The British National Health Service (NHS) has recently begun a laudable program to vaccinate all babies born in that country against the deadly disease meningitis B. On its website, the NHS claims: “The new programme makes England the first country in the world to offer a national, routine and publicly funded Men B vaccination programme.”
Is Britain really the pioneer in meningitis B vaccinations? Not even close: they missed by about 30 years. Nor is this news in Britain. Way back in 1998, the BBC ran an article which reported “Doctors in the UK are testing a vaccine that has appeared to eradicate a deadly form of meningitis in Cuba.” As that article described, Cuban scientists at the Finlay Institute had developed, and Cuba’s socialist health care system had deployed starting in 1989, a vaccine named VA-MENGOC-BC that has reduced the number of deaths from the disease in Cuba from several thousand per year to zero. This is just one of the 11 vaccines (against 13 diseases) from which all Cuban children benefit, and just one of the 33 vaccines developed by Cuba’s biotech scientists.
While the U.S. blockade didn’t directly prevent Britain or other countries from importing Cuban vaccine, its indirect effects did. For example, SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) had a vaccine research lab in Belgium, but since it was owned by a U.S. subsidiary, it was still subject to the blockade. And it certainly prevented the U.S. from doing so, even while Cuba was exporting the vaccine to 15 other countries. Early on, Cuban scientists at the Institute even offered their vaccine to U.S. health authorities, which were facing outbreaks on a recurring basis, but received no response.
How badly do the U.K. and U.S. want to deny the achievements of Cuban science, as well as deny the Cuban people the ability to derive financial benefit from it? 200 people per year die in the U.K. from meningitis B; in the U.S., the recent figure is 500/year. In 30 years, had the Cuban vaccine been available to the people of those two countries alone, the lives of 21,000 people could have been saved. And yet the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) still maintains that “there is currently no vaccine available” for meningitis B!
The cruel, inhumane, and criminal blockade must end, for the sake of Cuba and for the sake of the rest of the world!
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