not impacting people; I’m saying that just as they are using kidnappings as a tactic of war in Haiti, they are using chemical and biological warfare. They will put out the propaganda and then insert the chemical weaponry to bring it to fruition. African people are targeted more than any other people of color.

FC: Typically, this type of claim spawns protests in various forms, including demonstrations. How would you urge those angered by these authors’ assertions to adequately address this?

NW: It’s really important for Black people to strengthen our underground and have our own counter-intelligence tighter. In Haiti, this is why Western powers have not been able to grow stronger, but we’re losing that because we spend a lot of time behind computers. We could be in dialogue with someone for months and not see them. We need to be a lot more spiritually in tune because our spiritually as Africans will really be our defense.

They’d love to get us distracted on this, because then we’d stop fighting for temporary protective status. Though it is progressing, Haiti is still unstable.

There’s still political murders; thousands of political prisoners unjustly imprisoned; people who need to get out of the country, but will be thrown into U.S. prisons if they come without papers, which are really difficult to get.

We must not get distracted. When I go to Haiti and speak with Sisters who have had their husbands jailed, their homes burned, their children raped or killed, the Sisters declare that they will continue to have their husbands jailed, their homes burned [and] their children raped or killed until they have their freedom and the People’s Party is put back into power, so their country can move forward.

FC: Thank You.

© Copyright 2007 FCN Publishing, FinalCall.com

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Click on: Vaccinate Haiti? No - Stop using Haiti as a human laboratory
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Pye Kout Pran Devan: Is there a contaminated vaccination program being launched in Haiti, right now? HLLN, Nov. 10, 2007


Ezili Danto's note: Pye Kout Pran Devan - Is there a contaminated vaccine program being launched in Haiti, right now?

Considering that the United Nations and World Health Organization (WHO), for approximately 9.5 million dollars to themselves, have just initiated a national campaign to vaccinate 5.7 million or 58% of the population of Haiti against various diseases, including polio, measles and a "tetanus vaccine" to be provided to ALL Haitian women who are of childbearing age (Haiti Begins National Vaccine Campaign By Z. Perry CLOUT INDEX http://www.associatedcontent.com/
article/440140/haiti_begins_national_vaccine_campaign.html );

Considering the Ottawa Initiative, the 2003 foreign gathering where foreign ministers of the Western powers met in Canada and indicated they saw Haiti as a "threat" to North American countries because Haiti might have, by some estimates, a population of 20 million by 2019;

Considering that Canadian foreign Minister, Dennis Paradis is reported to have said at this white gathering that the prospect of 20 million Haitians by 2019, is a "time bomb, which must be defused immediately;"

Considering what we-Haitians have been learning about, these last weeks, in our efforts to understand the Worobey theory; considering we have learned that the Aids/HIV virus possibly came to Africa through a similar WHO polio vaccination program of the African population, all I can think to advise my people is: PYE KOUT PRAN DEVAN!!!!

It is critically then, that in reference to this World Health Organization (WHO) vaccination program, currently being promoted by the Internationals in Haiti, that Haitians remember that US/Euros have a history of experimenting on the poor (remember the Tuskegee experiment, et al...) and not a history of bringing health and prosperity to Black people, especially Haitians. Thus, right thinking requires that we-Haitians should ask our own trusted and non-embedded medical doctors to please advise as to whether this massive vaccination program, now launched, while Haiti is in the control of foreigners, won't be about transferring more diseases to Haitians? (See, AIDS: The WHO Vaccine Conspiracy & Monkey Business by ALAN CANTWELL,
M.D. |http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.c
fm?channelid=34&contentid=1377 ; The Ottowa Initiative | http://www.margueritelaurent.com/law/ottawai.html ; HLLN Links on Failed or Contaminated Vaccines, and Haiti Begins National Vaccine Campaign By Z. Perry CLOUT INDEX
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/440
140/haiti_begins_national_vaccine_campaign.html )

Ezili Danto
Li led li la
November 10, 2007
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HLLN Links on Failed or Contaminated Vaccines
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Coincidence or Intentional? - Is there an International plan to depopulate
and exterminate a large portion of Haiti's population? by Ezili Dantò, November 4, 2006 (See also - Vaccinate Haiti! and Defamed! -Page 1, - Page 2, Pg. 3 and Pg. 4 )
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Editorial - Occupied Haiti To be Vaccinated! Franklin Ellis, Nov. 11, 2007, Fanmi Lavalas Emission (Mp3 - 12:41| in French)
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In memory of the Arawaks and Tainos of Haiti, the Island's name is Haiti, not Hispaniola as the newscasters insist, Columbus's sailors brought syphilis to the Island and decimated the Amerindians population, not the converse...
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"Associations between Haitians and infectious disease are currently particularly strong in the U.S. popular press. This, too, is nothing new. Writing in 1920, National Geographic journalists noted that "it is estimated that 87 percent of the entire population were infected with contagious diseases." AIDS is merely the most recent in a long series of plagues attributed to Haiti. In the sixteenth century, Europeans insisted that syphilis originated n Haiti, and was brought back by Columbus' sailors. (the converse now appears to have been the case.)"Excerpted from: The Uses of Haiti (1994, updated 2005) --by Paul Farmer
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Possible Media Bias on coverage of Gilbert/Worobey report


History of the US's Thanksgiving Day...:
"....Another common practice among European explorers was to give "smallpox
blankets" to the Indians. Since smallpox was unknown on this continent prior
to the arrival of the Europeans, Native Americans did not have any natural
immunity to the disease so smallpox would effectively wipe out entire villages
with very little effort required by the Europeans... Most of the Wampanoag had died from the smallpox epidemic so when the Pilgrims arrived they found well-cleared fields which they claimed for their own. A Puritan colonist, quoted by Harvard University's Perry Miller, praised the plague that had wiped out the Indians for it was "the wonderful preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ, by his providence for his people's abode in the Western world." Historians have since speculated endlessly on why the woods in the region resembled a park to the disembarking Pilgrims in 1620. The reason should have been obvious: hundreds, if not thousands, of people had lived there just five years before. In less than three generations the settlers would turn all of New England into a charnel house for Native Americans, and fire the economic engines of slavery throughout English-speaking America. Plymouth Rock is the place where the nightmare truly began. (The Black Commentator, The History of Thanksgiving)
http://www.blackcommentator.com/254/25
4_cover_end_of_american_thanksgivings.html
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- 1.2 Million Merck Vaccines Recalled 12 Dec 2007: More than a million doses of a common Merck & Co. vaccine given to babies as young as 2 months were being recalled Wednesday because of contamination risks, but the top U.S. health official said it was not a health threat. [?] The recall covers roughly 1.2 million doses of the vaccine against Hib, which causes meningitis, pneumonia and other serious infections, and a combination vaccine for Hib and hepatitis B...http://www.sacbee.com/840/story/562997.html

- Must see video on how white scientists brought man-made Aids virus to Africa: According to Merck hepatitis B vaccine maker Maurice Hillerman PhD --- he ADMITS on this video: "I brought African green monkeys in (from Africa) --- I didn't know we were IMPORTING AIDS VIRUS AT THE TIME"
(i.e. between 1970-1974)...and LAUGHING heard on the sound track!!!
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=327_1195303011

- Watch: It shows Dr. Maurice HIllerman a Merck Immunologist.. actually saying
that he's responsible for bringing Aids to America..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tM8gk8C69M&feature (Please forward these clips (link) to everyone you know who thinks vaccines are "safe and effective.")

Original article is at: http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2003/07/4270.php

La Conspiration Du Silence - Genocide in Haiti by mass vaccination while Haiti
is occupied by Dessalines' enemies and other such white savior missionaries/
mercenaries... http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/defamed6.html#silence


HLLN Links relating to white (the foreigners') abhorrent violation of the fundamental duty of care - sexual abuse of the Black poor and powerless in Haiti

Rewriting History: USAID's former mission director tries to give the US credit for the lowering of diseases in Haiti when Aristide was in office
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/USfueled.html#usaid

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Haiti Begins National Vaccine Campaign by Z. Perry, Nov. 7, 2007, Associated Content: The People's Media Company

The government of Haiti, with the help of United Nations agencies, has initiated a national campaign to provide vaccines against various diseases, including polio and measles. It aims to vaccinate 5,700,000 people.

According to a press release issued by the United Nations on Tuesday, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti cooperated with the government to help the vaccine campaign achieve success. The efforts will cost approximately nine and a half million dollars.

Two types of measles vaccine are to be provided to Haitians from one to nineteen years old, and children four years old or younger will receive a polio vaccination. A tetanus vaccine is to be provided to women who are of childbearing age. The 5.7 million people targeted by the national vaccine campaign consist of fifty-eight percent of the population of Haiti.

U.N. peacekeepers from the Stabilization Mission helped to transport the vaccine equipment and supplies, making sure that they were kept under the proper conditions. The U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Haiti was quoted as saying that the campaign provided a "perfect example" of what can be achieved when U.N. agencies, govt. authorities, peacekeepers, and foreign countries (which provide funding) work together "in close collaboration."

The World Health Organization's page indicates that Haiti's health situation is relatively poor. The chance that children will die before the age of five is 120/1000 (compared to 27/1000 in Mexico, and 21/1000 in Venezuela), and the percentage of child births with a "skilled attendant" is just under 25% (one of the lowest in the world). The likelihood of death between the ages of fifteen and sixty is the highest in the western hemisphere, with Guatemala a somewhat distant 2nd.

According to the CIA World Factbook entry on Haiti, it is a nation of approximately 8.7 million people which has two official languages (French, Creole) and is almost as large as the state of Maryland. It is the poorest country in the entire west hemisphere, with very high unemployment and an average life expectancy of only fifty-seven years.

The factbook also indicates that Haiti's industries include making textiles, refining sugar, and cement production. Most of its exports go to the United States. It was formerly a French colony, but became independent in 1804, much earlier than many other countries. Approximately 8000 United Nations peacekeepers have been deployed there since 2004, after former President Aristide was removed from power (under disputed circumstances).

Sources:
1. United Nations, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=24551
2. CIA World Factbook (public domain), https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-
world-factbook/geos/ha.html
3. World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/countries/hti/en/
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Haitians Plan to Vaccinate Every Child

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Health officials in Haiti are rolling out the largest mass vaccination campaign in the impoverished country's history, aimed to inoculate every child against rubella, polio and other diseases, a U.N. doctor said Tuesday.

More than 5.7 million children and adult women are to be immunized in an effort that began Monday involving almost 12,000 Haitian and international heath workers and volunteers, said Dr. Teresa de la Torre, chief of UNICEF-Haiti's health and nutrition section.

Measles and rubella vaccinations will be given to 4.7 million children and teenagers, while 1.3 million children under age 5 will receive the polio vaccine. Millions will also receive vitamin A and treatment for worms while thousands of adult women will be inoculated against tetanus.

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washingtonpost.com

Officials Say Drug Caused Nigeria Polio
By MARIA CHENG
The Associated Press
Friday, October 5, 2007; 3:55 PM

LONDON -- A polio outbreak in Nigeria was caused by the vaccine designed to stop it, international health officials say, leaving at least 69 children paralyzed.
It is a frightening paradox in a part of the world that already distrusts western vaccines, making it even tougher to stamp out age-old diseases.

The outbreak was caused by the live polio virus that is used in vaccines given orally _ the preferred method in developing countries because it is cheaper and doesn't require medical training to dispense.

"This vaccine is the most effective tool we have against the virus, but it's like fighting fire with fire," said Olen Kew, a virologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC and the World Health Organization announced the cause of the polio outbreak last week, even though they knew about it last year.

Outbreaks caused by the oral vaccine's live virus have happened before. But the continuing Nigerian outbreak is the biggest ever caused by the vaccine. It also follows a nearly yearlong boycott of the vaccine in Africa's most populous country because of unfounded fears the vaccine was a Western plot to sterilize Muslims.

Officials now worry that the latest vaccine-caused Nigerian outbreak could trigger another vaccine scare.

Experts say such outbreaks only happen when too few children are vaccinated. In northern Nigeria, only about 39 percent of children are fully protected against polio.

The oral polio vaccine contains a weakened version of polio virus. Children who have been vaccinated excrete the virus, and in unsanitary conditions it can end up in the water supply, spreading to unvaccinated children.

In rare instances, as the virus passes through unimmunized children, it can mutate into a form that is dangerous enough to spark new outbreaks.

In 2001, officials reported that 22 children were paralyzed from polio in the Dominican Republic and Haiti in this way. Subsequent vaccine-caused polio outbreaks have occurred in the Philippines, Madagascar, China and Indonesia.

In the West, the polio vaccine is given as a shot and uses an inactivated virus, but that method is more expensive and requires training.

In Nigeria, the outbreak comes "in the wake of all the other problems they've had in," said Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who led WHO's smallpox eradication campaign in the 1970s.

In 2003, politicians in northern Nigeria canceled vaccination campaigns for nearly a year, claiming the vaccine was a Western plot to sterilize Muslims. That led to an explosion of polio, and the virus jumped to about two dozen countries.
Now, health officials' decision to keep quiet about the cause of the outbreak for so long may look suspicious.

Dr. David Heymann, WHO's top polio official, said that because the organization considered the outbreak to be a problem for scientists and not something that would change global vaccination practices, they thought it was was unnecessary to immediately share publicly.

CDC's Kew added: "The people who are against immunization may seize on anything that could strengthen their position, even if it's scientifically untenable."

Rumors are still rife among Nigerians that the vaccine is unsafe, and several religious leaders continue to lecture on its dangers. Another mass vaccine boycott could lead to further polio spread, derailing long-standing eradication efforts for good.

Nigerian health officials contacted by The Associated Press declined to comment on the situation.

"Convincing the Nigerians to take even more of this vaccine will be a tough sell," said Dr. Samuel Katz, an infectious diseases specialist at Duke University and co-inventor of the measles vaccine.

More than 10 billion polio doses have been given to children worldwide, and the vaccine has been credited with cutting polio incidence by more than 99 percent since 1988. Far more children are paralyzed by the wild polio virus than the virus spread by the oral vaccine. But no vaccine is risk-free.

WHO said that changing the vaccination strategy is unnecessary. "It would be nice if we had a more stable oral polio vaccine, but that's not the way it is today," Heymann said. "We will continue working the way we have been working because we don't want children to be paralyzed anywhere."

© 2007 The Associated Press

Commentary: Haiti, the international scapegoat!
By Jean H Charles, November 23, 2007

Some twenty years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration Service, as well as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), listed the Haitian people as suis generis carriers of the AIDS virus. This ill-conceived classification angered the Haitian Community in the United States to the bone. I was at that time, Assistant Dean of Students at the City College of the City University of New York. I called in a group of Haitian student leaders, they included Gilbert Hyppolite, Mario Jean, and Mildred Trouillot “Aristide”.

We planned together a strategy to organize a march to demonstrate against that ruling. The movement was taken over by the larger community. The rest was history.

Jean H Charles MSW, JD is Executive Director of AINDOH Inc a non profit organization dedicated to build a kinder and gentle Caribbean zone for all. He can be reached at: jeanhcharles@aol.com

On April 20, 1990, some three hundred thousand Haitians and their American and Caribbean friends marched from Brooklyn to City Hall and Battery Park through the Brooklyn Bridge in a frenzy that is still felt today with the recall of the memory.

The CDC retreated from that classification the same evening, advising the world that some Americans, like some Haitians or Jamaicans or Trinidadians might be the victims of a virus that can be contacted when sexual relations occurred with a person who was already an AIDS carrier.

Some twenty years later, Dr Michael Worobey of Arizona State University and Dr Arthur Pichenik came with a new twist to the old story. Patient zero, the first AIDS carrier might have been a Haitian resident, who had acquired the virus in the Congo, Africa.

This so called scientific finding appears on its face without foundation.

These empirical and anecdotal observations will illuminate the readers.

During the 1960s, the United Nations contracted a legion of Haitian professionals including doctors, teachers and lawyers to contribute to the nation building process in Congo after its independence from Belgium. When the United Nations contract expired some few years later, those Haitian professionals went to the province of Quebec in Canada to repeat the pioneering engagement of education and development.

In a recent book ”Those Quebecois who came from Haiti,“ edited by Samuel Pierre (International Press Polytechnique, 2007), the story, the life and the contribution of those heroes are narrated in a collection of tributes “for those who are an inspiration for the citizens of the world who believe in the future possibility of a happy society for all”. This quotation by Jean Charest, the Prime Minister of Quebec, sets apart the men and women that Quebec cannot forget neither in name, nor in heart, not in actions. Who they are, what they did is an eloquent example of engagement and determination!

Now at the age of retreat, those pioneers, healthy and wealthy are enjoying a well deserved retirement in Boca Raton Florida or in Port au Prince Haiti with a fat retiree check emanated from two continents. Yet the good American professors Worobey and Pichenik have chosen, to use the term of Dr. Paul Farmer of Harvard University to malign and slander on a base of a grand claim those missionaries of civilization. Quoting Luc Montaigne, the Thomas Edison of AIDS research, this finding is without foundation. The Haitians who came to Quebec from Africa had no signs of the AIDS virus.

I will add that the Haitian ethos patterned after the French culture is inhospitable to any group of people who are disease carriers. The grapevine and the rumor would have done its best to contribute to the shunning of those individuals. There is no scintilla of evidence that even a minority of those who came back from Congo was dying en masse of the AIDS virus.

On the other side, I know personally of a prominent activist American who died around 1973, with the symptoms that are now attributed to AIDS. He was fond of women, and he traveled often to Africa, the rumor then; there was a strange disease that could be contacted by those who are too prolific with the other sex.

In Haiti, with the help of good doctors and institutions like Dr J.W. Pape of Cornell University, Dr Paul Farmer of Harvard University as well as Doctors without Borders, the country has been cited in international conference on AIDS as a pioneer in the fight and the containment of the disease. From a peak of 6% in 2002, the AIDS population has been reduced to 2% in 2006 in Haiti.

In addition, the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation would have crumbled in a few weeks, but for the devotion and the professionalism of a hundred Haitian doctors and thousands of Haitian nurses who contribute day in and day out, representing the largest contingent of black professionals in the city hospitals.

We are expecting that Michael Worobey and his colleagues will follow the path of Dr. William Darrow who repudiated his own study of the theory of the 4 H (homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, Haitians). In the meantime, the harm has been spread throughout.

Haiti, the pioneer of black emancipation has to endure from time to time, the scourge of those who resent the fact that this black nation has disturbed and dismantled the world order of slavery. This gallant nation shall continue its mission of making this world a better one for all.

Like the Jews, despised by some but respected for the great universities, the zoos, the museums, the philharmonics orchestras and the cultural institutions they have sponsored wherever they have passed through, the Haitian people will have to content themselves with this God principle: To those of you I have trusted the task of illuminating this world, I did not promise an easy life on this earth.

"When you make a choice, you mobilize vast human energies and resources which otherwise go untapped...........If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want and all that is left is a compromise." Robert Fritz