Manufacturing Mutation End/Conclusion

The World Health Organization launched its Global Polio Eradication Initiative will the goal of eliminating the disease by 2000.

However, by 2000 it became clear that polio was still around, and new strains derived form the vaccine itself were emerging.

In 1983, some researchers realized that a “vaccine-derived” polio virus had caused an outbreak in Egypt. [Reuters Health. “Polio outbreak in Dominican Republic and Haiti caused by vaccine-derived virus.” Reuters Medical News (December 4, 2000)]

In 1993, Dr. Radu Crainic of the Pasteur Institute discovered that strains of the polio virus have the ability to spontaneously recombine with themselves and create new strains.

Crainic showed that if you vaccinate a child with polio strains 1, 2, and 3, you can produce a new strain, strain 4, out of the child's stool. Crainic concluded that the polio vaccine creates favorable conditions contributing to the evolution of viral “recombinations.”

In 2000, virologist Hiromy Yoshida found a new infectious polio virus in Japanese rivers and sewages. The virus had mutated from the polio vaccine and regained much of its original virulence, as confirmed by genetic sequencing. According to Yoshida, this poses a “persistent environmental threat” and the live oral polio vaccine is to blame.

According to a 2000 Reuters Medical News article, a polio outbreak in Haiti and the Dominican Republic resulted in numerous cases of flaccid paralysis.

Laboratory examinations confirmed health authorities' worst suspicions: the disease was caused by “an unusual viral derivative” of the polio vaccine. The virus demonstrates genetic similarity to the parent vaccine strain, “but it has assumed the neuro-virulence and transmissibility” of the wild polio virus.

Health officials are obviously concerned, “because a wild poliovirus has not circulated in the Western Hemisphere since 1991,” and if the newly mutated polio virus spreads, it could cause new epidemics of the disease.

People around the world continue to be stricken with vaccine-derived polio viruses (VDPVs), and the aforementioned case in India is just one example. Under certain circumstances, polio viruses within the vaccine “regain both neuro-virulence and the capacity to circulate and cause outbreaks.”

For example, from 2001 to 2005, there were several vaccine-derived polio outbreaks in the Philippines, Madagascar, China and Indonesia. In 2006, additional cases of vaccine-derived polio were recorded in Cambodia.

In 2010, a study was published in Finland with a title that just about says it all: “Highly divergent neurovirulent vaccine-derived polioviruses of all three serotypes are recurrently detected in Finnish sewage.”

Although no cases of “suspected poliomyelitis” have reportedly occurred in Finland since 1985, “Since December 2008, 21 genetically highly divergent, neurovirulent vaccine-derived polioviruses (VDPV) have been isolated from sewage in Tampere, Finland. While the source of the VDPV is unknown, characteristics of the viruses resemble those of strains isolated from immunodeficient, persistently infected persons.”

Unfortunately, animal matter and questionable drugs are still used in making the polio vaccine.

Despite the polio vaccine's long history of causing polio, and the manufacturer's inability to protect the public from dangerous microorganisms that perpetually contaminate an ever expanding repertoire of “new and improved” products, the currently available inactivated, or “killed-virus” polio vaccine continues to be manufactured in much the same way as earlier versions.

In the United States, today's polio vaccine is a sterile suspensions of three types of poliovirus. The viruses are grown in cultures of “a continuous line of monkey kidney cells...supplemented with newborn calf serum...” The vaccine also contains two antibiotics (neomycin and streptomycin), in addition to formaldehyde as a preservative.

In Canada, the inactivated polio vaccine is made in “human diploid cells” instead of monkey kidneys. Some researchers believe this is a safer alternative. According to Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center in Virginia, “With mounting evidence that cross-species transfer of viruses can occur, the United States should no longer be using animal tissues to produce vaccines.”

Dr. Arthur Levine of the NIH, however, believes that making polio vaccines using human cells isn't risk-free either, “because they must be tested for human infections.”

Levine also worries that even discussing these issues will frighten parents, “We do a grave disservice to the public if we were now to question the safety of the current polio vaccines on the basis of SV40.”

It is perhaps this attitude that prompted the CDC to recently remove the section of their website devoted to SV40 information. However, how can this be justified when hundreds of studies have now been conducted linking SV40 to cancer?

Barbara Loe Fisher would like to see changes in the way vaccine safety is governed. She believes that agencies like the FDA have an inherent conflict of interest because of their mandate to promote universal vaccination on one hand and regulate vaccine safety on the other. “Who's minding the store when the FDA has allowed drug companies to produce vaccines grown on contaminated monkey kidneys?”

Dr. Urnovitz is even more resolute in his convictions. He thinks that an extensive study of human exposure to simian microbes is long overdue. “Half of the people in this country are baby boomers who were born between 1941 and 1961 and are at high risk for having been exposed to polio vaccines contaminated with monkey viruses. Are we just a time bomb waiting to happen, waiting to develop lupus, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease?”

Urnovitz sums it up nicely, “You have to realize that if you mess around with nature, you're going to pay the price...”

            END

More Malicious Microorganisms

SV-40, SIV, and BSE aren't the only concern. Monkeys and cows, the preferred animals for making the polio vaccine, harbor thousands of viruses and potentially infectious microorganisms. Scientists have known since 1955 that monkeys host the “B” virus, foamy agent virus, haemadsorption viruses, the LCM virus, arboviruses, bovine immunodeficiency virus (BIV), and more.

In 1956, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) was discovered in chimpanzees.

According to the controversial researcher Dr. Viera Scheibner, RSV viruses “formed prominent contaminants in polio vaccines, and were soon detected in children.” Allegedly, RSV caused “serious cold-like symptoms in small infants and babies who received the polio vaccine.”

By 1961, the link between RSV and respiratory tract illnesses became clear, as the virus was found in 57% of infants with bronchiolitis or pneumonia, and 12% of babies with a milder febrile respiratory disease.

Infected babies babies remained ill for three to five months. RSV was also found to be contagious, and soon spread to adults where it has been linked to the common cold.

According to the CDC, today RSV affects the majority of children by the age of two, and is the most common cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia among children under one.

RSV remains highly contagious and results in thousands of hospitalizations every year; many people die from it. Ironically, scientists are developing a vaccine to combat RSV—the infectious agent that very likely entered the human population by way of a vaccine.

The Wikipedia page for RSV ends with this provocative statement: “The RSV is virtually the same as chimpanzee coryza virus and can be transmitted from monkeys to humans...the inactivated polio vaccine was reportedly contaminated with simian viruses, including Chimpanzee coryza, during 1955-1963.”

The two sources given for this statement are a 2005 study and, in the category of other simian viruses, Wikipedia provides a link to the now-deleted CDC page on SV40 contamination of the polio vaccine.

In 1996, at the Eighth Annual Houston Conference on AIDS, a microbiologist named Dr. Howard B. Urnovitz revealed that as many as 26 monkey viruses may have been in the original Salk vaccines, including the simian equivalents of human echo virus, coxsackie, herpes (HHV-6, HHV-7, and HHV-8), adenoviruses, Epstein-Barr, and cytomegalovirus.

Urnovitz maintains that contaminated Salk vaccines given to U.S. children between 1955 and 1961 likely set this generation up for immune system damage and neurological disorders.

He sees correlations between early polio vaccine campaigns and the sudden emergence of human T-cell leukemia, epidemic Kaposi's sarcoma, Burkitt's lymphoma, herpes, Epstein-Barr and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Indeed, as early as 1957 it was known that as many as eight “apparently new” viruses had contaminated the vaccine from using monkey-kindey tissue cultures.

Urnovitz challenged medical science to prove wrong his theory that the human immunodeficiency virus Type-1 (HIV-1) is a monkey-human hybrid that was created after 300,000 Africans were injected between 1957 and 1959 with quantities of experimental live oral polio vaccines contaminated with different monkey viruses.

Urnovitz also discussed “jumping genes”—normal genes that may recombine with viral fragments to form new hybrid viruses called chimeras. He believes that this is exactly what happened when monkey viruses and human genes were brought together during early polio vaccine campaigns.

And because the chimera “has the envelope of a normal human gene,” typical cures won't work. How do you develop a vaccine or other antidote against the body's own DNA?

For more information about autoimmune diseases and viruses, I recommend the following lecture available on Youtube: "The Exploding Autoimmune Epidemic: It's Not Autoimmune, you have Viruses." Here's a summary I put together of the important points mentioned in the lecture.

AIDS in America: HIV to Mad Cow Disease

Although Koprowski's experiment may have contributed to the rise of AIDS in Africa, what might have contributed to the spread of the disease to the homosexual community in America?

In 1974, clinics in New York and California began experimental treatments for gay men afflicted with herpes. Therapy consisted of multiple doses of the live polio vaccine.

The vaccine was produced in the kidneys of the African Green monkey, a known reservoir for SIV, a likely precursor to HIV.

Beginning in the early 1980s, simultaneous outbreaks of Kaposi sarcoma and serious opportunistic infections (later associated with AIDS) were reported among homosexual men, especially in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This time span coincides with the average incubation period between HIV infections and the development of AIDS.

In 1982, the CDC concluded that such outbreaks “strongly suggests the occurrence of a single epidemic of underlying immunosuppression....” The next year, HIV was identified as the causative agent.

In 1992, Lancet (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PII0140-6736%2892%2990876-5/fulltext) published the first scientific explanation showing how repeated doses of SIV-contaminated polio vaccines may have seeded HIV among American homosexual men.

In the 1980s, hundreds of people diagnosed with AIDS had no identified risk factor, in other words, they didn't engage in risky behaviors associated with AIDS infection. Many children were listed as NIR. Some parents even claimed that HIV-contaminated polio vaccines infected their children.

On February 12, 1994, Bruce Williams filed a civil suit against the American Cyanamid Company, claiming its polio vaccine caused his daughter's illness. The suit alleges that “the live oral poliovirus vaccine was produced, tested, and approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration pursuant to measures inconsistent with accepted standards of medical practice.”

The lawsuit also asserts that “the product was FDA approved despite the known presence of contaminants, including retroviruses such as HIV.”

The Williams' lawyer even identified the specific lots of vaccine the child received, but the CDC and federal health officials refused to test them. According to their lawyer, “The CDC could disprove my entire hypothesis by testing the vaccines they have in their possession. The fact that they haven't done so is evidence there's something wrong with the vaccine.”

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, was first noticed in the mid-1980s. Mad cow disease is a progressive nerve disorder of cattle that's similar to scrapie, a disease that affects sheep.

Authorities believe it spread to cows from sheep when they were fed scrapie-infected bone meal. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD and vCJD (a newly discovered variant) are the human equivalents of mad cow disease. They cause a comparable wasting of the brain leading to muscle incoordination, sensory loss, and mental confusion. It is always fatal.

Mad cow disease and the newly discovered variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob may be caused by the same infectious agent. A study published in Nature showed that monkeys injected with BSE developed very similar symptoms to vCJD. They also have similar molecular characteristics.

Mad cow disease can be passed from cows to humans if they ingest BSE-infected beef, or if they receive vaccines contaminated with BSE.

BSE-associated infectious agents are capable of contaminating polio vaccines because polio vaccines are not only grown in monkey kidneys, but in calf serum as well. In fact, many parts of the cow are used in vaccine production. Glycerol is derived from cow fat; gelatin and amino acids come from cow bones; and the growth medium for viruses and other microorganism may require cow skeletal muscle, enzymes, and blood.

Authorities knew that vaccines could be infected with BSE-associated transmissible agents as early as 1988. Yet, in England, vaccine manufacturers waited months before switching to cows less likely to be infected and refused to removed current stock off the shelves and out of doctor's offices until it was all sold, or expired five years later toward the end of 1993.

According to one British legislator, “The Department of Health was potentially criminally negligent in not requiring the immediate withdrawal or cessation of use of vaccines from potentially contaminated sources. It is also beyond belief the Department should not even have monitored those who were injected, and is now trying to sweep the whole thing under the carpet.”

Finally, in October 2000, the Department of Health became so concerned about the likelihood of children being infected with BSE-contaminated vaccines and falling prey to vCreutzfeldt-Jakob disease—dozens of people, including children, had already contracted it—that they issued a recall of hundreds of thousands of polio vaccines made using fetal bovine serum extracted from British cows.

In the United States, the FDA issued a “warning” to manufacturers in 1996 instructing them to “take whatever steps are necessary to reduce potential risk of transmission of BSE agent.” By 2000, the FDA realized that its “recommendations” were being ignored, for vaccines were still being made in bovine materials from countries reporting BSE. These vaccines wouldn't be removed from the market until 2002, when all existing stock had been purchased.

Although cows in America don't exhibit “mad cow symptoms,” tens of thousands of cattle are severely incapacitated each year in what some have suggested may be related to BSE. These “downed” animals have not been ruled out of vaccine production by the FDA.

Dr. Richard Marsh of the Department of Animal Health and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, conducted research providing evidence that down cattle in the U.S. may harbor a new variant of mad cow disease. He inoculated cows with TME, a variant of BSE. They became “downed” instead of “mad.”

Other scientists inoculated cows with scrapie from U.S. sheep. They, too, became “downed” instead of “mad.”

According to Farm Sanctuary, a national non-profit organization dedicated to preventing irresponsible agricultural practices, “We are concerned that, like in Britain, there is a powerful economic incentive to ignore evidence that BSE, or a variant of BSE, exists in the U.S.”

From Polio to Smallpox and HIV to AIDS: Historical Obfuscation

If the WHO's smallpox vaccination campaign triggered an AIDS epidemic in Africa, how did so many people get infected with HIV in the first place?

 

SV40 was just one of many simian viruses known to have contaminated polio vaccines.

Hilary Koprowski, who is about to be featured heavily in this story, wrote a letter to the Congressional Health and Safety Subcommittee in 1961 saying:

As monkey kidney culture is host to innumerable simian viruses, the number found varying in relation to the amount of work expended to find them, the problem presented to the manufacturer is considerable, if not insuperable. As our technical methods improve we may find fewer and fewer lots of vaccine which can be called free from simian virus.

According to Ronald Desrosier, a professor at Harvard Medical School, growing polio vaccine in monkey kidneys is “a ticking time bomb.”

Desrosier acknowledges that you can test monkeys before using their tissue and screen out those carrying harmful viruses. But he warns that you can test only for those viruses you know about—and that our knowledge is limited to perhaps “2% of existing monkey viruses.”

During the 1950s-70s, virus detection techniques were crude and unreliable. It wasn't until the 1980s that more sophisticated testing procedures were developed.

That was when researchers discovered that about 50% of all African green monkeys—the primate of choice for making polio vaccines—were infected with simian immunodeficieny virus (SIV), a virus closely related to human immunodeficieny virus (HIV), the infectious agent thought to precede AIDS.

Essex, M., et al. “The origin of the AIDS virus” Scientific American 1988;259:64-71.

Karpas, A. “Origin and spread of AIDS.” Nature 1990;348:578

Kyle, WS. “Simian retroviruses, poliovaccine, and origin of AIDS.” Lancet 1992;339:600-1.

Elswood, BF., Stricker, RB. “Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS.” Medical Hypothesis 1994:42:347-54

From the last study: “We hypothesize that the AIDS pandemic may have originated with a contaminated polio vaccine that was administered to inhabitants of Equatorial Africa from 1957 to 1959.”

This has caused some researchers to wonder if HIV may simply be SIV “residing in and adapting to a human host.” This led others to wonder if SIV mutated into HIV once introduced into the human population by way of contaminated polio vaccines.

Martin, B. “Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS: the career of a threatening idea.” Townsend Letter for Doctors (January 1994):97-100.

Curtis, T. “The origin of AIDS: A startling new theory attempts to answer the question 'Was it an act of God or an act of man?'” Rolling Stone (March 19, 1992):57.

“Workshop on simian virus-40 (SV-40): A possible human polyomavirus.” NVIC (Jan 27-28, 1997).

Curtis, T. “Did polio vaccine experiment unleash AIDS in Africa?” The Washington Post (April 5, 1992):C3+.

Vaccine authorities were so concerned about the possibility that SIV was a precursor to HIV, and that polio vaccines were the means of transmission from monkey to human, that the World Health Organization convened two meetings of experts in 1985 to explore the data and consider their options. After all, SIV was very similar to HIV and occurred naturally in the monkey species predominantly used by vaccine manufacturers.

However, WHO concluded the vaccines were safe enough and insisted the mass vaccination campaigns continue. By 1989, they recommended not making the polio vaccine using monkeys infected with SIV.

The following year, wild chimpanzees in Africa were found to be infected with a strain of SIV that was almost identical to HIV. Some researchers even referred to it as the “missing link” to the origins of HIV.

Since chimpanzees were used to test viruses for potential use in vaccines, and were kept in captivity by research laboratories, they could have been a source of vaccine contamination.

Scientific concerns were also heightened when researchers found some West Africans who were infected with an SIV-like virus that was a fundamental twin to HIV. They called it HIV-2, and like the initial HIV subtype, it was implicated in the development of AIDS.

According to Robert Gallo: “The monkey virus is the human virus. There are monkey viruses as close to isolates of HIV-2 as HIV-2 isolates are to each others.”

By 1991, as the result of improvements in virus-detection techniques, researchers found SIV DNA in the kidneys of infected monkeys. Minced monkey kidneys were, and still are, used to produce the live polio vaccine.

SIV was also found in the cancer cells of an AIDS victim, and in other people as well. To many researchers, this trail of evidence had become too persuasive to deny. Apparently, millions of people were infected with monkey viruses capable of causing AIDS, and this cross-species transfer very likely occurred by way of SIV-contaminated polio vaccines.

Giunta, S., et al. “The primate trade and the origin of AIDS virus.” Nature 1987;329:22.

Seale, J. “Crossing the species barrier—viruses and the origins of AIDS in perspective.” J R Soc Med 1989;82:519-23.

Lecatsas, G. “Origin of AIDS.” Nature 1991;351:179.

Gilks, C. “AIDS, monkeys and malaria” Nature 1991;354:262.

   

Since most historians agree that AIDS originated in Africa, how could it be linked to the polio vaccine if Salk and Sabin's trials were conducted in the U.S., the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe?

In March 1951, several years before Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin would scuffle over whose vaccine was the true prophylactic, Dr. Hilary Koprowski announced at a medical conference that he had become the first doctor in history to test polio vaccine on humans. His “volunteers” included several institutionalized children with mental handicaps. They drank the vaccine in chocolate milk.

From 1957 to 1960, after years of tinkering with monkey kidneys and polio germs, Koprowski tested his own experimental polio vaccine on 325,000 equatorial Africans, including 75,000 citizens of Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Zaire).

Called by drums, rural natives traveled to local villages where they had a liquid vaccines squirted into their mouths. 98% of the vaccine recipients were infants and toddlers. The youngest children received 15 times the adult dosage. Though Koprowski claimed he had the backing of the World Health Organization, WHO denied sanctioning the large-scale trials.

In 1959, Albert Sabin published a study that claimed that Koprowski's polio vaccine used in the African trials contained un “unidentified” and “unstable” cell-killing virus. Although he was quick to point out the flaws in the vaccine of Koprowski, his professional rival, unfortunately his ability to detect viruses in the polio vaccine fell short when it came to mass contamination of Sabin's own polio vaccine with SV-40.

In response to Sabin's claims of contamination, Koprowski simply scoffed at him and said he was just trying to discredit his work (as he would do again and again to anyone making this accusation). The virus allegedly detected by Sabin was never identified.

Until recently, the earliest known blood sample containing antibodies against HIV was traced back to 1959. The serum came from a patient visiting a clinic in Leopoldville, one of the epicenters of the AIDS epidemic that would occur a decade later.

Gerald Myers, a genetic sequencing expert with Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, tracked the evolution of HIV and confirmed that today's major subtypes of the AIDS virus in humans appear to have arisen as recently as 1960.

Although this time period is widely accepted by medical researchers, more recent conflicting reports suggest that the first HIV infection may have occurred years earlier.

Regardless of when the first HIV infection occurred, it would seem to be premature to dismiss the OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine) AIDS hypothesis on this basis alone. The timing of the first HIV infection is irrelevant to the question of whether or not some doses of the experimental polio vaccine used in Africa in the late 1950s were contaminated, thus precipitating a future outbreak.

Koprowski's vaccine was not approved for human use, so it was discontinued in 1960 following the African trials. Thus, it was only administered to inhabitants of the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi—the precise area where high levels of HIV infection were identified by researcher 30 years later.

Furthermore, the AIDS virus is known to infect mucous cells, prevalent in the mouth. The African vaccines were squirted into people's mouths.

Could squirting an HIV-contaminated polio vaccine into people's mouths cause AIDS? According to Tom Folks, chief retrovirologist at the CDC, “Any time a person has a lesion in his mouth, then there could be transmission” of the virus.

Dr. Robert Bohannon of Baylor College of Medicine asserts that squiring polio vaccines into one's mouth would tend to aerosolize some of the liquid. Small drops could then go into the lungs, and from there to the blood cells susceptible to infection. This could be an efficient mode of HIV transmission.

Experts believe that the average time between HIV infection and the development of AIDS is approximately 8-10 years.

If the African polio vaccine was indeed contaminated with SIV/HIV, initial outbreaks of AIDS would have occurred from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. This period accurately coincides with the emergence of AIDS in equatorial Africa.

Understandably, authorities are very reluctant to admit that there's even a possibility that scientists may have contributed to the AIDS pandemic by growing polio vaccines in virus-laden monkey kidneys.

In 1992, Tom Curtis published a story for Rolling Stone that created quite a stir.

Although dismissed by most experts, “a few scientists, notably the biologist W.D. Hamilton, thought the hypothesis required serious investigation, but they received little support from the scientific community.”

William Haseltine, a professor at Harvard, believes that hypothesizing about the origin of AIDS is distracting and nonproductive, saying, “It's not relevant...I'm not interested in discussing it.” Dr. David Heymann, head of the WHO's Global Program of AIDS, stated that “the origin of the AIDS virus is of no importance to science today.”

Jonas Salk wouldn't comment on the possibility, as apparently he was too busy working on an AIDS vaccine, and Sabin's response was “you can't hang Koprowski with that.” Koprowski himself initially dismissed the idea with a laugh, and then later said that “this is a highly theoretical situation.”

His amusement must not have lasted long, because Koprowski sued Curtis and Rolling Stone for “...the destruction of (his) professional and personal reputation, for mental and emotional suffering, and for...humiliation and embarrassment.” As a result the magazine was ordered to pay $1 in damages. [See The Seeds of Doom by Christian Biasco]

However, both Tom Folks of the CDC and Robert Gallo thought testing the seed stocks of polio might be a good idea. According to Folks, “any time we can learn more about the natural history [of AIDS], it helps us understand the pathogenesis and...the transmission.”

Gallo believes that questions like this “are of more than academic interest because answering them may help avoid future zoonitic catastrophes—that is, transmission of disease from lower animals to humans.”

Responding to these concerns, some AIDS researchers formally requested samples of the original polio vaccine seed stocks. But the government would neither release nor test them because there are “only a small number of vials” of the material, and tests “might use it all up.”

Inspired by Curtis' investigative report, a British writer named Edward Hooper traveled in Africa, Europe, and the United States for seven years. As a result of his research, he published a book in 1999 called The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS.

Although the scientific community generally rejects the OPV AIDS hypothesis, Hooper “criticizes the research and conduct of many of the scientists involved in the investigation and alleges a 'very substantial cover-up' took place to silence the hypothesis.”

One of the several arguments against the hypothesis was that Koprowski was not using chimpanzees in his experiments, and therefore HIV contamination didn't occur. However, eyewitness testimony suggests otherwise.

In 2004, The Origins of AIDS, a French TV documentary strongly supportive of the OPV hypothesis, appeared on several television stations around the world.

The film offers a convincing case for the hypothesis, and seriously challenges the questionable nature of the categorical denials by Koprowski and others that no chimpanzees were used in the development of his experimental vaccine.

     

The Koprowski vaccines were tested and found not to contain SIV or HIV genetic material: http://aidscience.org/Science/Cohen289(5486)1850.html