by Greg Piper
COVID-19 vaccine supporters are fond of sneering at public figures who have called for the Food and Drug Administration to pull or at least re-evaluate the safety of the increasingly unpopular therapeutics, such as Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cardiologist Peter McCullough and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.
They might have a harder time caricaturing a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director who ran the agency when COVID vaccines were being developed, promoted vaccination and repeat boosting as recently as 2022 and promoted cloth face masks as “one of the most powerful weapons we have” against COVID, before vaccines were available.
Robert Redfield cited “concerns that the mRNA vaccines actually have contaminating nucleic acid in them” but also sequences from Simian Virus 40, “which is a tumor virus,” in the debut episode of songwriter, author and Lyme Disease activist Dana Parish’s podcast.
Some of the 98 million polio vaccines given from 1955 to 1963 contained SV 40, which is part of the same family as the human papillomavirus associated with cervical cancer, according to the federally convened Immunization Safety Review Committee’s 2002 review of the evidence for the contamination’s effect on cancer rates.
The review was inconclusive on whether “SV40-contaminated polio vaccine did or did not cause cancer in the vaccine recipients” but affirmed that exposure concerns are “significant because of the seriousness of cancers as the possible adverse health outcomes and because of the continuing need to ensure and protect public trust in the nation’s immunization program.”
SV 40 has come up before in the context of COVID mRNA vaccines. Health Canada said a year ago that Pfizer violated its obligation to “specifically identify the SV40 sequence,” which is “biologically functional,” when it submitted “the full DNA sequence” of the plasmid to the vaccine regulator for approval of its COVID vaccine.
The purported fact-checking industry went into a frenzy following the disclosure, putting Health Canada on the defensive for referring to both the SV 40 “sequence” and “enhancer.”
“The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine does not contain simian virus 40,” the regulator told AFP. “The presence of the SV40 promoter enhancer sequence is not the same as the presence of the whole virus itself.”
While Redfield (pictured here) is not “personally” concerned about SV 40, “I think it’s something that should be critically re-reviewed by the FDA” in the next year rather than dismissed as “‘we see this but we don’t think it means anything,'” the virologist told Parish.
“I was on [Operation] Warp Speed, I helped develop these vaccines, I’m proud of it,” Redfield continued, referring to President Trump’s COVID vaccine initiative. “We saved a lot of lives, but these vaccines really should have been prioritized only for the highly vulnerable” populations.
A safer alternative is “killed-protein vaccines,” not built on the mRNA platform associated with a higher risk of heart inflammation in young people, he said. The “test of time” showed “quite debilitating” side effects from mRNA vaccines.
“It’s a good question” whether the mRNA spike protein can “integrate into the genome of human cells,” Redfield told Parish when asked. He doesn’t think it integrates into chromosomes but is worried that spike protein “stays around a lot longer than it should,” three to six months after it’s supposed to leave the body.
Redfield said this may indicate mRNA “has been stabilized to the point that it can stay in the body much longer” than the viral RNA itself, but he is “more of the view that it may integrate into mitochondrial DNA and therefore have cytoplasmic replication potential to continue to produce spike protein,” based on papers he’s read.
A preprint study from spring 2023, not yet peer-reviewed, concluded Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines had DNA contamination in excess of European Medicines Agency and FDA limits.
It was co-authored by Kevin McKernan, who managed MIT’s research and development for the Human Genome Project. He testified in a lawsuit to halt distribution of mRNA vaccines in Australia because the contamination makes them a “genetically modified organism” that requires a gene technology license under Aussie law.
“The FDA would like to make clear that based on a thorough assessment of the entire manufacturing process, the FDA continues to be confident in the quality, safety, and effectiveness of all the mRNA based COVID-19 vaccines approved or authorized for use in the US,” FDA spokesperson Carly Pflaum told Just the News in an email.
She referred to the agency’s Dec. 14, 2023, letter shaming Florida’s Ladapo after he informed FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and then-CDC Director Mandy Cohen of a more widely read fall 2023 preprint, also co-authored by McKernan, that found “DNA fragments” in both mRNA vaccines from Ontario, Canada.
Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, implied Ladapo was contributing to “ongoing proliferation of misinformation and disinformation about these vaccines” and called it “quite implausible” for “residual small DNA fragments” to make it “intact” all the way into chromosomal DNA.
The CDC did not answer requests for its response to Redfield’s SV 40 comments, which appear to have flown largely under the radar of mainstream media.
Newsweek and others instead focused on his assertion to Parish that SARS-CoV-2 was “intentionally engineered as part of a biodefense program.” (Redfield also told NewsNation that presumptive HHS pick Kennedy is not “antivaccine” but simply favors vaccine “transparency.”)
Redfield was denounced as a conspiracy theorist and even racist when he first gave credence to the lab-leak theory, but President Biden’s directive to the intelligence community to study the origins questions vindicated Redfield. The FBI and Energy Department lean toward lab-leak.
The U.S. played a “substantial” role in COVID’s emergence because federal agencies funded the Chinese virus research involved in a suspected lab leak and the “scientific mastermind” of the research is University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, Redfield told Parish.
Baric’s lab was an early suspect for association with SARS-CoV-2 because of his work with the EcoHealth Alliance, which passed through U.S. taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for coronavirus research, which then sent spike sequences to Baric.
Redfield said Baric “probably helped create some of the original viral lines but I can’t prove that,” telling Parish “I think there is a real possibility that the virus birthplace was Chapel Hill.”
Baric did not answer Just the News queries for his response to the characterization.
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Just the News reporter Greg Piper has covered law and policy for nearly two decades, with a focus on tech companies, civil liberties and higher education.
