Dr. Gary Null has suggested that all vaccines are contaminated, and, of course, he is not alone3.
Vaccines are produced in what the industry calls “incubation tanks,” which are basically giant stainless steel containers where viruses are cultured in one of many substrates, such as chicken embryos, cloned human cells, ground up monkey kidneys and other organs (formerly the most common substrate)12.
In the year 2000, American manufacturers chose to stop importing monkeys and begin a practice that had in fact been banned since 195212. They used monkey cells that were cancerous12. By exposing these cells to certain levels of radiation or a particular chemical, the cells will continually reproduce themselves12. Scientists could thus fill giant vats with these cancerous tumors, streamlining production12. The reason the practice was initially banned was because it was believed it could cause cancer; now, manufacturers stop the spread of the cancer by putting formaldehyde into the mix, which kills cells (and happens to be carcinogenic to humans)2, 12.
These substrates can and do host large numbers of undesirable viruses3. As Dr. Andrew Lewis of the FDA said, “All the egg-based vaccines are contaminated, [including] influenza, yellow fever and smallpox vaccines, . . . for these fertilized chicken eggs are susceptible to a wide variety of viruses”12.
Now, filters are used after the vaccine is cultured and incubated, but obviously the filters cannot be smaller than the virus for which the vaccine is being made, and therefore anything as small as or smaller than the virus will remain in the vaccine12. Because of this, additional chemicals are used to aid sterilization, such as mercury and formaldehyde3. In spite of these preservatives, Null and others argue that sterilization is unachievable. The vaccines will always include other viruses, DNA and RNA fragments, proteins, viral proteins, chemicals, “degradation products” (defined by Janine Roberts as “parts of decayed viruses or cells”), etc.12, 16.
How contaminated are the vaccines?
It seems that nobody really knows what’s in the vaccines. Here is a quote from an MMR vaccine manufacturer: “[The] measles vaccine bulk is an unpurified product whose potency was measured through a biological assay for the active substance rather than through evaluation of integrity of physical form. Degradation products are neither identified nor quantified”12. In other words, they’re not even looking. They look only for what Roberts construes as “obviously active contaminants”12.
Now, the FDA has set contaminant weight limits for decades, but vaccine manufacturers rarely reach the set goal16. Because of the inability of manufacturers to reach contamination goals, “The CDC decided to limit their weight recommendation to cancerous cell lines and then increase the other DNA contamination allowance one hundred-fold”16. However, these limits are only “recommendations” that can’t be enforced16.
Mind you, although most of us are ignorant of vaccine contamination and this information will seem shocking to many of us, let us recall that the discovery in 1960 that the polio vaccine was contaminated with carcinogenic monkey viruses led to phasing out of Jonas Salk’s vaccine. This was far too late, as millions of children had already been injected37.
DNA fragments
It is well known that DNA fragments contaminate vaccine substrates. As the chief of CBER’s Laboratory of Retrovirus Research, Hana Golding, points out that although these fragments may be considered dead, they may also remain active and be potentially dangerous16. “The codes of these contaminants could combine in vaccines and create new mutant strains of pathogens”16. Alarmingly, an expert at a NIH workshop in 1997 suggested that these same mutations could occur in children after vaccination16.
This 1997 workshop was actually held amongst top government regulatory scientists to consider the contamination issue. There was concern that a DNA fragment (reverse transcriptase) was active and present in vaccines derived in a chicken embryo substrate12. The overwhelming majority of scientists present expressed great concern, as there was compelling evidence presented the FDA’s Dr. Arifa Khan and others that the vaccines were contaminated and that the reverse transcriptase is harmful and carcinogenic12. To quote Dr. Khan, “The finding of RT activity in all measles vaccine lots from different manufacturers tested suggests that this occurrence is not sporadic and that vaccine recipients may be universally exposed to these [chicken] retroviral particles”12. Dr. Khan had found two types of retroviruses not in a wide variety of vaccine lots, but in the actually recipients of different vaccines12.
Unfortunately, the opinion of the minority of scientists who were not concerned seemed to win out in subsequent events in the media and in government policy12. No policy changes were made following this conference, despite Dr. Khan’s recommendation to avoid the chicken embryo substrates12.
Dr. Goldberg, an attendee at the conference, expressed concern that the scientific community currently understands but a fraction of the complexity of the microbial world16. Only presently identified particles can be tested for, yet the vaccines are likely to contain significant quantities of unknown particles16.
Finally, to follow up on the points made earlier in the essay about autoimmune disorders, let’s look at how these DNA fragments might play a role in causing autoimmune disorders. British geneticist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho proposed a theory for how vaccines could cause autoimmune diseases, writing that “Vaccines themselves can be dangerous, especially live, attenuated viral vaccines or the new recombinant nucleic acid vaccines, they have the potential to generate virulent viruses by recombination and the recombinant nucleic acids could cause autoimmune disease”16.
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