Suzanne Humphries on polio: what the evidence says · JRE #2294
SUBJECT: POLIO
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
So along comes polio research, and the polio vaccine, even to this day, is made on African green monkey kidney cells. Now, the African green monkey kidneys early on were basically taken out of their wild habitat in India, and millions of monkeys were brought to the USA for use. Unbeknownst to them and discovered by a scientist named Dr. Bernice Eddy is that there was a cancer-causing entity inside of the substrate that they were using to make the vaccine on the petri dishes. And that entity was Simeon Virus 40, SV40, called SV40 because before there were 39 others
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Several elements are accurate but the account conflates two distinct cell substrates. The current U.S. inactivated polio vaccine (IPOL) is grown on Vero cells, a continuous line derived from African green monkey kidney, so that part is correct. However, the SV40-contaminated polio vaccine used from 1955 to 1963 was made on primary kidney cells of rhesus and cynomolgus macaques, not African green monkeys, and rhesus macaques (native to Asia including India) are a different species; the Vero line used today has never been an SV40 source. SV40 was named as the 40th simian virus found in rhesus kidney cultures, which matches the quote, but the isolation and naming was done by Ben Sweet and Maurice Hilleman in 1960; Bernice Eddy's contribution was demonstrating that rhesus kidney cell extracts induced tumors in hamsters (1961) and later identifying that oncogenic substance as SV40 (1962). Federal reviewers concluded the evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal link between SV40-containing vaccines and human cancer, and epidemiological studies of recipients found no increased cancer risk overall.