The Monkey In The Syringe

A Tour De Force Retelling Of Seven Decades Of History Culminating In Events Shaping Our Current Times

It was a gorgeous spring afternoon in 1993. Dr. Harvey Pass MD, one of the world's leading mesothelioma surgeons and the chief of thoracic surgery at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), in Bethesda, Maryland, was busy working in his laboratory when Michele Carbone MD, PhD, an Italian pathologist and a researcher at the NCI, strode in with a most unusual request. These men did not know each other and had spoken for the first time on the telephone just a few hours prior to this meeting. Carbone was asking Pass for his help in proving a somewhat controversial theory he had about the origins of mesothelioma, a deadly cancer afflicting the the lining of the chest and the lung. Mesothelioma was virtually unheard of prior to 1950, but the incidence of the disease has risen steadily since then. Though considered rare — responsible for the deaths of about 3,000 Americans a year, or about one half of one percent of all domestic cancer deaths—the disease is deadly. Most patients die within eighteen months of diagnosis.

Dr. Pass, like other scientists, believed the disease was caused by asbestos exposure. But Carbone had a hunch. He wondered if the cancer might also be caused by a virus—a monkey virus, known as simian virus 40, or SV40, that had widely contaminated early doses of the polio vaccine, but had long been presumed to be harmless to people.

Before you read any further, I highly recommend you take a short detour to read my previous essay on the history of the Salk polio vaccine and the infamous “Cutter incident”. Reading this will enable an understanding of the historical context of what comes next, the magnitude of the tragedy that ensued and the silencing of one of the great unsung heroes and whistleblowers of that era, Bernice Eddy, who remains just as central in this story.

The deadliest mass vaccination tragedy no one has heard of

Rewind to the early 1950’s. The very real, utterly devastating effects of polio overshadowed any hypothetical questions of vaccine safety. In 1952, the worst polio outbreak in American history infected 58,000 people, killing more than 3,000 and paralyzing 21,000 — the majority of them children.

Jonas Salk, the creator of the eponymous Salk polio vaccine used what was, in those days, a breakthrough discovery in virus science: Monkey kidneys. Unlike bacteria, which can be grown in a laboratory environment when placed in a suitable growth medium, viruses cannot reproduce on their own and require living cells to infect. Researchers discovered that polio virus could cause disease not only in humans, but also in monkeys. This was a game changer. Salk’s team harvested kidneys from live monkeys and injected them with live polio virus, which quickly multiplied in the kidney cells. Monkey kidneys could now be used to culture abundant quantities of polio virus necessary to mass-produce a vaccine.

On Aug. 30, 1954. Bernice Eddy, Ph.D, an American virologist, epidemiologist and a veteran scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was hard at work assiduously checking batches of the recently synthesized polio vaccine for safety.

From Left to Right: Harvey Pass, Bernice Eddy and Michele Carbone

As she checked a sample from Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif., she noticed that the vaccine—designed to protect against polio— had instead caused polio in a test monkey. She was horrified to discover that rather than containing killed virus to induce an immune response, the sample from Cutter Lab contained live, infectious polio virus. Three of the six samples had paralyzed test monkeys. She immediately warned her higher-ups. Her warnings about this unexpected finding and the potential for human tragedy went unheeded and set into motion a series of events that would later be dubbed the infamous “Cutter incident” during which many children died and hundreds were maimed and paralyzed as a consequence of being injected with the tainted Salk polio vaccine. (Still not too late to read my essay: click here)

In the aftermath of the Cutter incident and the public outcry it engendered, Bernice Eddy was scapegoated and transferred to the influenza section, but the polio vaccine debacle still rankled her mind. The problem with monkey kidneys is that…..well, they come with monkey problems. In 1960, just 6 years after she had blown the whistle on Salk vaccine contamination, Bernice Eddy, with her unslakable curiosity and unassailable ethical code that yielded to no one made yet another earth-shattering discovery. When she injected newborn hamsters with the kidney mixture on which the polio vaccine was cultured, they developed tumors. When the extracts of these tumors were injected into a new group of hamsters, they too developed tumors.

Eddy's superiors tried to keep the discovery quiet, but Eddy presented her data at a cancer conference in New York. She was eventually demoted, and lost her laboratory. The cancer-causing virus was soon isolated by other scientists and dubbed SV40, because it was the fortieth simian virus discovered. Alarm spread through the scientific community as researchers realized that nearly every dose of the vaccine had been contaminated. In 1961 federal health officials ordered vaccine manufacturers to screen for the virus and eliminate it from the vaccine. Worried about creating a panic, they kept the discovery of SV40 under wraps and never recalled existing stocks. For two more years millions of additional people were needlessly exposed—bringing the total to 98 million Americans from 1955 to 1963. But after a flurry of quick studies, health officials decided that the virus, thankfully, did not cause cancer in human beings.

After that SV40 ceased to be anything more than a medical curiosity. Even though the virus became a widely used cancer-research tool, because it caused a variety of tumors so easily in laboratory animals, for the better part of four decades there was virtually no research on what SV40 might do to people.

Now back to our story of Carbone and Pass. Carbone had reviewed some old research papers on the contamination and some of the early tests on SV40. He had even reviewed the notes from a crucial 1963 epidemiological study, by Joseph Fraumeni, an NCI researcher, which had concluded that children inoculated with contaminated vaccine did not show increased mortality rates. However, Fraumeni himself admitted that the epidemiological study was too short to have detected certain slow-developing cancers. “A carcinogenic effect of SV40 would have gone undetected in this study if the latent period was longer than 4 years” (Mesothelioma can take twenty to forty years to develop.)

Fraumeni's paper on SV40

Carbone had already injected the virus into dozens of hamsters and every one of them developed mesothelioma and died within three to seven months. He had come knocking on Pass’s door because he heard the surgeon had meticulously saved tumor tissue from every one of the dozens of mesothelioma surgeries he’d performed, and boasted one of the largest mesothelioma biopsy collections in the world. Carbone asked Pass if he could look for SV40 DNA in Pass's tumor-tissue samples, using polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to extract tiny fragments of DNA from the frozen tissue and then amplify and characterize them.

"I thought to myself, He's got this wild-assed idea," Pass recalls. "If it's true, it's unbelievable. Even if it's not, I'm going to get a hell of an education in state-of-the-art molecular biology."

That spring afternoon in 1993, with Pass's mesothelioma samples in hand, Carbone called an old friend, Antonio Procopio, a professor of experimental pathology in Italy who had worked for three years at the NIH. "I asked him if he was willing to do this crazy project with me," Carbone says. "I told him I could not pay him or his expenses." A month later Procopio arrived in Bethesda. "We had no money," Carbone recalls. "He slept in my house for six months, and we worked day and night."

Carbone’s findings were nothing short of jaw-dropping. It turned out that Pass's samples were loaded with the monkey virus: 60 percent of the mesothelioma samples contained SV40 DNA; the nontumor tissues used as controls were negative. Moreover, Carbone found that in most of the positive samples he tested, the monkey virus was active, producing proteins—suggesting to Carbone that the SV40 was not just an opportunistic "passenger virus" that had found a convenient hiding place in the malignant cells but was likely to have been involved in causing the cancer.

Since Carbone and colleagues published their first study in 1994, scientists from different laboratories in the United States, Europe and Asia, confirmed his results in detecting the presence of SV40 in mesotheliomas from human lung tissue. Not only that, SV40 has also been detected in bone tumors (osteosarcomas) and brain tumors (e.g. medullobalstomas, ependymomas & choroids plexus tumors).

However, this hypothesis is not without its share of skeptics and naysayers. The most notable and influential among them being Dr. Howard Strickler, previously at the Viral Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute. Since he is an epidemiologist and not a molecular pathologist like Carbone, Strickler set out to disprove the link between SV40 and cancer by hiring a researcher of his own choosing to see if Carbone’s work could be replicated. In 1996, Dr. Strickler published a paper with Dr. Keerti Shah of the Johns Hopkins school of public health in the Journal of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention that failed to detect SV40 in their tumor samples. Their paper disproportionately influenced the direction of SV40 research and funding, and the Viral Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute considered the case closed. Their work is repeatedly cited by federal health officials as evidence that the dozens of scientific publications, including Dr. Carbone's, are not persuasive. As of 2002, there were over 61 reports from 49 different laboratories that detected SV40 in human mesothelioma, lymphoma, brain and bone tumors, versus three reports (two of these were from Dr. Shah and Strickler) that failed to detect SV40 in these tumor types.

At the April 2001 Mesothelioma Conference in Chicago, Dr. Shah was queried by a member of the scientific audience, "Which method did you follow for the DNA extraction? The Chomcynski method or the Chirgwin method?, Dr. Shah replied, "Proteinase K-it's a crude method." You don’t have to be scientist to know that the application of an inefficient or "crude" method to extract DNA will result in degraded DNA. If DNA is already degraded in the first step, the presence of SV40 will not be detected in any of the succeeding steps.

To add to the swirling controversy, at a sworn testimony during litigation representing patients with SV40-positive tumors, Dr. Shah revealed that Dr. Strickler, the multi-center study coordinator, compromised the masked positive controls and knowingly permitted Dr. Shah to re-test and adjust his technique during pre-trial testing. This so-called “breaking the blind” is one of the most egregious taboos in clinical trials, a cardinal sin and a protocol breach of the highest magnitude.

Contemporary opinions surrounding the contentious issue of SV40 and its link to cancer in humans continues to rage unabated with supporters and detractors on either side. For example, even as recently as 2020, a group of scientists from Germany, Wales and Qatar were unable to confirm the presence of SV40 tag mRNA expression in archival surgical specimens of 139 pleural mesothelioma cases collected from 1988-2005. The full palette of studies and their findings showing the association of SV40 and cancer or the lack thereof is outside the scope of this discussion and provides scant additional context besides the fact that this by no means “settled science.”

This story is important on many different levels. Firstly it is a telling of the widespread and systematic failures that plagued the polio vaccine program. From the Cutter incident to the SV40 in monkey kidneys, what we saw was a blueprint of how-not-to of mass vaccination programs. Secondly, it highlights the complete unwillingness of most bureaucrats pretending to be scientists to do the right thing and put people before careers and narratives. The extraordinary valor of of a scant few like Bernice Eddy stands out in sharp relief against the collectivist cowardice infecting bureaucracies in epidemic proportions . (Be sure to read my exposition on how bureaucracy created COVID casteism here)

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, the contaminated vaccine story no longer resides in the realm of historic relics, but has reared its ugly head once again. Earlier this year, genomics expert Kevin McKernan discovered DNA contamination in vials of Pfizer and Moderna’s bivalent booster COVID vaccines. McKernan and colleagues found billions to hundreds of billions of DNA molecules per dose in the mRNA COVID vaccines. Residual DNA was detected in all 27 vaccine vials surveyed.

And as if to pay homage to Mark Twain who once famously quipped “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” they found fragments of the SV40 virus contaminating the batches of COVID vaccine they had examined. The monkey had returned to the syringe. “These vectors contain an SV40 Promoter, SV40 Enhancer, SV40 Origin, and anSV40 polyA signal. They do not contain the entire SV40 virus or the SV40 T-antigen.”

Phillip Buckhaults, a cancer genomics expert, and professor at the University of South Carolina initially dismissed McKernan’s findings as “conspiracy.” He set out to debunk the work by replicating the experiments on mRNA vials himself. But what Buckhaults discovered shocked him. Like McKernan, Buckhaults too found billions of tiny DNA fragments in Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, and recently testified about it before a South Carolina Senate hearing.

The echoes of the past have never reverberated as loud as they do today. Learning no lessons from it, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) insists that any residual DNA contamination in COVID vaccines is not a problem and that it “stands behind its findings of quality, safety, and efficacy for the mRNA vaccines.”

“While concerns have been raised previously as theoretical issues, available scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the minute amounts of residual DNA do not cause cancer, or changes to a person’s genetic code,” added the FDA.

Not surprisingly, the FDA would not provide the “available scientific evidence” to support its claim, but it’s worth noting that the vaccines’ own product labels show that genotoxicity and carcinogenicity tests were not carried out prior to their use. You can read investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi’s in-depth reporting on this topic by clicking on this link.

No one knows what comes next. But if past is prologue, one is assured of angry denial, scapegoating of whistleblowers and performative obfuscation delivered with tone-deafness honed by seven decades of relentless practice elevating bamboozling to high art form.

Thank you for reading. I hope you found this as illuminating as I did researching and writing about it. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. While you’re here, feel free to read my other essays and share them with your friends. As always, I enjoy reading your comments and try to respond to them as much as I can. Your patronage is very much appreciated.

Note: Parts of this essay were adapted from “The Virus and the Vaccine” by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher in the February 2000 The Atlantic issue. As always, you can click on the hyperlinks to read the references and citations in their entirety.