There are major things wrong in modern virology. No other modern science is in such trouble. This is my reluctant conclusion after nine years of investigation. I am both horrified and amazed by what I have discovered. Mistakes made in the 1980s are still being made today. The evidence is in the investigations below and in the library of peer-reviewed scientific research made available here so that you can judge my conclusions for yourselves.
This means tragically we have sometimes looked entirely the wrong places for remedies.
Forthcoming book "Fear of the Invisible: Viruses and Vaccines, AIDS and HIV" will soon document all this and more!
News on Book - It is completed, full of sensational research -original, highly authorative sources, well referenced - and coming. It will be out in 2008. It covers the whole history of virology from its early days trying to cure polio (and failing - so it renamed the disease), through childhood vaccines (new research here too) and on to AIDS and HIV... and to wet your appetite - here is a tasted of the book....
Chapter 7
A year after I met in 1997 with the top government regulatory scientists at the NIH Emergency Workshop on SV40, they would gather again for another Washington workshop on vaccine safety. Present were representatives of all the major US government vaccine organisations. A third similar meeting would be held a year later in 1999.
At the November 1998 meeting, the main issue on the agenda was whether or not it was safe to grow the viruses needed for vaccines in cancerous cells - as had been mistakenly done earlier with the HeLa cells and as is still being done for research purposes with HIV.
Many pharmaceutical companies were seeking government approval for this, on the basis that cancerous cells, as ‘immortal’, would make a cheap permanent ‘substrate’ on which viruses for vaccines could be grown
These workshops looked at this broadly, by comparing the relative safety of different ways of making our common vaccines. Present were the top government vaccine safety scientists of the US and UK governments. As everyone present was a scientist, the discussions were much more open and frank than they are when journalists are present.
They started with the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine (MMR). One of the first speakers on it was Dr Arifa Khan from the top American government health and safety organization, the Food and Drugs Agency (FDA), and what she had to report was very troubling.
She commenced: ‘Today I would like to present an update on the reverse transcriptase [RT] activity that is present in chicken cell derived vaccines.’ My attention was immediately grabbed. I knew that the mumps and measles components of the MMR vaccine are grown in fertilised chicken eggs, as are also the Flu and Yellow Fever vaccines. The rubella virus for MMR is produced differently - in artificially grown cells taken originally from an aborted human foetus.
Dr, Khan explained she was reporting the result of a just concluded and little-known two-year investigation into the safety of MMR headed by the World Health Organisation. She explained that this study was initiated in 1996 after the discovery in MMR of RT. an enzyme linked to retroviruses as well as cells. In the back corridors of virology this had immediately caused alarm as some retroviruses were thought to cause cancers – as well as AIDS – for HIV is said to be a retrovirus
WHO had then quietly organised MMR safety studies at various laboratories to see ‘whether this RT activity was associated with a retroviral particle, and even more importantly, whether this retrovirus particle could infect and replicate in human cells.’
What they then discovered confirmed their worse fears. Dr Khan continued: ‘The RT activity is found to be associated with retroviral particles of two distinct avian endogenous retroviral families designated as EAV and ALV.’ Now ALV stands for Avian Leukosis Virus. It is associated with a cancer found in wild birds, so definitely was not wanted in the vaccines.
Khan added that they had found another possible danger; ‘There was a theoretical possibility that the virus could … infect the [human] cell’ thus integrating its genetic code ‘into the human DNA’ and cause cancer. The only reassurance she could give was that her team had watched vaccine cultures for a full ‘48 hours’, and, in that time period, no merger of viral and human DNA had been observed. I thought this far too short a period to guarantee safety – but read on.
Dr Khan then warned; ‘there is a possibility that there could also be potential pseudotypes (between) … the measles vaccine virus and the retroviral sequences’ – meaning there was a risk that bird viruses might combine with the measles virus in the vaccine to create new dangerous mutant viruses, They had not seen it happen, but it could happen.
She acknowledged much longer term studies were needed than 48 hours, but acknowledged that such studies of measles vaccine cultures were very difficult: ‘because the measles vaccine virus itself lyses [kills] the culture in about three to four days.’ This had prevented them from looking to see what might be the consequences from longer-term contamination in the vaccinated.
So far, she added, they had only managed to analyse a small part of the retrovirus contamination in the vaccines. ‘Our ongoing studies are directed towards doing similar analysis’ of other retroviral genetic codes found in the vaccine preparations.’ It seemed they had found only part of these virus’s genetic codes.
And she added that she had learnt, ‘about 20 years ago similar RT activity was reported’ in the vaccine. Apparently at that time nothing had been done about it, and the public were not told.
She concluded by explaining what the World Health Organisation (WHO) had decided to do about this chicken leucosis virus (ALV) contamination. It would take the risk of quietly allowing MMR vaccine production to continue in retrovirus contaminated eggs, because; ‘You cannot get ALV free flocks in places where you are making yellow fever vaccine.’
Dr Andrew Lewis, head of the DNA Virus Laboratory in the Division of Viral Products, then warned. ‘All the egg-based vaccines are contaminated’ including ‘influenza, yellow fever and smallpox vaccines, as well as the vaccine for horses against encephalomyelitis virus’ for ‘these fertilised chicken eggs were susceptible to a wide variety of viruses.’
This was an eye opener for me. Before I started on this investigation, if I thought about it, I would have presumed our vaccines were made of selected non-dangerous viruses in sterile fluid to which a small amount of preservative chemicals had been added. I think this is what most parents would presume.
It was thus a shock to discover that the viruses in our current vaccines were not in a sterile fluid, but in a soup of unknown bits and pieces – rather like what the vaccine scientists had prepared back in the 1950s.
The common childhood vaccines, this top-level scientific workshop was teaching me, are made out of a witches brew of DNA fragments, proteins and, even more alarmingly, they said possibly prions and oncogenes.
The vaccines are suspensions filtered from the ‘incubation tanks’ in which the vaccine viruses are grown on ‘substrates’ of mashed bird embryo or minced monkey kidneys or cloned human cells. These suspensions are then filtered – but this only removes particles larger than viruses. The point of the vaccine is that it contains viruses, thus none of these can be filtered out. This also means nothing is filtered out that is smaller than a virus, including what the manufacturers call ‘degradation products’ – the parts of decayed viruses or cells.
The only checks made for contaminants by the vaccine manufacturers or government scientists are for a few known pathogens, thus ignoring a vast host of unknown, unstudied, small particles that are admitted to remain in the vaccine. They were reporting at these vaccine safety meetings that it is simply impossible to remove these unidentified particles – and this would of course also apply to vaccines for animals.
I went to the published reports of MMR manufacturers, and found these confirmed what the scientists at this workshop were reporting. A MMR manufacturer stated it made the vaccine with ‘harvested virus fluids,’ (HVFs) It stated frankly in 2000 that their ‘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.’ In other words, the pharmaceutical company checked for contaminants that are active, but not for contaminants lying there quietly, or working slowly. It did not even measure how much the vaccine was polluted with genetic code fragments, other viruses, or of parts of bacterial, animal, bird or human cells.
I looked to see how the checks on known pathogens were done and found that these were all variants on a theme of how to find a needle in a thousand haystacks. One method detects incredibly small DNA fragments with PCR – which cannot identify anything bigger than the tiniest fragment of viral genetic code – smaller than a single gene. If this incredibly small fragment is to be identified and studied with PCR, it must be identical to a previously identified fragment – often a difficult process, given our knowledge of such particles is still very limited. That is why the scientists checking the avian leucosis virus contamination of the MMR vaccine had so far only managed to check a small part of this contamination in several years of work.
PCR cannot prove a vaccine pure. A recent report stated: ‘A negative PCR signal could be obtained when the total batch [of 10 litres] still contained 106 undetected viral particles.’
Another common method of testing for the presence of a pathogen, such as a toxin, virus or bacteria, is to look to see if a cell culture, or vaccine substrate, contains antibodies produced by our immune systems to mark a molecule belonging to this pathogen for destruction. The antibody detected thus must be known to only target this molecule.
But it is hard to prove that any identified molecule is unique to a particular pathogen. Proving this must involve an incredible number of steps – and is virtually impossible to carry out with complete accuracy. There is always the chance that the molecule is part of more than one thing – including part of a yet unidentified virus. In other words, there is always uncertainty in such identifications.
A major problem is that we have so far only identified a very small part of the microbial world, much less than 1% – therefore we just do not know from where else a molecule may come from. If antibodies are detected, then all that can be said with certainty is that these antibodies fit to molecules that were at some point present in the patient.
But despite all these possible sources of error, virologists have ways to minimalise error. After a very fine filtration of a cell culture believed to have produced viruses, a sample is put into a thick sugar suspension and spun extremely fast in a centrifuge. This causes all the particles present to band in the sugar according to their density. Certain types of viruses are known to band at particular densities. (This process is also almost guaranteed to destroy HIV as it is reported to be extremely fragile and to easily disintegrate.)
The next stage involves the use of the electron microscope. The selected density band is micrographed. This may hopefully produce images of tiny particles of viral size. These particles are so small that millions of them could literally be on a fine needle tip. But the problem is, even if millions are found that are identical – if they are then found not to reproduce in a cell culture, they may not be viruses. The micrograph shown was identified as containing purified polioviruses, but the regular shapes also bring up the possibility that these could be material shaped by filtration meshes. (Contrast them with micrographs of viruses later in this book. )
Next the particles must be added to cell cultures – but to make them produce viruses, chemical ‘growth factors’ are added at the same time. Repeated shifts from one culture to another hopefully will maximalise the production of such particles. These cellular products however cannot be presumed to be identical with those that were in the centrifuged pellets.
Thus these multiplying particles finally must be shown to cause the illness in question – a test very difficult to perform since no disease can be given to humans without consent. Instead, it is often presumed that, if it causes a similar disease in a rodent or monkey, then it is the probable cause of the disease in a human.
If these tests are met with success, the scientists then have to separate out enough of this virus for it to be used as a ‘vaccine seed’; to be fed to a substrate of cells and grown for use in a vaccine.
The latest information I could find about the retroviral contamination of the MMR vaccine is in a 2001 scientific paper. This reported some 100 MMR recipients were tested to see if they possessed antibodies against two types of retroviruses identified by Dr Khan and others. When the selected antibody was not found, this interpreted as meaning that these children had not been infected.
But the authors went on to say: ‘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‘. (4,5,7,14). They then concluded: ‘Despite these reassuring data, the presence of avian retroviral particles in chick embryo fibroblast-derived vaccines [like MMR] raises questions about the suitability of primary chicken cell substrates for vaccine production.’ They thus recommended considering stopping production in fertilized eggs, and growing the vaccine viruses instead on ‘RT-negative cells from different species, such as on immortalized [cancerous] or diploid [laboratory grown] mammalian cells.’
A year later, on September 7th, 1999, another Workshop was convened in Washington DC to consider again these issues. All the largest public health institutions in the Western World were at this workshop, including the World Health Organisation whose representative co-chaired it. The UK government’s vaccine safety organisations had a top-level representative in Dr Philip Minor. No press apparently were present – but the importance of the meeting meant that it was taped to ensure an accurate record.
Dr Bill Egan, the Acting Director of the Office of Vaccines at the Center for Biologics opened the meeting thus.
‘I think we need to remind ourselves that viruses can propagate only in live cells, and this of course holds true for whole viral vaccines… They can only be produced in cells [substrates]… We have only to think back to the finding of SV40 in poliovirus vaccines to realize the extent of the risk that any cell substrate may pose, and there is still great need for concern… we have been given the task of identifying these concerns…’
The scientists present then told of viral and DNA genetic code fragments, as well as proteins,that contaminate the vaccines. They mentioned particularly their worry that among these might be dangerous prions or oncogenes.
Other vaccines had been found contaminated with monkey viruses. Dr Andrew Lewis of the FDA reported: ‘humans were immunized with adenovirus vaccines that contained adenovirus-SV40 hybrid viruses.’ In other words, a brand-new monkey-human mutant virus had been created in the vaccine.
Dr. Ben Berkhout exclaimed at hearing this: ‘That's the one I would like to focus on today, Is [there a danger of] the potential reversion of an attenuated vaccine strain to a virus variant that can replicate fast and can potentially cause AIDS?’
This was a startling question. Could the viruses in our most common childhood vaccines be so affected by contaminating DNA that the vaccines would give our children AIDS?
Were such mutation events rare? Apparently they were not. Another doctor stated. ‘Recombination among a variety of viruses and cells co-infected in tissue culture is not uncommon. This is an issue that certainly will need further consideration.’ In other words, vaccine incubators cause virus mutation.
The next speaker dealt with the ‘foreign cellular DNA’ they had found to contaminate our childhood vaccines. Dr Andrew Lewis of the CDER and FDA worried that this might well include ‘viral oncogenes’ – in other words, it might cause cancer.
One of the scientists present, Dr Adimora, asked how would the public react if they knew of these dangers? He stated: ‘The general public have a variety of concerns about vaccines but, to my knowledge, the cell substrates in which the vaccines are grown has not been one of their major concerns to date. But,’ he added, ‘it could conceivably be different in future.’
this is a quarter of one of its chapters.....
and some references....
Virus Clearance Strategies for Biopharmaceutical Safety http://www.pall.com/applicat/bio_pharm/pdf/Bp5560.pdf.
This was suggested first by Dr Stefan Lanka.
Shifiting Paradigms:- DIRT, VIRUSES, BACTERIA and the healthy Infant's immune system.
Virology was created by scientists who presumed all genetic-code carrying small particles were dangerous, thus naming them as viruses, meaning in Latin 'poisons'. For disease after disease they looked solely for viral causes, ignoring environmental. This attitude was passed onto the public - who did all they could to kill the viruses in their homes. But some scientists have since revealed a very different picture - revealing that we cannot live healthy lifes without viruses and bacteria, most do not harm us - and killing them can make us ill. - click here for our Dirt is Good for You articles..
The Wonder of Retroviruses - our cells' essential cargo ships.
Retroviruses were first researched mainly by virologists who suspected they were the cause of cancer. One reason was that the DNA changed in the cells they entered. But from the early 1980s an entirely different view of them emerged in biology. We now know healthy cells in animals, in bacteria, in plants and in us make their own retroviruses to carry snips of cellular genetic code from one cell to another to reshape our DNA - a process that has played a major role in our evolution.click VIRUS BLOG -and Working Hypothesis
So why is HIV so different?
HIV- the author's journey through the key research into HIV, the HIV Test and HAART. Click for more information on major coming article HIV blog
`AIDS - the many causes - click To summary of second part.
The above are pre-print summaries of two major new articles on HIV/AIDS now with their publisher and due out in print later this year. Readers are warmly invited to send in comments. The science in them has been carefully checked by many eminent scientists. Now it is time for you to have your say.
