Are Vaccines Causing More Disease Than They Are Curing?
Copyright
1999 by Alan Cantwell, Jr., M.D.
Vaccine-induced Illness
Vaccine Contamination
Covert Vaccine Experiments
Vaccine Manufacture and Associated Dangers
Is There a Vaccine Contamination Connection to AIDS?
The Vaccine Connection to Gulf War Illness and Huntsville Mystery Illness
Dangerous Animal and Human Cell Lines in Vaccine Manufacture
Vaccines and Public Paranoia
Vaccines help keep us safe from infectious diseases. Smallpox and polio epidemics have
been wiped out by mass vaccine programs. People rush to get flu shots every
fall, and kids are bombarded with a barrage of 22 required vaccinations before the
age of six. Even pets need their shots. The manufacture of vaccines is a giant
industry and what you pay for inoculations and doctor visits is big business for
pediatricians, family practitioners and veterinarians. So why are more and
more people worried about vaccines, especially the ones for kids?
Vaccine-induced Illness
Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information
Center, a consumer's group based in Vienna, Virginia, claims vaccines are responsible
for the increasing numbers of children and adults who suffer from immune
system and neurologic disorders, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, asthma, chronic
fatigue syndrome, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and seizure disorders.
She calls for studies to monitor the long-term effects of mass vaccination and
Fisher wants physicians to be absolutely sure these vaccines are safe and not harming
people.
No one can deny the dangers of vaccines. The measles, mumps,
rubella (German measles) and polio vaccines, all contain live but weakened viruses.
Although health officials tell you that polio has been wiped out in the U.S. since
1979, they often fail to mention that all recorded cases of polio since that
time are actually caused by the polio vaccine.
Vaccine investigator Neil Z. Miller questions whether we still need
need the polio vaccine when it causes every new case of polio in this country. Before mass
vaccinations programs began fifty years ago, Miller insists we didn't have cancer in
epidemic numbers, that autoimmune ailments were barely known, and childhood autism
did not exist.
Vaccine Contamination
There is also the problem of contamination that has always plagued
vaccine makers. During World War II a yellow fever vaccine manufactured with human
blood serum was unknowingly contaminated with hepatitis virus and given to the military.
As a result, more than 50,000 cases of serum hepatitis broke out among American troops
injected with the vaccine.
In the 1960s it was discovered that polio vaccines manufactured in
monkey kidney tissue between 1955 and 1963 were contaminated with a monkey virus (Simian
Virus, number 40). Although this virus causes cancer in experimental animals, health
authorities insist it does not cause problems in humans. But evidence of SV40
genetic material has been popping up in human cancers and normal tissue.
Researchers are now connecting SV40-contaminated polio vaccines to an
increasing number of rare cancers of the lung (mesothelioma) and bone marrow
(multiple myeloma). In a 1999 report, SV40 DNA was detected in tissue samples
from four children born after 1982. Three were kidney transplant patients, and a
fourth had a kidney tumor. Could SV40 be passed on from parents to their children? No one
knows for sure.
Covert Vaccine Experiments
Using kids as guinea pigs in potentially harmful vaccine experiments is
every parents' worst nightmare. This actually happened in 1989-1991 when Kaiser Permanente
of Southern California and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) jointly conducted a
measles vaccine experiment. Without proper parental disclosure, the Yugoslavian-made
"high titre" Edmonston-Zagreb measles vaccine was tested on 1,500 poor,
primarily black and Latino, inner city children in Los Angeles. Highly
recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), the high-potency
experimental vaccine was previously injected into infants in Mexico, Haiti, and Africa. It
was discontinued in these countries when it was discovered that the children were dying in
large numbers.
Unbelievably, the measles vaccine caused long-term suppression of the
children's immune system for six months up to three years. As a result, the
immunodepressed children died from other diseases in greater numbers than children who had
never received the vaccine. Tragically, African girl babies in the experiment were given
twice the dose of boys, and therefore suffered a higher death rate. The WHO pulled
the vaccine off the market in 1992.
Ironically, the E-Z measles vaccine tested by Kaiser on minority
babies was supposed to increase immunity in younger infants. Instead, the vaccine produced
the opposite effect. A Los Angeles Times editorial (June 20, 1996) assured
readers that "none of the 1,500 was injured by the unlicensed vaccine" and
called upon the CDC to ensure that experiments like the E-Z
measles vaccine could never occur again.
One wonders how many secret vaccine experiments are conducted by health
authorities that never come to the attention of the public. During the two-year
measles experiment I was employed by Kaiser and I never knew anything about it until
I read the report in The Times five years later, in 1996.
In the poor inner cities across the country the
number of asthma cases is exploding and health officials don't know why. According to the
CDC, 5000 asthma deaths occur annually; and it is estimated that 17.3 million people
(4.8 are children) suffer from the disease, up from 6.7 million in 1980. Asthma usually
begins before age 6, and blacks are two to three times more likely to die from asthma than
whites. In the Bronx and Harlem sections of New York City, the hospitalization rate for
asthma is 21 times higher than in the more affluent areas of the city.
Could the sharp rise in asthma in poor children be connected with
immunosuppression caused by by a barrage of vaccines, as well as a lack of quality medical
care and insurance, poor diet, and environmental factors?
The possible connection of immunosuppressive vaccines to diseases like asthma has never
been raised by health officials .
With vaccine experiments frequently performed in Africa and now on
black Americans, no wonder one out of every four African-Americans
believes AIDS was developed as a genocide program by the U.S. government to exterminate
the black population.
But vaccine experiments in the 1990s have not been limited to
blacks. Millions of female Mexicans, Nicaraguans and Filipinos have been duped into taking
tetanus vaccines, some of which contained a female hormone that could cause
miscarriage and sterilization. In 1995, a Catholic human rights organization called
Human Life International accused the WHO of promoting a Canadian-made tetanus
vaccine laced with a pregancy hormone called human choriogonadotropic hormone (HCG).
Suspicions were aroused when the tetanus vaccine was prescribed in the unusual dose of
five multiple injections over a three month period, and recommended only to women of
reproductive age. When an unusual number of women experienced vaginal bleeding and
miscarriages after the shots, a hormone additive was uncovered as the cause.
Apparently the WHO has been developing and testing anti-fertility
vaccines for over two decades. Women receiving the laced tetanus shot not only
developed antibodies to tetanus, but they also developed dangerous antibodies to the
pregnancy hormone as well. Without this HCG hormone the growth of the fetus is impaired.
Consequently, the laced vaccine served as a covert contraceptive device. Commissioned to
analyze the vaccine, the Philippines Medical Association found that 20 percent
of the WHO tetanus vaccines were contaminated with the hormone. Not surprisingly,
the WHO has denied all accusations as "completely false and without basis," and
the major media have never reported on the controversy. For futher details on this
issue, consult the Human Life International website (www.hli.org).
Newly approved vaccines may also pose serious risks. In October
1999 a vaccine against "rotavirus" infection (which causes most cases of
childhood diarrhea) was pulled off the market. One year after the RotaShield
vaccine was inoculated into over a million infants, it was found to increase the
risk of bowel obstruction. Almost 100 cases of bowel obstruction were reported to
the government, and twenty infants developed bowel obstructions within one or two weeks
after receiving the vaccine.
Vaccine Manufacture and Associated Dangers
Althogh the public has heard about side effects of
vaccines, most people are clueless about the manufacture of vaccines. Few
people know that viruses used in vaccine production need to be grown on animal parts like
monkey kidneys, or in chicken embryos, or in human and fetal "cell
lines." Harvesting viruses in human cell-lines can be perilous because some
human cell lines are derived from cancer cells.
In AIDS & The Doctors of Death I wrote about the
development of the first human "HeLa" cell line - an "immortal"
cell line used extensively in cancer and vaccine research for decades. Henrietta Lacks was
a young black woman from Baltimore who died from a highly malignant cervical cancer
in 1951. Small pieces of her tumor were donated to a laboratory specializing in tissue
cell culture. In those days most attempts to grow human cells outside the body failed. But
for some unknown reason Henrietta's cancer cells grew vigorously and became known as
the first successful human tissue cell line in history - the now famous
HeLa cell line commemorating the legendary HEnrietta LAcks.
Henrietta's cells were kept alive by feeding them a witches' brew of
beef embryo extract (the ground-up remains of a three-week-old, unborn cattle embryo);
fresh chicken plasma obtained from the blood of a live chicken heart; and blood from
human placentas (the placenta is the sac that nurtures the developing fetus and contains
powerful hormones).
It is now suspected that a sexually-transmitted papilloma virus is the
cause of cervical cancer. And it is anybody's guess how many other chicken, cattle, and
human viruses are incorporated into the HeLa cell line, but none of this possible
viral contamination seems to bother scientists who have extensively used the cells in
cancer research. What laboratory scientists did eventually discover was that HeLa
cells proved so hardy that they frequently contaminated other tissue cell lines used
in cancer and cancer virus research.
In the late 1960s when widespread HeLa cell contamination
problems were uncovered, scientists were shocked and embarrassed to learn that millions of
dollars worth of published cancer experiments were ruined. "Liver cells" and
"monkey cells" that were used in cancer experiments turned out to be Henrietta's
cancer cells in disguise. Benign cells which supposedly "spontaneously
transformed" into malignant cells were found to be cells contaminated with cancerous
HeLa cells.
The serious problem of HeLa cell contamination in cancer and vaccine
research is revealed in Michael Gold's A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's
Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused. Even Jonas Salk, who developed
the legendary Salk polio vaccine, was fooled when HeLa cells contaminated his
animal cell lines. He admitted this years later in 1978 before a stunned audience of cell
biologists and vaccine makers. In experiments performed in the late 1950s on dying
cancer patients, Salk tried injecting them with a cell line of monkey heart tissue -
the same cell line he used to harvest polio virus for his famous vaccine. He hoped the
monkey cell injections would stimulate the immune system to fight cancer. However, when
abcesses developed at the site of injections Salk began to suspect that he might be
injecting HeLa cells rather than monkey cells, and
he stopped the experiment.
Mark Nelson-Rees, a HeLa cell expert and one of the 1978 conference
attendees, offered to test Salk's line if it was still available. Salk graciously
agreed and the monkey cells indeed proved to be HeLa cells which had invaded and taken
over the monkey cell line. According to author Gold, Salk thought there were adequate ways
to separate viruses from the tissue cell lines they were harvested in, so that it
really didn't matter what kind of cells were used. Even if vaccines weren't
filtered, and even if whole cancer cells were injected directly into a human, Salk
believed they would be rejected by the body and cause no harm. In those days doctors
didn't much believe in cancer-causing viruses. Nowadays, no researcher would dare
try injecting cancer cells into a human being. But in the 1950s Salk had done it
accidently. He had injected HeLa cells into a few dozen patients and it hadn't bothered
him a bit.
Is There a Vaccine Contamination Connection to AIDS?
Most people assume vaccines are "sterile" and germ free. But
sterilizing a vaccine can destroy the necessary immunizing protein that makes it work.
Thus, contaminating viruses or viral "particles" can sometime survive the
vaccine process.
Animal viruses are also contained in fetal calf serum, a blood product
commonly used as a laboratory nutrient to feed various tissue cell cultures. Vaccine
contamination by fetal calf serum and its possible reationship to HIV was the subject of a
letter by J. Grote, published in the Journal of the Royal (London) Society of
Medicine in October 1988. Bovine visna virus (which looks similar to HIV) is a known
contaminant of fetal calf serum used in vaccine production and virus-like particles have
been detected in vaccines certified for clinical use. Grote warns that "It
seems absolutely vital that all vaccines are screened for HIV prior to use, and that
bovine visna virus is further investigated as to its relationship to HIV and its
possible role in progression towards AIDS ."
Could virus-contaminated vaccines lie at the root of AIDS? A few
researchers, including myself, who believe HIV was "introduced" into gays
during the experimental hepatitis B vaccine trails when thousands of homosexuals
were injected in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, during the years 1978-1981.
The AIDS epidemic first erupted in gays living in those
cities in 1981. In 1980, one year before, already 20% of the gays inoculated in
Manhattan with the experimental vaccine were already HIV-positive. This was several years
before definite AIDS cases were diagnosed in Africa. In the early 1970s the
hepatitis B vaccine was developed in chimpanzees, now wildly accepted as the animal from
which HIV supposedly evolved.
Hepatitis B vaccine was developed to protect people from the sexual
spread of the hepatitis B virus. Now the government recommends that all newborn babies be
given the vaccine. Such recommendations do not make sense to many parents. And people are
still fearful of the hepatitis B vaccine because of its original connection to gay men and
AIDS. The original experimental vaccine was made from the pooled blood serum of
hepatitis-infected homosexuals and, as mentioned, serum-based vaccines cannot be
sterilized.
Another theory of AIDS is that HIV originated from polio vaccines
contaminated with chimp and monkey viruses, and administered to Africans in the late
1950s. In The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS , published in
1999, Edward Hooper details how polio vaccine was made using monkey (and possibly
chimp) kidneys and how the ancestor virus of HIV could have
jumped species (via the vaccine) to produce the outbreak of AIDS in Africa. Hooper's
well-researched book greatly expands the polio vaccine theory of AIDS first
reportedby Tom Curtis in Rolling Stone magazine in 1992, and The
River is a must-read for anyone interested in the possible man-made origin of AIDS.
Other researchers think it more likely that the various WHO-sponsored
vaccine programs (particularly the smallpox program) in Africa in the 1970s are
responsible for unleashing AIDS in Africa in the 1980s. Hooper, who has worked as a United
Nations official, has discounted the research pointing to AIDS as a man-made
disease, as proposed by Dr. Leonard Horowitz in Emerging Viruses, and in my two books AIDS
& The Doctors of Death: An Inquiry into the Origin of the AIDS Epidemic: and Queer
Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot.
Horowitz and I both suspect contaminated smallpox vaccines as the
source of HIV In Africa. Certainly the smallpox (vaccinia-cowpox) virus is an excellent
virus to use for the genetic engineering of new, multipurpose vaccines. By splicing
into the DNA genes of the vaccinia virus, scientists can add on parts of disease-producing
viruses like influenza, hepatitis, and other viruses. The safety of this
technique has not been fully evaluated, prompting one vaccine maker at a Vaccinia Virus
Workshop in 1984 to ask if this could lead to another form of AIDS.
The Vaccine Connection to Gulf War Illness and Huntsville Mystery Illness
The cause of Gulf War Illness (GWI) is unknown. For years this
debilitating illness (which now affects one-half of the Gulf War vets) has been
ignored by Pentagon officials who claim the disease does not exist and that
vets are simply reacting to stress. GWI is also thought to be contagious. Vets
insist their disease has been passed on to spouses, other family members, and even pets.
Some people suspect multiple vaccines, particularly the experimental
anthrax vaccine, are implicated in the disease. Currently, soldiers who refuse to
take the mandatory anthrax vaccine are being courtmartialed and dismissed from the
service.
Researchers Dr. Garth Nicolson and his wife Nancy have found a
tiny bacterial microbe (a "mycoplasma") in the blood of nearly half the
ill vets with GWI. Amazingly, this infectious agent has a piece of HIV (the AIDS
virus) attached to it. This microbe could never have occured naturally. On the
contrary, the composition of the microbe suggests a man-made and
genetically-engineered biological warfare agent.
Garth Nicolson's scientific credentials are impeccable. For 16 years he
was a professor of medicine at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in
Houston, as well as professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University
of Texas Medical School, also in Houston. Nancy Nicolson, a molecular biophysicist, was on
the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine.
Six months after returning home from the Gulf war, the Nicolson's
daughter contracted GWI. Her mother Nancy had contracted a similar illness in 1987
when she was working with Mycoplasma incognitus in infectious disease
research. Finally suspecting that this research had biowarfare implications, Nancy
Nicolson became a whistle-blower and angered officials. As a result, she believes she was
deliberately infected with the mycoplasma. After partial paralysis and a long
illness, she finally regained her health with the antibiotic Doxycycline.
The Nicolson's discovery of a similar mycoplasma (but without the
attachment of HIV) in a mysterious illness that erupted in the Huntsville, Texas area
among prison guards and their families has all the drama of a The Movie of the Week.
Although the Huntsville disease broke out in the late 1980s (shortly before the Gulf War),
it has many of the same signs and symptoms of GWI. Many locals are convinced the sometimes
deadly disease originally spread from prisoners incarcerated in several large prisons
around Huntsville.
In experiments conducted during the 1970s and 80s, the prisoners
were inoculated with flu vaccines containing genetically engineered viruses and
mycoplasma . It is suspected that vaccines were being covertly developed and deployed
as biological warfare weapons. Nobel prize winner James Watson, world famous for his
discovery of the molecular structure of DNA and a leading researcher of the still
ongoing Human Genome Project, was involved in these prison experiments. The guards are
convinced the Huntsville mystery illness is intimately connected to these
experiments, jointly conducted by the Medical School and the military. Like GWI,
health officials deny the disease exists.
The Nicolsons continue to developed antibiotic treatments, which
have helped some vets. But they have paid a heavy price for their controversial
research and unprecedented discoveries. Garth Nicolson was forced to resign from M.D.
Anderson in 1996. His career and reputation destroyed, the Nicolsons have since
moved to California and head The Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach.
Dangerous Animal and Human Cell Lines in Vaccine Manufacture
In an effort to quell concerns about the safety of vaccines, scientists
are finally taking another look at the "non-infectious" particles of bird-cancer
viruses (avian leukosis virus) in the mumps/measles/rubella vaccines routinely given to
kids. Could this be the reason the FDA held a meeting in September,
1999, to reconsider using human tumor cell lines (like HeLa) rather than
monkey kidneys and chicken embryos which are no longer guaranteed 100% safe?
Writing in Science, Gretchen Vogel admits public trust in vaccines is a
bit shaky. In Wales anti-vaccine parents are holding "measles parties" to infect
their children with the disease rather than vaccinate them. She cites the danger of
using immortal cell lines for live vaccine production because cancer genes or other
hazardous factors might be transferred to people receiving vaccines. But manufacturers
also realize vaccine critics are becoming more wary of vaccines made in animal and bird
tissue. And vaccine makers want to use immortal cell lines to grow their viruses because
obviously viruses can't grow on their own.
The big question everyone seems to avoid is: Can vaccines cause
cancer? There is certainly evidence connecting contaminated vaccines to AIDS. And
HIV is a cancer-causing virus. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV in 1984, has
clearly stated AIDS is an epidemic of cancer.
Animal and avian viruses can contaminate vaccines and have all been
studied as cancer-causing agents. And cancer and vaccine research would be
much more difficult without the use of cell lines, some of which are derived from cancer.
Vaccines and Public Paranoia
Is the fear of vaccines justified? It is clear that vaccines can
be dangerous. The contamination of vaccines is a reality, and vaccine experiments can be
hazardous to one's health. AIDS, unknown two decades ago, is now an increasing
worldwide epidemic with millions of death predicted for the next decade. Could vaccines
contaminated with cancer-causing and immunosuppressive viruses unleash new plagues in the
New Millennium? If so, the new plagues may be far worse than the diseases we
eradicated by vaccine programs in the twentieth century.
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Hooper E: The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS. Little, Brown and
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Quinnan GV: Vaccinia Viruses as Vectors for Vaccine Antigens. Elsevier, New York,
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[Alan Cantwell is a physician and AIDS researcher. His book on the man-made epidemic of
AIDS entitled AIDS & The Doctors of Death: An Inquiry into the Origin of the
AIDS Epidemic, is available on the Internet through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, or
through Book Clearing House at 1-800-431-1579]. [word count 3800]