Biotech Industry and the Vaccine Controversy
A mumps epidemic has hit western Canada this past week. Every year measles crop up somewhere in North America. Probably hundreds of children suffer from other preventable diseases such as whooping cough and tetanus, and more cases of polio, a disease all but irradicated after vaccines were discovered in the 1950s and 60s, are reported each year. All of this because parents are choosing not to subject their children to the risks associated with vaccination, fearing those risks outweigh the benefits. These risks may be very real, but the decision must be made with a clear understanding of vaccine safety, as the consequences of not vaccinating are equally scary. In just one example, according to the New York Times, in 1989-90, a measles outbreak in southern California resulted in 101 deaths. Thousands more fell ill.
Without getting immersed in debate by expressing my personal opinions on this bioethics issue, I'd like to ask the question: What is the biotechnology industry doing about these risks? It seems most companies are working at pumping out even more vaccines for us to debate over... and this might be a good thing when it comes to finding a vaccine for AIDs and other lethal and incurable diseases. But is anyone looking at ways to make the vaccines safer? It seems some areas of biotechnology might help alleviate this problem. In the field of plant biotech, there are research groups investigating ways to express antigens (the proteins that trigger an antibody response in our bodies) in plants, so we can injest them as part of our normal diet. Oral vaccines are under investigation because of the benefits they offer to underdeveloped countries. They cost less to produce and may save thousands, if not millions of lives. The added benefit to developed countries, however, might be the safety of having immunity conferred from eating a plant with the sole antigen protein, and the only risk being that of a possible allergic reaction to that compound alone, eliminating our exposure to the added "soup" of delivery chemicals.
Sources:
McNeil Jr., DG. When Parents Say No to Child Vaccinations. New York Times, November 30, 2002.
Comments
I go into how vaccines are made in some detail in my recently published book “Fear of the Invisible” and cite what the top US and UK vaccine scientists said at recent vaccine safety scientific workshops. They expressed enormous concerns, much more than are normally said publicly. The current childhood vaccines were described as “quite primitive” by Dr Phil Minor, the top UK government doctor in this area of study. Other doctors present said the vaccines cannot be filtered clean of anything the size of a virus or smaller – so they are contaminated with many viruses, with DNA and RNA fragments, cellular degradation products, proteins – and they said – possibly prions and oncogenes. The WHO representative present reported on finding Avian Leukosis Virus present widely in the MMR, measles and mumps vaccines.. all this without any kind of public statement to warn parents of this. I document this and more in my book – and look at how polio, measles and even HIV are ‘isolated’ for use in vaccines. I also finally cite some of the latest biology on the relationships between cells and viruses – these are not what are widely thought – and this gives me reason for hope.
Janine Robers – author of Fear of the Invisible (on Amazon now)