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