Merck Stops Producing Vaccines Without Cells From Babies Killed in Abortions

Merck Stops Producing Vaccines Without Cells From Babies Killed in Abortions

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A leading pro-life group that educates about the vaccines that are based on the cells from babies killed in abortions is worried about a new decision from the pharmaceutical giant Merck. The company has decided to stop producing some vaccines that are not made based on fetal cells from abortions.

Merck & Co. Inc has stopped the production and sale of its monovalent vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella.

Instead, the company will focus on combination vaccine, MMRII, which accounts for 98 percent of the company’s sales of the vaccines targeting those diseases.

The monovalent vaccines account for only two percent of the total sales but they are important to the pro-life movement because they are produced based on animal cells and not from cells obtained from the bodies of babies killed in abortions.

“Merck’s separate dose for rubella, Meruvax, uses aborted fetal cell lines and taints the entire MMR II vaccine,” Debi Vinnedge of the pro-life group Children of God for Life tells LifeNews.com.

“The separate doses of Attenuvax (measles) and Mumpsvax (mumps) use chick embryo. Without these separate doses for measles and mumps, there will be no moral alternative for parents,” Vinnedge says.

Merck spokeswoman Amy Rose said the decision to eliminate the monovalent vaccines was made for both financial and health reasons.

“The combination vaccine is what’s recommended, and it’s such a significant portion of the orders we see,” she told AAFP. “It’s in the best interest of public health to make more of that rather than dedicate manufacturing capacity to monovalents.”

Rose said Merck has not decided if it will make the moral monovalent vaccines available for sale again in the future.

Vinnedge’s group issued Merck a letter on Tuesday asking the company to reconsider its decision.

She says millions of pro-life Americans “are deeply concerned with the use of aborted fetal cell lines in the rubella portion of your MMR II and other vaccines, I am asking you to reconsider your position.”

She also said parents have been willing to wait for the alternative vaccines to be produced and were willing to pay higher costs in order to give their children vaccines that are not abortion-based.

“Once again, many of these families are waiting for you to resume production and their children will be unprotected unless you provide the doses. They are already abstaining from rubella and some have even flown overseas to vaccinate their children. That is, in my view, a disgrace to American healthcare,” she said.

Vinnedge says Merck’s decision is far-reaching because Merck is the sole provider of these alternative vaccines.

ACTION: Contact Merck and express your desire for the company to reverse its decision and make the non-abortion vaccines available. Contact Richard Clark, CEO, Merck & Company, One Merck Drive P.O. Box 100, Whitehouse Station, NJ 08889-0100. Call 908-423-1000 or find more information at http://www.merck.com/contact

Related web sites:
Children of God for Life – http://www.cogforlife.org

Pentacel vaccine

On June 26, 2008 the ACIP recommended adding  Pentacel vaccine to the immunization schedule for children. Pentacel is a combination vaccine of Diptheria, Petrussis, Tetanus (DTaP), HiB and Polio. It is the first DTaP-based combination vaccine that also includes polio and HiB vaccine components.

There are similar five-in-one vaccines such as Pediarix and Pediacel. However, controversy has arisen over the use of the Pentacel vaccine, because the polio portion of this vaccine is grown on the MRC-5 cell line – derived from human fetuses.

England’s J.P Jacobs for the Medical Resource Council created this cell line in 1966. It was derived from the fifth subject of the study: the normal lung tissue of a 14-week-old male fetus who was electively aborted by a 27-year-old woman. It parallels research conducted by Leonard Hayflick, Ph. D., who developed the WI-38 cell line in 1962 at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania Wistar Institute. That cell line came from the 38th research subject – lung tissue taken from an electively aborted fetus of almost three months gestation from Sweden. WI-38 is used to manufacture vaccines for Poliomyelitis, Rubella, Vermicelli, Mumps, Rabies, adenoviruses and Hepatitis A.

Vaccines for shingles and the chicken pox also make use of aborted fetal cells. Although the vaccines themselves do not contain cells or tissues, they are grown on cells. For example, Hepatitis B is grown on fungal yeast cells. And the polio vaccine, in addition to being grown on aborted-fetal cells, is grown on monkey kidney cells.

Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at The Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, said the use of monkey kidney cells in the past to grow the polio vaccine risked exposure to the Simian vacuolating virus 40 (SV40). This virus has the potential to cause tumors and is found in both monkeys and humans. SV40 virus concerns surfaced with the live, oral polio vaccine, which no longer is used in the United States.

GlaxoSmithKline makes Pediarix, one alternative to Pentacel, in which the poliovirus is grown on monkey kidney cells. In this case, the three strains of the inactivated poliovirus component of Pediarix are individually grown in VERO cells, a continuous line of monkey kidney cells. Since the poliovirus is inactivated and the vaccine is ministered via shot, the risk of SV40 is eliminated.

Pediarix includes the same ingredients that Pentacel has except HiB. Pediarix protects against Hepatitis B, a virus that Pentacel leaves recipients vulnerable to. Consequently, Pentacel recipients need separate shots for Hepatitis B, and Pediarix receivers need separate shots of HiB.

Pediarix is a three-dose series with one shot at each of the two, four and six-month immunization visits. Pentacel is a four-dose series to be given at two, four, six and at 15-18 months of age.

“With Pediarix, an extra shot of Hepatitis B is needed for those infants who have received the birth-dose and, unlike Pentacel, there is no reduction in the number of shots administered in the second year of life because Pediarix is only licensed for a three-dose series at two, four and six months of age,” she said.

While Pentacel offers a reduced number of shots for children in the U.S., compared with Pediarix or Pediacel, a European vaccine identical to Pentacel, which does not use aborted fetal cells. Canadian Physicians for Life lobbied for this vaccine last year when they were unable to find an available five-in-one option in Canada, which they found morally acceptable. It is possible to create a vaccine identical to Pentacel without any ethical controversies, and Pediarix, currently available in the U.S., does so without using fetal cell lines.

With time and money it is possible to create alternative cell lines for various vaccines that use aborted fetal cells. Mr. Furton said an additional “problematic connection” exists between using aborted fetal cells and embryonic stem cell research. “The cultural mindset in the scientific community is that it’s okay to use aborted fetuses for research purposes,” he said referencing the use of aborted fetal cell lines in vaccines. This mindset leads to what he called an unethical and increasing acceptance by the scientific community of using embryonic stem cells for research.

                                          Source:The Evening Bulletin 

 

 

Rubella

Are Some Cases of Autism Actually Subclinical, Congenital Attenuated Rubella Syndrome?

                    www.nccn.net/~wwithin/autismrubella.pdf

 

• F. Edward Yazbak, MD, FAAP, found a link between mothers’ rubella susceptibility in pregnancy and their having children with autism spectrum disorders. He described 60 previously vaccinated women who were considered “rubella susceptible” during their routine prenatal OB/GYN visits. All of these women were revaccinated in the post partum period due to their not having antibodies to rubella. Each of these women could be described as having failed to seroconvert to an previous vaccination or having rubella immunity that declined over time.

   

   

   

   

• A few ideas and questions are warranted on WHY some females may unknowingly be serving as hosts to a persistent rubella infection and why the RA27/3 vaccine strain of rubella virus might be particularly well adapted to persist undetected in females.

   

   

   

   

• Information provided by the FDA in Appendix A on the history of the development of rubella vaccines used in the US prompts many questions about the safety of RA27/3 strain of rubella vaccine and its use in females. Per the FDA, the rubella virus used in the vaccine originated from a fetus that was aborted in 1964. It was isolated in and recovered from fetal tissue. It was attenuated through 25 passages through human fetal cells, and it is grown in human fetal cells.

   

   

   

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fetal Cell Lines and Vaccines

 List of Vaccines that use fetal cell lines and the history.

If you prefer to listen to a conference on this issue.

Cell Lines:

 WI38- W=Wistar I=Institute 38= # of abortion used

• tissue would be collected from the lungs of a female baby at 3 months gestation
• 1964
• The rubella virus clinically named RA273. R=Rubella, A=Abortus, 27=27^th fetus, 3=3^rd tissue explant, which was then cultivated on the WI-38 aborted fetal cell line. Stanley Plotkin would later reveal that 40 more babies were aborted after RA273 was successfully isolated, with virus strains taken from 34 of them. A total of over 80 separate abortions were involved in the research and final production of the present day rubella vaccine- 21 abortions from the original WI-1 through WI-26 fetal cell lines that failed, plus WI-38 itself, plus 67 from the attempts to isolate the rubella virus.

 

MRC5-

• 1970
• Introduced in Great Britain by the Medical Research Council
• Cell line is derived from the lung tissue of a 14-week gestation male
• 1977 MMR with fetal cell lines

Other references: http://www.biotech.ist.unige.it/cldb/cl5168.html

 

                              http://www.cogforlife.org/packageinsertsample.htm

 

What happens when the current cell lines expire? Cell lines age in accordance to the age of the fetus and can become cancerous. But they don’t know when that happens. The plan:

 

     “The cell line developed at Coriell, identified as IMR-90 was the first of several lines planned in support of NIA research programs…IMR-90 was developed and characterized in such a way as to parallel WI-38 as closely as possible to minimize the variables in replacing WI-38 within ongoing laboratory  programs … The IMR-90 cell line, like WI-38 was derived from the lung tissue of a human female        embryo following therapeutic abortion …Since the goal of establishing this cell line was a replacement for WI-38 in vaccine production, virus yields were compared for IMR-90, WI-38 and MRC-5 for a number of different viruses including varicella zoster, herpes simplex, vesicular stomatitits virus and cytomegalovirus.”  *there is also an MRI- 91.

 Per C6-

• 2001
• isolated retina from a fetus about 18 weeks old
• This cell line was made to be ‘immortal’ but failed. It caused cancerous tumors in mice. Was used in the HIV vaccine trial but caused cancer so it  was pulled.
• Crucell-advent of their PER C6 fetal cell line took off
• PER C6 is a normal cell that has been modified to resist cell senescence. In doing so, it introduces the potential for cancer to form in the vaccine recipient.

Other Reference: http://www.cogforlife.org/xigris.htm

 

“However, a feature of regulatory importance associated with Ad5-transformed cells is their capacity to form tumors in immunodeficient animals such as nude mice. This framework is intended to examine, and wherever possible, to quantify the potential risk of “transmitting” the tumorigenic components of  the cell substrate used for vaccine production, and determine whether that “transmission” might pose a risk, particularly an oncogenic risk, to vaccinees. Factors that could influence the risk associated with the use of Designer Cell Substrates include (1) the known             mechanism of cell transformation leading to the development of tumorigenic cells; (2) residual cell substrate DNA; and (3) the presence of adventitious agents, especially oncogenic viruses.”

 * A continuous cell line would be considered immortal, if it contains cells that have no limits on how many times they can divide.

 Hek293-

• Normal healthy fetus from Netherlands
• Avian Flu in development
• Eli Lily

Other references: http://www.cogforlife.org/xigris.htm

 

                              http://www.mbi.ufl.edu/~shaw/293.html

 

When new vaccine batches are needed, the virus is cultivated on the existing fetal cell lines, which in turn have been sub-cultured numerous times over the years. 

 

 It is listed in the vaccine package inserts that residual DNA, proteins, and components are present in the vaccines and would list MRC-5 or WI38 or human diploid cell lines. Like this.

 

Since those statements do not outright say “aborted fetal tissue“, some may not think twice about what exactly that is. It’s quite deceptive on the part of the pharmaceutical companies. Diploid cells  are “a cell that contains two sets of chromosomes (one set donated from each parent).

 

 It is already known that human DNA is absorbed into the baby’s cells which eventually go to the brain.  DNA from chick, duck, or monkey for example, rejects it as a foreign material. Haven’t we learned anything from the Polio vaccines and SV40?

 

 Use of protamine sulphate for elimination of substrate DNA in polio vaccines produced on continuous cell lines.

Cell substrate DNA was shown to be an abundant contaminant in the clarified preparations of the Sabin type 1, 2 and 3 poliovaccines produced on a continuous cell line (4647). The size of the DNA, as evaluated for the Sabin type 1 poliovaccine, was highly heterogeneous, ranging from 100 to 20,000 base pairs. In view of potential oncogenicity of this DNA a simple and efficient procedure for its elimination is proposed. The method is based on use of protamine sulphate which at the concentration of 2.0 mg ml-1 precipitated cell DNA almost completely without affecting the virus titres.

Do your own Pubmed search and see what you find.

Why are aborted fetuses being used?

•  Economics
• Patents-every time a cell line is used, the patent holder gets a cut
• Receive Federal funding for the use of aborted fetuses. Started in the Clinton era and Bush approved partial funding and for stem cell research

 WHO has been allowing the use of continuous fetal cell lines since 1986. The FDA simply reminds the pharmaceutical makers to be “free of residual intact Vero cells. If your manufacturing process does not include a validated filtration step or other validated procedure to clear residual intact Vero cells from the product, please incorporate such a procedure into your manufacturing process and submit the appropriate changes.”