'The Constant Gardener' - Does Art Imitate Life?

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'The Constant Gardener' - Does Art Imitate Life?

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 22:51:48 +0100

 

 

 

 

 

THE CONSTANT GARDENER - DOES ART IMITATE LIFE?

 

Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD, ND and

Elissa Meininger

September 15, 2005

NewsWithViews.com

 

John le Carré is the author of The Constant Gardner, now turned into

the latest blockbuster film that many movie reviewers believe is Oscar

material. Its innocent title conceals the plot detailing the

immorality and corruption of a fictitious drug company, in league with

government officials and international aid agencies in using the Third

World as a testing ground for developing drugs.

 

The publisher's notes state, " The Constant Gardener is a magnificent

exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and

elegant storytellers of our time. The novel opens in northern Kenya

with the gruesome murder of Tessa Quayle – young, beautiful, and

dearly beloved to husband Justin, a British diplomat. When Justin sets

out on a personal odyssey to uncover the mystery of her death, what he

finds could make him not only a suspect among his own colleagues, but

a target of Tess's killers as well.

 

A master chronicler of the betrayals of ordinary people caught in

political conflict, John Le Carré portrays the dark side of unbridled

capitalism as only he can. "

 

For people just looking for Le Carre's latest spy thriller, The

Constant Gardener, they will not be disappointed.

 

However, to the health freedom community, The Constant Gardener has

become a cult favorite as it centers on the question, " How close does

art imitate life? "

 

Le Carre's story takes place in AIDs-torn Kenya where a drug company,

in order to cut corners and expenses, had made arrangements with the

local government, with the help of the British Government, to test a

new TB drug in anticipation of an epidemic expected sometime in the

future. The arrangements, also assisted by international humanitarian

aid agencies, were to encourage thousands of unsuspecting and

impoverished Africans to become part of a dishonest drug testing

project where deaths and other adverse reactions to the drug being

tested are to be concealed so the drug can be eventually marketed with

glowing clinical study reports.

 

For those who are unfamiliar with how drugs are developed and tested

who find the plot a little farfetched, need to know that le Carré

devoted four pages of disclaimers in the back of his book to protect

all the people he contacted during his research on the project.

 

The idea that Big Pharma, with the blessings of governments and

humanitarian agencies, would permit such tests to be conducted is a

very troubling thought. While we are not suggesting that the murder

and mayhem that made le Carre's story a thriller is something that

happens, we are sad to say, our own government has been involved with

such questionable drug testing among impoverished people both here and

abroad.

 

In a scathing report put together in 1996 by the National Vaccine

Information Center (NVIC) and the Washington Office of the government

of Haiti entitled, " Measles Vaccine Experiments on Minority Children

Turn Deadly " , such duplicity has occurred. NVIC is an organization

founded by parents of vaccine-injured children that monitors the

safety of vaccines. NVIC is responsible for passage of the 1986 law

that provides compensation for parents of children killed or

permanently damaged by vaccinations. www.909shot.com

 

The first part of the 1996 NVIC/Haiti report is as follows:

 

In an experiment to find out if they could give a high potency

Edmonston Zagreb measles vaccine to babies as young as four months old

in order to overwhelm their natural maternal antibodies and replace

them with vaccine-induced antibodies, medical researchers at the

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Johns Hopkins University

injected thousands of babies in the Third World with the experimental

vaccine that reportedly caused chronic immune suppression and the

deaths of an unknown number of babies. With the help of Kaiser

Permanente, more than 1500 six-month old black and Hispanic babies in

inner city Los Angeles were enrolled in the experiment starting in

June 1990. The study was halted in October 1991 after repeated reports

from vaccine trial sites in Africa that girl babies were dying in

higher than expected numbers six months to three years after vaccination.

CDC Admits Informed Consent Violations - CDC director David

Satcher admitted in a June 17 Los Angeles Times article that a

National Institutes of Health (NIH) investigation of the 1990-91 Los

Angeles study found that informed consent regulations had been

violated because the parents were not told their babies would be

injected with an experimental vaccine that had never been licensed by

the FDA for use in America. Both Kaiser and the CDC have denied that

any of the Los Angeles babies were harmed by the high potency EZ

vaccine but did admit that one child, who received a standard potency

EZ vaccine, died from a bacterial infection they maintain is unrelated

to the vaccination.

 

The high potency EZ measles experiments began at four major sites

in the mid-1980's including Haiti, the Senegal, Guinea Bissau and

Mexico. Other trials followed in Cameroon, Gambia, Bangladesh, Togo,

Iran, New Guinea, Peru, Rwanda, Sudan, South Africa, Egypt,

Philippines, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Zaire and Los Angeles. Primary

funding came from the U.S. Agency for International Development

(USAID) and the World Health Organization (WHO). In Haiti, infants

were given the experimental vaccine at 10 to 500 times the usual dose

levels. In a June 1996 article in Journal of Infectious Diseases,

Johns Hopkins researchers report that infants with the highest

antibody responses to high titer measles vaccine have the most

profound immune suppression.

 

HIV Positive Babies Enrolled - Some of the infants in both Haiti

and Zaire were HIV positive and already enrolled in a long term HIV

study. They were deliberately included as part of the study design in

order to evaluate the effects of vaccines in HIV positive infants.

When study results were finally published in late 1993, deaths

occurring in the HIV positive babies were left out of the mortality

figures. It is unknown exactly how many of the vaccinated HIV-positive

babies died, although at least 100 of the Haitian HIV-positive babies

reportedly died.

 

Warnings Ignored - The measles vaccine experiment was only stopped

two years after the director of one of the African sites warned the

WHO and CDC experiment leaders in April 1990 that African mortality

data raised a red flag about the high titer EZ vaccine. His reports

were first ignored and then discounted and he was replaced as a

principal investigator. After his mortality data was dismissed as

incorrect for more than a year, with support from colleagues at

Harvard, he published the mortality data in The Lancet in October

1991. WHO then called for all the sites to submit mortality data for

independent analysis. The CDC has stated that enrollment for the LA

study was halted in October 1991.

CDC Knew It Was An Experiment - In the LA Times article, the CDC's

chief Satcher referred to the failure to tell the parents in LA that

the EZ vaccine was experimental as a " little mistake " and not a

deliberate attempt to deceive them. Kaiser maintains that the failure

to inform the parents was an administrative " oversight. " However, CDC

grant announcements in 1989 clearly state that the vaccine trials are

" experimental, developmental, test and research work. " [Read]

 

Over the years NVIC's newsletters have been filled with similar

stories of what the ordinary person would judge as unethical and/or

immoral acts in the name of developing new drugs. What makes watching

The Constant Gardener interesting to someone familiar with these other

reports, is that the main tension in the story occurs when the hero,

Justin Quayle, interacts with his colleagues of longstanding, who he

considered his friends. The plain fact of the matter is that each of

these people had a stake in acting as they did. None of them were

really bad people and all of them found an excuse to distance

themselves from the ultimate outcome, the brutal murder of Tessa. What

made Justin Quayle stand out as an unlikely hero is that confronted

with true evil, he was compelled to take action, despite having been a

passive, go-along-to-get-along middle management diplomat up until then.

 

In the real world of health freedom, there are only four kinds of

people: a few evil people; a lot of well-meaning people who, like

Quayle's colleagues, are willing to blind themselves to the

implications of things and shrink from taking action other than to

protect their position; a whole lot of people who see something bad

but who do nothing to change things; and a few people who see what is

wrong and can't live with themselves unless they make an effort to fix

the problem.

 

Notwithstanding the benefits of some types of medical intervention,

if, after reading this story and others equally disturbing about our

ailing medical system, you find yourself compelled to take action, we

invite you to join us at an international meeting in Minneapolis this

October to meet and greet some of the most interesting and committed

health freedom fighters from all over the US, Canada, and Europe.

 

October 28-30, 2005

National Conference for Health Freedom Advocates

And World Health Freedom Assembly

Minneapolis, Minnesota http://www.nationalhealthfreedom.org

 

ACT FOR HEALTH FREEDOM NOW: Go to

http://www.friendsoffreedominternational.org and purchase " Death by

Modern Medicine " and view and purchase the new movie on Codex and Free

Trade called " We Become Silent " by Kevin Miller. Proceeds from the

sale of these products are crucial to help fund our health freedom

action. For state action go to http://www.nationalhealthfreedom.org.

 

© 2005 Carolyn Dean -

 

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Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor, naturopathic doctor, herbalist,

acupuncturist, nutritionist, as well as a powerful health activist

fighting for health freedom as president of Friends of Freedom

International. Dr. Dean is the author of over a dozen health books,

the latest of which is " Death By Modern Medicine " .

 

Elissa Meininger, is Vice President of Friends of Freedom

International and co-founder of the Health Freedom Action Network, a

grassroots citizens' political action group. She is also a health

freedom political analyst and can be heard on the natural health radio

show SuperHealth, broadcast weekly on station WKY (SuperTalk AM 930)

in Oklahoma City.

 

Website: http://www.deathbymodernmedicine.com

Website: http://www.carolyndean.com

 

E-Mail: holeopharm