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The Trump administration refuses to vaccinate migrants in detention centers
By
Alex González
August 21, 2019
The US federal government will not vaccinate migrants until this year's flu season, according to a statement from the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Of the six children who died in the custody of the US Gestapo since September 2018, three have died of an influenza-related illness.
"In general, because of the short-term nature of CBP's portfolio and the complexity of the current vaccination programs, neither CBP nor its medical providers are administering vaccines to those in our custody," he said. a spokesperson for CBP. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that all children over the age of six months be vaccinated against influenza every year.
The announcement took place after a group of Harvard and Johns Hopkins affiliate physicians wrote a letter to Congress in early August calling for an investigation into the health conditions at the border facilities. Influenza deaths in American children are "extremely rare," according to US doctors. During the past influenza season, the CDC reported 124 deaths of children with influenza. This represents a rate of about one death out of 600,000 children. Yet in migrant detention centers, three out of every 200,000 children died of the flu, a rate almost 10 times higher.
The letter to Congress says that migrant children in detention centers are already at a higher risk of getting the flu than people born in the United States. With lower immunization rates, higher rates of other infectious diseases, and inadequate pediatric care early in life, immunocompromised migrants would be given the highest level of medical care in a scientific and social society. rational.
The refusal to vaccinate can not be explained by the "complexity" of organizing a vaccination campaign in migrant camps. Nor can it be explained by the "short-term" nature of the detention of a child, which in reality often lasts for weeks or months. On the contrary, the decision to run unclean and disease-filled prison camps is part of a definite strategy of Trump's fascist advisers.
They calculate that by inflicting physical and emotional harm on immigrants, the US government will be able to deter the hundreds of thousands of workers, peasants and youth who wish to flee their conditions of intolerable poverty and violence. and exercise their international law on asylum. Trump and his advisers do not want to prevent diseases, but to stoke them.
With the support of the Democratic Party, the United States has set up concentration camps as an ideal breeding ground for infectious diseases. "The rapid turnover of prisoners increases the spread of the flu by creating an influx of people in rapidly consecutive cohorts (a" revolving door "effect)," the doctors wrote.
The rapid turnover of migrants has been accompanied by a deliberate overcrowding of their facilities in which contagious diseases can easily spread. In a particularly scandalous example, a CNN report released in late May revealed that 900 immigrants were being held in a facility that can accommodate 125 people.
During a new attack on their immune system, migrants are routinely denied access to basic hygiene products such as soap and a toothbrush. "There is no soap for children to wash their hands with. We have seen many sick children, "said a group of lawyers who visited two border patrol processing centers this summer. "We immediately saw children coughing and having runny noses. There was mucus on their shirts.
Epidemics of infectious diseases have already erupted in federal institutions this year. Forty mass of 8,000 inmates held at the McAllen Central Processing Center in Texas at the end of May because of a "large number" of immigrants showing signs of flu-related symptoms. ", according to CBP. In March, an ICE official said more than 2,200 immigrants had been quarantined throughout the country.
The death of the three migrant children linked to the flu is a blatant warning about the type of humanitarian crisis that could very well be declared among the immigrant population.
Felipe Alonzo-Gómez, age 8, died of a complication of the flu on December 24, 2018, six days after arriving in the United States with his father. He was arrested by CBP and developed a sore throat and nasal congestion. He was tested positive for influenza B at a local hospital and died after being released to a federal facility.
Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, two years old, died in May 2019 after being admitted to emergency for multiple respiratory and gastrointestinal infections. Wilmer's mother took him to the United States because he was seriously ill and his family could not afford medical care in Guatemala.
According to his family, 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez was in excellent health. He died of the flu, aggravated by pneumonia and sepsis, after being detained for six days, twice as long as the legal maximum of 72 hours set by law for unaccompanied migrant children.
Such crimes could not take place without the active political support of the Democratic Party. At the end of June, Democratic deputies massively voted in favor of additional funding of $ 4.6 billion from detention centers, thus guaranteeing a wave of arrests and detentions without stopping for immigrant children.
To prevent future crimes against some of the most vulnerable segments of the working class, the massive support for the immigrant population must be mobilized as an independent force, in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans, parties twinned with deportation and deportation. detention, on the basis of a socialist program of open borders and immediate release of all detained immigrants.
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