Cuba, The West, And An 'Elusive' Vaccine

How meningitis B unnecessarily killed kids for 25 years

Until very recently, meningitis B was a leading cause of death in babies and young children in Europe and North America.

In these countries it sickened tens of thousands, and killed hundreds, sometimes thousands of children every year.

Those who survived were more often than not left with a permanent disability, such as brain damage, epilepsy, hearing loss, or the loss of limbs after undergoing amputation to stem the infection.

There are twelve different groups of meningococcal disease. Six - A, B, C, W, X and Y - are responsible for most cases of meningitis. Group B is particularly dangerous to adolescents, and different groups dominate in different countries. In Europe, 90% of cases are caused by group B, which makes total child deaths from meningitis in Europe higher than in the US and Canada.

So deadly, in fact, that the UK’s NHS reported a few years ago that meningitis B was the leading infectious killer of babies and young children in Europe.

In the UK alone this translated to around 60 dead babies and children a year, with 600 infected and left with devastating life-changing and lifelong illness. In the US, where group B is far less prevalent, the toll in 2015 was also 60.

Much changed in 2015 when a vaccine heralded as a breakthrough against group B was approved.

Known as Bexsero and developed by the Swiss pharma company Novartis (the vaccine rights have since been bought by GlaxoSmithKline), it was lauded as a significant achievement against a disease for which governments and researchers claimed had been difficult to manufacture a vaccine.

Within months, Pfizer followed Novartis with its own group B vaccine. The Pfizer vaccine, Trumenba, was rolled out the same year in the US.

The UK’s health secretary at the time, Jeremy Hunt, said the UK would be “the first country in the world to have a nationwide meningitis B vaccination programme.”

The results were great. By 2020, Britain’s NHS reported that the vaccine had reduced cases of meningitis by two-thirds.

(It is worth noting that the British government at first rejected the inclusion of the vaccine in the UK’s childhood immunisation programme on the basis of cost effectiveness, before overwhelming pressure from the families of meningitis B victims forced them into it).

These two companies then, appeared to have done the world a great service, saving many children from life changing illness and death.

Mainstream media extolled big pharma innovation. CNN hailed the vaccines as ‘a turning point,’ recounting the story of a 17 year-old who had died of meningitis B a few years earlier. A 2016 article in Scientific American said a vaccine for group B had “remained elusive” until Bexsero.

The only problem with these stories?

They were lies.

Cuba had made the meningitis B vaccine breakthrough more than twenty-five years earlier.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Cuba faced a devastating outbreak of meningitis, with groups B and C the main culprits. The Cuban government struck a deal with France to buy its group C vaccine, but no vaccine existed against group B. So in 1982, the government’s state biotech agency, the Finlay Institute, assembled a team, led by female biochemist Concepción Campa, to invent the world’s first meningitis B vaccine.

And that’s exactly what Campa and her team did.

A meningitis B vaccine was being administered by 1988 and by 1990 more than 3 million Cubans had been vaccinated. Meningitis B incidence and deaths on the island plummeted, and the epidemic was declared over. UN immunologists sent to the island to rate the vaccine said it had a 95% efficacy rate, rising to 97% in the high-risk three months to six years age group. In 1989, the UN awarded Campa’s team the UN gold medal for global innovation, recognising that year’s most outstanding scientific achievement. The vaccine has been included in Cuba’s childhood immunisation schedule ever since.

So no, the UK was not the first to do it. Not by decades. No, the Pfizer and Novartis vaccines weren’t turning points. No, a vaccine against meningitis B had not remained elusive.

Did western media fail to investigate? Or did they just omit the information in service of capitalist empire?

Cuba’s vaccine was not just for Cubans. In the 90s Cuba licensed the vaccine to 15 other Latin American and Caribbean countries, slashing rates of meningitis B in those countries too.

Babies and children in the US, the UK and other European countries could have been similar beneficiaries.

Our governments chose otherwise.

In the 90s the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, struggling to make its own meningitis B vaccine, applied for permission to test Cuba’s vaccine in Belgium. But because its labs in the country were owned by the US subsidiary of GSK, US sanctions against Cuba made it illegal. The deal ultimately went nowhere. The BBC reported the story in 1999.

This was the extent of the mainstream news coverage of Cuba’s incredible meningitis B success story.

As a result, for more than twenty-five years, babies and children Europe and the US continued to die at higher rates than children in Cuba and Latin America because of the ideological fixation on punishing a country for defying the US order.

For refusing, basically, to do capitalism.

Despite independent assessments and UN medals, some researchers over the years have tried to cast doubt on the Cuban vaccine, as a way to defend its non-use in the west. Cuban scientists in response have had to publish papers defending the vaccine. Of course the vaccine doesn’t prevent every meningitis B death. But even studies from GlaxoSmithKline, when they were finally able to test it, showed its incredibly high efficacy. Certainly higher than the zero efficacy induced by not having a vaccine for so many years.

The numbers don’t lie. Cuba and the 15 other Caribbean and Latin American countries that use the Cuban vaccine have for years had lower incidence of meningitis B than countries like the UK, New Zealand and Ireland.

One truth is undeniable.

Babies and children in the west were left unprotected against meningitis B for more than 25 years whilst a vaccine that could have saved lives and prevented devastating future health problems existed.

Cuba achieved, and still achieves (as demonstrated by its homemade covid vaccine), incredible biotech success despite punishing western sanctions.

The US stance on Cuba of course has never been about freedom and democracy. The US and its allies had, and still have, no trouble supporting dictatorships when it is in their geo-political interests. As I’ve written about before.

Nowadays, most of the world, including European countries, see the folly of the US stance on Cuba. Most vote at the UN to end the US embargo. But the US always uses its veto power to override global democracy. At the last vote just a few weeks ago, only two countries voted against the embargo: the US and Israel.

From the Cuban embargo preventing child saving vaccines, to these vaccines being rejected due to cost effectiveness, we see how our lives and the lives of children are so often at the whim of capitalist logic and ideology.

This, disgracefully, is not unusual.

From Gaza, to Gateshead to Galveston, babies and children were, and are, routinely killed because of an ideology that places capitalist interests above all else.

How clearly we see this in Palestine.

How clearly we see this with covid.

How clearly we see this with climate breakdown.

In the service of enforcing capitalists interests and US empire, the lives of babies and children are so often acceptable collateral damage.

But Cuba shows us it doesn’t have to be like this.

Cuba shows us a currently existing, different way to do things.

Can we really argue it’s not a better way?