Highly contaminated vaccines
http://jabs.org.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2855

Written by Janine Roberts
Monday, 18 August 2008 01:47

Extract from chapter of the book Fear of the Invisible

This article follows on from the one i have posted on MMR contamination but explains what is happening more broadly - it is drawn from my new book on vaccines and viruses Fear of the Invisible.

From the official US transcripts of recent unreported meetings of US and UK vaccine safety scientists....

All ways of making vaccines have their dangers. Dr Hayflick, a well-reputed scientist involved for many years with vaccines, described at the conference how the ‘Primary Culture' method of taking cells from ‘sacrificed animals' or bird embryos ran into problems when ‘it became apparent that these cells contained many unwanted viruses, some of which were lethal to humans.' He noted: ‘Latent viruses were such a problem with primary monkey kidney cells that a worldwide moratorium on the licensing of all polio virus vaccines was called in 1967 because of death and illnesses that occurred in monkey kidney workers and vaccine manufacturing facilities'. The contaminating virus then blamed was the deadly Ebola. This was most serious, but again I could find no record of the public being informed about this suspension or the Ebola.

The top UK government expert present at this conference, Dr Phil Minor of the National Institute of Biological Standards and Control, added that the polio vaccine had originally been so polluted that it's doses contained as much monkey virus as poliovirus! I had no idea that so much monkey virus was in this vaccine given to hundreds of millions of children.
Then there was another shock for me. I had been assured two years earlier at the SV40 Workshop held by the NIH in Washington that the polio vaccine was no longer contaminated with SV40 - and consequently I had so assured the UK public in our resulting Channel 4 television documentary. Now I learnt I had been misled and consequently had seriously misinformed the public. Scientists reported to this meeting that ‘SV40 sequences' remained in the poliovirus seed used for the current polio vaccines.


...........

AND MMR ...



Dr Heyrick told of how the eminent Dr Maurice Hilleman, the scientist I earlier interviewed about the MMR vaccine, had used what he thought was an ‘intestine-based cell line' to make an adenovirus vaccine, only to discover to his horror that his cell line had been invaded and taken over by the aggressive cervical cancer virus known as HeLa.

I also learnt that DNA fragments contaminate vaccine lots and remained extremely active and dangerous. Dr Golding feared they might combine with other genetic codes in the vaccine lots - and thus create a mutant viral strain that could get in the individual doses of vaccine.

The removal of this contaminating DNA has proved impossible. The US government in 1986 recommended a weight limit for contaminating DNA of 100 picograms per vaccine dose. But the manufacturers could not meet this safety recommendation, as was explained at this Workshop.

Their failure again led the government to relax its standards, applying the 100 picograms limit solely to vaccines produced from cancerous cells, and allowing one hundred times as much contaminating DNA (10 nanograms) in vaccines produced on other types of cells. But the meeting was told that vaccine manufacturers now admitted they could not meet even this lower standard of ‘purity.' Thus high levels of hazardous DNA pollution remain in many vaccines.

This failure was a great concern to the meeting. Many of the doctors present worried that such a great amount of DNA fragments might cause viral mutations in the vaccines. ‘Naked' DNA (with no protein coat) is known to be highly reactive said Dr. Phil Krause. He then calculated; ‘If there are 10 nanograms of residual DNA per dose, which is the current WHO recommendation, and if two doses were recommended per child, as is the case with MMR vaccine, and the infectivity of viral DNA in the vaccine were comparable to that of purified polyoma virus DNA, we can calculate the theoretical infectivity risk. ... For a vaccine that is universally administered to the 4 million children born in the US every year, this would represent about 500 infections per year, clearly an unacceptable rate.'

This shocked me. If he was right, and it seemed he was (none of the experts present questioned his calculations), this surely meant the current MMR vaccine is potentially very dangerous. Krause also had only added up the risk from the one vaccine. What when to it is added the contaminating DNA in all the other vaccines?

------- and later on at the vaccine safety meeting..... (I am putting together parts of my chapter here)

Dr Krause also stated: ‘Of course, in the context of DNA vaccines, we are talking about injecting even larger quantities of DNA into people.' He was speaking here about the new DNA vaccines being developed as ‘safer' than our current vaccines.

Another important safety issue was raised. ‘What would this contaminating DNA do when it was injected into humans in vaccines? Could it change our own DNA? Could it cause cancers - or autoimmune diseases?' ‘When you consider that almost everyone of these vaccines is injected right into the tissue that is the preferred site for DNA gene therapy ... I think you couldn't do much more to get the DNA expressed [to get contaminating DNA taken up by human cells] than to inject it into a muscle in the way it's being done.'

Another speaker lamely admitted: ‘I chaired the committee that licensed the chickenpox vaccine, and it [residual DNA] was actually an issue that we considered at that time. We looked among recipients of the vaccine for evidence of an autoimmune response associated with the DNA included in that vaccine.' He then added: ‘Actually, we didn't look, we asked the company to look and they did not find one.'

Walid Heneine of the CDC asked: ‘No one has mentioned how much DNA we now have in the licensed vaccines. I mean, how much are we being exposed to? Do we have any idea how much is in the viral vaccines, like yellow fever, measles, mumps vaccines? Do the regulators have an idea from the manufacturers, how much DNA there is?'

DR. Loewer replied: ‘I have no idea. Nobody that I know has mentioned it.'

Dr Becky Sheets from CBER then confirmed the suspicions of many when she responded. ‘I think that the vast majority of licensed vaccines, U.S. licensed vaccines, have not been tested for residual DNA. The few that have been tested are the ones that have been licensed in the last few years, including varicella and Hepatitis A.'

She then added: ‘I wanted to respond to an earlier question regarding how purified are live viral vaccines [like MMR] - [the answer is] minimally purified.'

These presentations made some of the experts very uneasy. Dr. Desrosiers stated: ‘I don't worry so much about the agents that one can test for. I worry about the agents that you can't test for, that you don't know about.

Dr Greenberg agreed, He said he was: ‘worried also about the agents that aren't known'. He continued: ‘There are still countless thousands of undiscovered viruses, proteins, and similar particles. We have only identified a very small part of the microbial world - and we can only test for those we have identified. Thus the vaccine cultures could contain many unknown particles.'

Another doctor said: ‘As time goes on, of course, new viruses are discovered and new problems arise. The foamy virus has been [recently] identified as one that we should be really sure is absent from these vaccines.'

The Chairman of the Workshop then asked Dr Maxine Linial: ‘Maxine, does anybody know if vaccines have been checked for foamy virus contamination?'

She replied: ‘As far as I know, no.'

‘You mean nobody has looked or as far as you know?

She responded; ‘I don't know. There are very few reagents. I mean, there are reagents for the so-called human or chimp foamy virus, but as far as 1 know, there are no good antibody reagents.' In other words, they could not tell if the vaccines contained foamy viruses. (‘Reagents' are antibodies to known virus particles.)

The experts voiced other concerns. ‘And I'll be honest and say that I'm surprised that primary African green monkey kidney cells continue to be used, and I'm a little bit disappointed that FDA and whoever is involved had not had a more serious effort to move away from primary African green monkey kidneys. We all know that there are a number of neurodegenerative conditions and other conditions where viral causes have been suspected for years and no viral agent identified. Maybe they're caused by viruses, but maybe they're not.'

Another doctor said: ‘We need to consider again some of the issues of residual DNA. Is it oncogenic? We had a lot of experience with chicken leucosis viruses in chick embryo cells beginning back in 1960. And the thing about them is they are not easy to detect because they don't produce any pathogenic effect.'

An unnamed participant added; ‘I have to express some bewilderment [at this talk of dangerous contamination], simply because, as I mentioned last night, the vero cell, which under many conditions is neoplastic [cancerous], has been licensed for the production of IPV and OPV [the common polio vaccines] in the United States, Thailand, Belgium and France.' The current polio vaccines thus run the risk of having oncogenes in them. Again this was news to me. I had no idea that the polio vaccine might be grown on cancer cells.

Dr. Rosenberg added, unreassuringly: ‘When one uses neoplastic cells as substrates for vaccine development, one can inadvertently get virus to virus, or virus to cellular particle, interactions that could have unknown biological consequences.'

Dr. Tom Broker said we had to be concerned about ‘papilloma virus infections' in the vaccine ... ‘One of the more remarkable facts of this family of diseases is that since 1980 more people have died of HPV disease than have died of AIDS.'

Dr. Phil Minor, from the UK National Institute of Biological Standards and Control, told of another disaster. ‘Hepatitis B was transmitted by yellow fever vaccine back in the 1940s. The hepatitis B actually came from the stabilizers of the albumin that was actually put in there to keep it stable'

He continued: ‘For many years, rabies vaccines were produced in mouse brain or sheep brain. They have quite serious consequences, but not necessarily associated with adventitial agents. You can get encephalitis as a result of immune responses to the non-invasic protein.' ‘Influenza is an actuated vaccine. Again, it's not made on SPF eggs, that is, specified pathogen-free eggs. They are avian leukosis virus free, but they are not free of all the other pathogens that you would choose to exclude from the measles vaccine production system.'

Dr Minor, the UK's top vaccine safety officer, then added: ‘So even today then you have to bear in mind that a large amount of vaccine that's made is made on really quite crude materials, from an adventitious agent point of view. It's not a trivial usage. In fact, when consider what vaccines are actually made on these days, they are quite primitive in some respects.'

These warnings were coming from a doctor working for the UK government who asked me at a later meeting not to pass on vaccine information that would alarm parents.

He went on to discuss SV40 and the polio vaccine. ‘It's a very common polyoma virus of old world monkeys, and particularly rhesus macaques. The difficulty with this was that, when the rhesus macaque monkeys are sacrificed and a primary monkey kidney culture made from him or her, as the case may be, a silent infection is set up. So there is evidence of infection [found] just by looking at the cultures. In fact, these cultures can throw out as much SV40 as they do polio [virus].' ‘The problem was that the cell cultures didn't show any sign of having defects, when they were actually infected with SV40.'

It seemed that SV40, and its accompanying proteins and genetic codes, would never have got into so many humans if they had not contaminated the vaccine - and that they were only dangerous when moved into a species for which their presence was not natural - such as into humans and into cynomolgus (African Green) monkeys.

Dr Minor continued: ‘Wild caught monkeys were being used extensively in vaccine production. Up to a half of the cultures would have been thrown away because of adventitious agent contamination, mainly foamy virus, but certainly other things as well.'

But, they could not be certain what viruses were present. They could be mistaking SV40 for other viruses. Why? He explained because antibody tests are used to test for its presence - and such tests are not all that accurate. Antibodies don't only react to a specific viral protein. They may ‘cross-react' against other things. ‘What you could also argue is that you are not picking up SV40 specific antibodies at all, and they could be other human polyomas [viruses] like the BK or the JC, and it's cross-reacting antibodies that we're picking up. I think that is still a thing that needs to be resolved.'

‘The point about this long story which I have just been telling you about SV40 is that SV40 was a problem between 1955 and 1962, and it's now 1999, and we still don't really know what was going on. So if you actually make a mistake, it's really quite serious. It may keep you occupied for the rest of your working life. ‘

Then Dr Minor made a still more alarming admission: ‘Now the regulatory authorities in the room will be well aware of a large number of other examples of this type which don't actually get published. I think that's not so good. I think this stuff really should be out there in the public literature.

Another UK expert then took the stand. It was Dr. Robertson from NIBSC and, as he explained, ‘for those of you who don't know, NIBSC is CBER's cousin from across the pond in the U.K.' In other words, it was the top UK vaccine safety monitoring body. He started off on a reassuring note: ‘There is no evidence for any increase in the incidence of childhood cancers since the onset of measles, mumps vaccination.' But he then said: ‘But, I think, as a scientific community, unless we do something at least for the future, we might be in a very difficult situation to defend certain issues. If I confronted some of the violent ideologically pure Greens in our country, [telling them what we have been discussing here]: I'm sure they would say: ‘Shut it down because this is unsafe, totally unsafe.'

It was thus that I learnt that our vaccines are a veritable soup, made up not just of viruses that should or should not be there, but also thousands of bits of viruses and of cells, DNA and RNA genetic codes, proteins, enzymes, chemicals and perhaps oncogenes and prions. The vaccine was monitored for the presence of only a very few of these particles and vaccine lots are thrown away only if these are found.

In other words, the vaccines we give our children are liquids filled with a host of unknown particles, most of which came from the cells of non-humans: from chickens, monkeys, or even from cancer cells.

Truly we do not know what we are doing or what are the long-term consequences. All that is known for sure is that vaccines are a very cheap form of public medicine often provided by governments to ensure the public that they really do care for the safety of our children.

... the chapter continues....


Janine Roberts

author of 'Fear of the Invisible'
How scared should you be of Viruses and Vaccines...