Are Vaccines Causing More Diseases Than They Are Curing?

by Alan Cantwell, M.D.

Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Centre, a consumer’s group based in Virginia, USA, has claimed 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.

Fisher 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 US since 1979, they often fail to mention that all recorded cases of polio since that time are actually caused by the polio vaccine.

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).

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 US Centres 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 Organisation (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.

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 United States 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 million 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 hospitalisation 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 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.

Vaccine Manufacture and Associated Dangers

Although 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 woman from Baltimore who died from a highly malignant cervical cancer in 1951. Small pieces of her tumour were donated to a laboratory specialising in tissue cell culture. In those days most attempts to grow human cells outside the body failed.

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 that 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.

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 US Federal Drug Administration held a meeting in September, 1999, to reconsider using human tumour 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 realise 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.

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.

Editor’ Note: Alan Cantwell, MD,  author of Queer Blood and The Cancer Microbe, is grateful to New Dawn magazine in Australia for originally publishing this.

Photo credit: abc.net.au