Rabat – On Thursday, October 21, less than a month after they issued a first open letter requesting Health Minister Khalid Ait Taleb to respect Moroccans’ freedom of choice to be vaccinated or not and to suspend COVID vaccination for minors, a group of Moroccan health professionals from different medical disciplines followed-up on their demands with a second petition. Their number rose from 217 signatories in late September to 800 now.
The health professionals reiterated their demands at a time when France is to extend its health pass requirement until July 2022; when countries such as Bulgaria or Benin are also imposing COVID passes on their populations amid rising infections; and when the United States considers itself “ready” to vaccinate children aged between 5 and 11, knowing there is a number of countries such as Cuba, Israel, Cambodia, or the UAE who have already begun vaccinating children as young as 3 years old.
This all is happening at the same time as the World Health Organization (WHO) constantly recalls the urgency to vaccinate the populations of poor countries before inoculating children and adolescents in rich countries.
In their second open letter, the concerned health professionals extended their initial address to the Ministry of Health to various other public health representative bodies in Morocco, including the Moroccan Society of Pediatrics, headed by Hassan Afilal, and the Center for Anti-Poisoning and Pharmacovigilance (CAPM), directed by Rachida Slimani.
In addition to demanding that COVID vaccination for minors be suspended and that adults’ freedom of choice to be vaccinated or not be respected, the petition also requested that the COVID health pass be canceled and that COVID-19 be considered as a curable disease.
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As such, the signatories consider the lifting of COVID’s exceptional status, a year and half after the outbreak of the pandemic, to be a decisive step against “the application of restrictive and unconstitutional measures not based on any scientific grounds.”
They justified this by recalling that COVID is showing “a cure rate of more than 99%” and “a mortality rate of less than 1% even at the peaks of the pandemic.” The group described their petition as a “warning” against “the potentially dangerous social, economical, and health consequences” of measures such as the vaccine pass.
According to the collective, the vaccine pass produces “an illusion of safety” among the population and can even be regarded as “a danger” because it leads citizens to not respect individual and collective protection measures at a time when the effectiveness of marketed vaccines is still being discussed. Current data indicate that both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated continue to spread the disease in its dangerous and also fatal forms, they stressed.
In their petition, the health professionals also drew attention to the detailed composition of the vaccines being administered to the Moroccan people. They called for transparent communication about and “a complete and accurate analysis” of the content of these vaccines.
Their questioning of the vaccines being used in Morocco is prompted by local incidents such as the appearance of black particles in Pfizer injection vials in the Tangiers region, as well as by similar events worldwide: notably, the finding of similar black sediment in Moderna vaccines in Japan last month.
The signatories’ demands for more transparency also pointed to the lack of publicly available information regarding the side effects of COVID vaccination which, although observed among a non-negligible number of vaccinated Moroccans, have only been “informally reported by various health professionals.”
Some of these side effects were reported to be as varied as “paralysis,” “Guillain-Barré syndrome,” “acute encephalomyelitis,” “myocarditis,” “increased incidence of miscarriages and menstrual irregularities in vaccinated women,” “chronic fatigue,” “blood clots disorders,”or “sudden vision loss.”
Read also: Moroccans Launch Petition Protesting Mandatory Vaccine Pass
In the present scenario of mandatory vaccination for all Moroccans, the concerned health professionals then urged the Ministry of Health to meet its institutional obligations and “to take responsibility for all cases that show side effects after vaccination” by providing them with free healthcare and compensation. These “victims,” they denounced, are today “completely abandoned” and paying the costs of vaccines’ complications treatments on their own.
The collective presented these demands and claims as based on “scientific arguments” which they organized into 13 points. For instance, in order to justify their call to respect Moroccans’ freedom of choice to be vaccinated or not, they highlighted a number of prominent peer-reviewed scientific studies attesting to the effectiveness of natural immunity over that resulting from marketed vaccines (Point 5).
They underlined scientific findings such as the well-established notion that most licensed vaccines stimulate glycoprotein spike production in recipients, a protein that can cause endothelial tissue damage (Point 7); and called attention to the blood clotting disorders (VIIIT) reported in healthy young vaccinated patients worldwide (Point 10) which resulted in the subsequent cancellation of AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and more recently of Moderna vaccines in a number of European countries.
To justify their call for the suspension of COVID vaccination for minors, the signatories insisted on the “rare” and “mild” character of COVID infections amid children except in very exceptional cases (Point 2). They also highlighted the reported and “non-investigated into” the deaths of Moroccan children Ghufran, Zahira, Othman… following their vaccination (Point 13).
Finally, in light of their call for Morocco to terminate the exceptional status of COVID-19 and to reconsider its disproportionate emergency laws, the collective suggested alternative governance measures.
Read also: Morocco’s Unified Socialist Party Criticizes ‘Vaccine Pass’ Decision
One is to increase public awareness through the media about the benefits of the therapeutic approaches available to treat COVID infections. Another suggestion is to include Ivermectin in the national protocol for COVID treatment (in addition to the current use of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, or vitamin D); while at the same time ensuring the availability of vital medicines that have been interrupted, such as anticoagulants.
Yet, while the signatories underlined emerging evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of Ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 (Point 12), further research into this Nobel Prize-winning anti-parasitic drug reveals an increase in poisonings linked to its unproven use for COVID.
Specifically, there have been cases of severe episodes of confusion, ataxia, seizures, and hypotension, according to a report from the Oregon Poison Center last August. For the petitioners, such reports call to our attention once again the fact that improper use of any medication may result in serious side effects requiring hospitalization.
While the collective’s request for “an objective and respectful scientific exchange” with the Health Ministry deserves to be addressed, the difficulty here remains that both scientific evidence in favor of COVID vaccination and against it simultaneously abounds, lacks, and is being constantly updated.
All this confounding and constantly evolving data makes the signatories’ demands to suspend minors’ vaccination and preserve adults’ right of choice very contentious topics of debate likely to ignite unending and passionate debates at a time when Morocco, as part of a globalized international system, is expected to act/react fast in accordance/or discordance with other players’ “gesticulations” at the prevailing system.
