The entire world praises the benefits of vaccines, reassuring us they are safe and effective and responsible for eradicating horrible deadly diseases. What they aren’t telling you, is they, just like any other medication or product, can be contaminated with foreign bodies, chemicals, viruses and particles. Here is a contamination roundup:

Pieces of Glass

The Morning Call discovered that one of the world’s leading vaccine manufacturers, Sanofi Pasteur, had tiny pieces of glass in some batches of vaccines back in 2013, but the company didn’t recall any of the lots because they didn’t think it was necessary. The type of contamination is called vial delamination, where the vials shed flakes of glass called lamellae. The FDA warned that lamellae could cause serious adverse events such as an adverse immune system reaction.

In 2014 and 2015, more batches of vaccines yielded more pieces of glass contamination, but this time it was not considered to be caused by delamination, but rather, just plain old glass contamination. Also found were stainless steel particulates. Sanofi Pasteur did not find the cause of these particulates and did not perform a recall for contaminated vaccines. They also didn’t say anything to doctors, to the CDC, to ACIP, or to parents. Wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure that the vaccines you are giving your kids doesn’t have shards of glass in it??

Lead

Lead was banned from household paint in 1978 because we finally figured out it was toxic after using it for 6,000 years. Lead is dangerous to adults, children and pregnant women, for its potential of causing irreversible health effects. It can cause reproductive problems in men and women. It causes nervous system damage, stunted growth, kidney damage, and delayed development. So what was it doing in vaccines today? 

A group of Italian scientists recently tested 44 types of vaccines from 2 countries, and astonishingly found heavy metal contamination in every single vaccine meant for babies, but ironically the only vaccine that was free of metal contamination was the only veterinary vaccine tested. Um, poor kids? But the story isn’t over: lead wasn’t the only metal discovered contaminating the vaccines. They also found stainless steel, titanium, iron, chromium, tungsten, nickel, zirconium, gold, zinc, platinum, silver. The list goes on. 

Glyphosate

Kids may grow like weeds, but a vaccine contaminated with Glyphosate does not sound like a great idea. Glyphosate is of course the main ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Round-Up. The herbicide kills a variety of plants, including grasses and broadleaf plants, but was also named as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015. 

Then recently in 2018, a school groundskeeper sued Bayer’s Monsanto claiming that the popular herbicide caused his cancer and was awarded $289 million, which was then reduced to $78 million. Bayer faces about 8,000 more lawsuits on the herbicide.

So what the heck is this cancer-causing herbicide doing in children’s vaccines? Moms Across America sent out 5 childhood vaccines to an independent lab to be tested for glyphosate, and all came back positive, with the MMR having levels 25 times higher than the other vaccines. This obviously warrants further study. We shouldn’t be giving children a vaccine containing a cancer-causing ingredient, right??

Simian Virus 40

If you got a polio vaccine from 1955 through 1961 you were most likely exposed to simian virus 40, also known as SV40. The virus was present in the monkey kidney cells that was used to grow the vaccine. Because the contamination was not caught for years, it is estimated that around 90% of children and 60% of adults in the USA were inoculated with SV40-contaminated polio vaccines. This adds up to about 98 million Americans. 

SV40 is a DNA virus that can cause tumors in animals, and although it’s quite controversial whether SV-40 is a direct cause of many cancers, many scientists believe the virus contributed to the formation of mesothelioma, osteosarcoma, pediatric and adult brain tumors, and non-Hodgkin lymphomas. 

XMRV

It sounds like it would be a new model of Mercedes Benz, but it stands for xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus. This retrovirus was first discovered in 2006 in prostate cancer tissue and later detected in individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome. Next doctors discovered it was in the respiratory tract of patients with or without a respiratory tract infection. So what is this virus and why are we so stumped? This virus comes from mice. You know those cute little furry animals in cages in science labs. Well it turns out mice carry viruses! And using their brains to grow and make vaccines might be a bad idea. There have been many vaccines over the years that have been grown in mice tissue. Gross, right? Vaccines against rabies virus, yellow fever and Japanese encephalitis, were all cultured on mouse brains. No one knows for sure how or why some people test positive for XMRV, but as the saying goes, you are what you eat, or inject.

Pig Viruses

As if getting some mice virus wasn’t enough, in 2010 two Rotavirus vaccines (both RotaTeq and Rotarix) were found to be contaminated with DNA from porcine circovirus 1 (PCV1) and one vaccine was contaminated with both PCV1 and PCV2, which is a “lethal pig virus that causes immune suppression and a serious wasting disease in baby pigs that damages lungs, kidneys, the reproductive system, brain and ultimately causes death.” Wow, just wow. The vaccines already had a bad wrap with their increased risk of intussusception in babies (which is a bowel obstruction condition where the intestines telescope into itself and can cause serious harm, even death), and then they discovered the entire time the vaccine was licensed for use in the United States it was unknowingly contaminated with two strains of pig viruses, one of them lethal to baby pigs.   

Aborted fetal tissue, MCR-5

Ok so maybe you’ve heard about this one before. This is a known ingredient in vaccines, and in fact, it’s often the one cited by pro-lifers as their reason to not vaccinate. Vaccine manufacturers use human cell cultures to grow the virus in question. But it’s where this aborted fetal tissue comes from, in this particular instance, that warrants a little more exploration, and its place at the top of this list. MCR-5 is one cell line that happens to be from a baby aborted from a women in 1966 for “psychiatric reasons”. Wait a minute, psychiatric reasons? Yes, people, you read that right. I wish we knew more about this person in question, because maybe, just maybe, it’s not a great idea to take DNA from a mentally unstable person and put it in another person. I guess we can wait and see what happens…