By Jeffry John Aufderheide
Media and public relation campaigns literally portray the U.S. FDA as superheroes. For example, the FDA came to the rescue about E. coli tainted spinach, Chinese-made baby formula containing melamine, and even removing salmonella-laced peanut butter from grocery store shelves. Those aforementioned events ought to be the measuring stick for parents to conceptualize one specific issue: vaccine contamination.
Parents need to ask: Are contaminated vaccines being injected into our babies? Many parents may be surprised to learn the answer is likely ‘yes’.
To illustrate that point, Gina Bari Kolata wrote an article in February, 1975, entitled, Phage in Live Virus Vaccines: Are They Harmful to People? The article starts off by saying,
“Almost 2 years ago, scientists at the Bureau of Biologics of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported that all live virus vaccines are grossly contaminated with phage (viruses that infect bacteria).” [emphasis mine]
“This finding presented a problem since federal regulations forbade extraneous material in vaccines, and no one knew whether phage are harmful to human beings or whether they could be removed from vaccines. The temporary solution was to amend the regulations so as to permit phage in vaccines.” [emphasis mine]
How is amending regulations a solution to a serious contamination problem?
Their ‘solution’ reminds me of a concept one of my college professors often articulated as “the illusion of efficiency.” The FDA is seen as publicly saving the day against certain biological contaminations, but categorically ignoring disease-causing agents currently being injected directly into babies. In other words, the public’s perception is, if there were safety concerns with vaccines, the FDA would have done something about it.
FDA’s tolerance of vaccine contaminants manifested years later, for example, in a court case decided in 1987, stating:
“Each seed virus used in manufacture shall be demonstrated to be free of extraneous microbial agents except for unavoidable bacteriophage.” [emphasis mine]
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