Long-tailed macaques invaluable for vaccine development: Expert

It was the headline (Long-tailed macaques invaluable for vaccine development: Expert) that caught my attention in The Jakarta Post. As can be seen the story involves an "expert" and so ought to be believed. Here is the story, dated Wedneday, May 23, 2018:

Long-tailed macaques, also known as crab-eating macaques, have important value for the development of vaccines in Indonesia, the world’s largest vaccine supplier, an expert has said. 

Amir Hamidy, member of the Scientific Authority at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Indonesia, said long-tailed macaques were a non-endangered species currently listed in Appendix 2 of the Convention. This means people are permitted to hunt the species but within a quota system.   

"First we must see what benefits we can get from long-tailed macaques. Because the pressure from the international community, such as the Animal Welfare Association, on the use of wildlife, especially primates, is quite high. We are not permitted to exploit the species and must also maintain its population and natural habitat,” Amir said on Tuesday. 

The scientist was referring to the possible uses of long-tailed macaques for the development of vaccines, produced with the animal's kidney tissue culture.  

“We supply the world with vaccines. We export our vaccines to many countries and we can develop polio and TB vaccines by using long-tailed macaques. But the macaques we use must be from a breeding facility to ensure they are clean and healthy,” said Amir. 

“The use of long-tailed macaques to develop vaccines is one example of the uses of biodiversity,” he added.

Despite the involvement of a so-called expert, the story is undoubtedly and depressingly true. What surprised me about the story was that Indonesia is the world's largest vaccine supplier and that vaccines are still being developed using mashed-up monkey kidneys as a culture.

It was from another Jakarta Post article (Bio Farma temporarily suspends diphtheria vaccine exports to tackle outbreak) that I learned:

State-owned vaccine manufacturer Bio Farma has temporarily stopped its diphtheria vaccine exports to focus on vaccine distribution to fulfill domestic demand as Indonesia strives to contain an outbreak of the infectious disease.

So Bio Farma is owned by the Indonesian government. The company has a surprisingly long history dating back to 1890. While Indonesia may be the world's largest vaccine supplier, neither Bio Farma or any other Indonesian pharmaceutical company features in the top 50 companies for 2017 (link). Indonesia's largest pharmaceutical company is Kalbe Farma and has featured in the news recently (see article: Indonesia's first biomedicine factory opens) and, to quote from the article:

Apart from vaccines and antisera produced by state-owned Bio Farma, most biopharmaceutical products in Indonesia have been imported. Kalbe aims to break this dependence on biopharmaceutical imports by finally manufacturing its own biogenerics. 

Meanwhile, there have been some interesting developments regarding compulsory vaccinations in Jakarta. This story from The Jakarta Post, dated May 22, 2018 summarises the situation:

Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan has decided to revise a recent circular that was criticised for discouraging immunisation drives in the city. 

The circular, which was distributed at the end of April through puskesmas (public health centres), annulled a previous regulation on basic immunisation as an admission requirement for kindergarten and elementary schools. 

Anies said he did not mean to discourage immunisation campaigns, but he also did not want it to become an obstacle for children to enrol at schools. 

"The circular will be retracted and we'll issue another one, because it has generated various interpretations," the former education minister told reporters on Monday at City Hall. 

Anies said the revised circular would ensure that schools provide immunisation access to children who were unvaccinated when they applied to schools. 

Health practitioners and parents criticised the Jakarta Education Agency for issuing the new circular that stripped immunisation from admission requirements, saying that communicable diseases still plagued the nation's capital. 

The original regulation that made basic immunisation mandatory for school admission was issued by former governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama. 

Clearly the Jakarta Governor is trying appease two antagonistic sides. On one side is a lot of citizens who are suspicious of vaccinations, especially following the recent dengue fever vaccination debacle in the Philippines. On the other side is the pharmaceutical  and medical industries that makes a lot of money out of vaccinations. These are the same tensions that exist in many countries, although the latter side does not enjoy the same dominance as it does in many Western countries. However, even in the West, the number of citizens who refuse to unconditionally accept the vaccination orthodoxy is growing and becoming better organised.

In Indonesia however, Islam is also being called upon in the fight against Big Pharma, as this article reveals:

One of the leading anti-vax campaigners is Dewi Hestyawati, who calls herself a Holistic Islam Health Activist. 

She says diseases like diphtheria and polio can be warded off and treated with diet and alternative therapies. 

"The Prophet shows us that immunisation should come from the regular daily consumption of healthy substances : honey, herbs, olive oil; dates and goat's milk. If we don't follow that, we can be easily infected with diseases," she said.

Dewi Hestyawati has a Facebook page and, one thing leading to another of course when going down these rabbit holes, she makes reference to a Doctor Andrew Moulden who died prematurely in 2014 at age 49, under suspicious circumstances. A website has been set up by a friend to keep his ideas alive. Here is a link to a talk he gave in Montreal in 2009.

What particularly struck me about Doctor Moulden's comments was that vaccines can cause reduced blood to nerves connected to the eyes and face, so that eyes can become "turned" in exactly the same way as happened to my brother Tony. I remember when he was pre-school and it was suddenly discovered that he had a turned eye. He needed to wear spectacles with a patch. 

I'm wondering if he didn't suffer vaccine reactions which caused not only caused his turned eye but also his acoustic neuroma that doctors said had probably been growing since he was two years of age. Of course, there was no suspicion that vaccines might have caused these two seemingly unrelated problems and perhaps also led to Tony's behavioural problems. No one will ever know now of course but it seems highly likely that he was damaged. Being so much younger than his other two brothers (Peter - born 1953 and myself - born 1949), he would have received different "flavours" of vaccines and probably more of them.

It's interesting to compare the number of recommended vaccines in the late 1940's versus 2010 (source):

Late 1940s | Recommended Vaccines
Smallpox
Diphtheria
Tetanus
Pertussis 

2010 | Recommended Vaccines
Diphtheria
Tetanus
Pertussis
Measles
Mumps
Rubella
Polio (IPV)
Hib
Hepatitis B
Varicella
Hepatitis A
Pneumococcal
Influenza
Rotavirus

Let's close this post with the following observation by Doctor Moulden:

Every Vaccine Produces Microvascular Damage 

Theodor Herzl

I've started researching about Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew, who is regarded as the spiritual father of Israel and a pivotal figure in the rise of Zionism. From my reading thus far, he seems to have started out believing that the integration of Jews into European society was possible but later abandoned that idea and embraced the idea of a Jewish homeland. Argentina, Uganda and the Sinai were all considered at various points but eventually Palestine was decided upon.

Theodor presided over the first Zionist Conference in (interestingly) Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and remained president until his death in 1904 at the young age of 44. He garnered a lot of international support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine but couldn't persuade the Ottoman sultan to allow Zionists access, despite offering to help pay off the empire's debts. It has been proposed that the Zionists decided the Ottoman empire had to be dismantled because of the sultan's intransigence. Palestine was part of the Ottoman empire at that time.

Many Jews of the time were not in favour of a Jewish homeland and some are still not. On the Torah Jews website, the following points are made regarding an upcoming seminar:

There was no classroom big enough, so they rented a stadium. Masses of authentic Torah Jews are expected to fill the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum to capacity this Sunday at 4:00 PM to hear major rabbis lecture on the incompatibility of Judaism and Zionism. 

The lectures will emphasize the differences between Judaism – a religion centered around belief and adherence to the precepts of the Torah – and Zionism, a militaristic political movement designed to transform Jewish identity from religious to national, centered around a land, language, and army.

Since the state of Israel was established in 1948, Zionists have touted it as the “Jewish state,” and arrogated to it the role of representative of world Jewry. 

Opponents of Israel are silenced by Zionists with the accusation that they are “anti-Semites,” and Israel's politicians are portrayed as leaders of world Jewry. Jewish opponents of Zionism have been branded “self-hating Jews,” and Israel has employed various means to coerce and convince Jews to identify with Israel as their state. Their methods of coercion include various forms of discrimination against the Orthodox anti-Zionist lifestyle. Most recently, media has attached religious significance to the move of the American embassy to Jerusalem. 

This Sunday’s convention will be an important opportunity to hear the other side of the story, the position of Torah Jews on these subjects. Besides their opposition to the ideology of Jewish nationalism, the lecturers will also explain the traditional Orthodox Jewish view that Jews are forbidden to wage war but must live among the nations of the world in peace and with utmost loyalty, and that we must resist and fight against the draft law with all means at our disposal. 

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, noted lecturer and author on both Zionism and Judaism, says "Israel’s referring to itself as the Jewish state is a form of collective identity theft, since Jewishness is a purely religious identity, not political or national." He explains, "It is crucial for people to realise that Israel's identification as the Jewish state is a unilateral claim of Zionism. Judaism says the Jewish people are members of a religion and have no state except those in which they reside." Rabbi Shapiro will be available during the event to answer questions for the press and other interested parties.

Getting back to Theodor however, he detested Jewish bankers (Finanzjuden) and so that's a point in his favour. He was clearly an idealist and believed that the Jews and Palestians could live together in harmony. He wrote a novel called Altneuland (Old New Land) in which this sort of harmony is achieved. Regarding a possible settlement in Argentina, he displayed idealistic naïveté when he wrote:

"When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly ... It goes without saying that we shall respectfully tolerate persons of other faiths and protect their property, their honor, and their freedom with the harshest means of coercion. This is another area in which we shall set the entire world a wonderful example ... Should there be many such immovable owners in individual areas [who would not sell their property to us], we shall simply leave them there and develop our commerce in the direction of other areas which belong to us" 

The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol. 1 (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), pp. 88, 90 hereafter Herzl diaries.

As we now know, the private property (in Palestine) was expropriated, not gently but violently, and it continues to the present day. I think Theodor would be aghast to see how his beloved Israel has turned into a rogue state, the most violent and dangerous nation on Earth. Historically, I want to investigate to what extent the Zionists fomented the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution. It seems that they were deeply involved and if so, then again what would Theodor have thought of the millions who perished because of the machinations of a political entity that he had helped create? Perhaps he has long ago turned in his grave on Mount Herzl. Did the Finanzjuden manage to wrest control of the movement after his death and set about ensuring the destruction of the Ottoman Empire? I'm still exploring that possibility.

At a personal level, he married a woman called Julie Naschauer and they had three children: Paulina, Hans and Margaritha (Trude). Paulina died of a heroin overdose in 1930 at the age of 40. Hans committed suicide on the day of her sister's funeral at age 39. Trude died in a concentration camp in 1943. She had a son, Stephen Theodore Neumann, who was born in 1918 and who became a committed Zionist (unlike his mother or aunt and uncle). Unfortunately, he committed suicide in 1946 by jumping from the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge in Washington, D.C. It is certainly a very sad family history.

I'll make my way through Theodor Herzl's Diaries and see what I discover. I'm also making my way through the voluminous but fascinating The International Jew The World's Foremost Problem. The newspaper articles that comprise The International Jew were written in 1920 or a little later and they shed an interesting light on Jewish activity during and immediately after the war, especially their involvement in the entry of the United States into the war, the subsequent peace conference and the framing of the Balfour declaration.