Abortion and Vaccines
If you didn’t think the topic of vaccinations enough of a lightning rod, we also have to bring in the abortion issue, as several of the vaccines used today were developed from aborted fetal tissue.
For those people who are pro-life in regards to abortion, this is a serious dilemma. And in light of some recent findings connecting vaccines using aborted fetal tissue and autism, this is a serious issue regardless of one’s stance on abortion. This autism connection will be discuss in the latter portion of this article.
The childhood vaccines used that were developed from aborted fetal tissue include the vaccines for chicken pox, hepatitis A, and MMR (measles, mumps and rubella). There are not alternatives for these vaccines, including MMR, as it is the rubella portion of this vaccine which is derived from aborted fetal tissue, and the MMR shot will no longer be offered as separate shots.
The cell line used for the chicken pox and rubella vaccines is called WI-38, developed by Dr. Leonard Hayflick in 1962 at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, PA. Lung cells were taken from an aborted baby girl, one of many of the aborted babies used in the research of developing cell lines.
The cell line used for the hepatitis A vaccine is called MRC-5 and was developed by Dr. Stanley Plotkin in 1966 for the Medical Research Center in England. Lung cells were taken from an aborted baby boy for the development of the cell line.
The abortions were performed with the specific intent to create vaccines, as researchers needed to immediately harvest the live tissue and preserve it for use.
As aborted fetal cell lines are not immortal, additional tissue from aborted babies is being used to create new vaccines and sustain the existing ones. In 1985 the cell line PER C6 was developed and currently being used in research to develop vaccines to treat Ebola and HIV.
A paper called “Aborted Fetal Cell Lines and the Catholic Family” written by Debra Vinnedge of Children of God for Life covers an extensive history of the abortions and cell line research and does an excellent job of taking into consideration the moral implications of this issue.
Aborted Fetal Tissue and Autism
In April of 2011 I attended a Health and Human Services Reform Committee meeting at the Minnesota State Capital in which Dr. Theresa Deisher presented research that pointed to a connection between vaccines that were derived from aborted human fetal tissue and autism.
Analysis of autism disorder rates, published in March 2010 by the Environmental Protection Agency identified a ‘changepoint’ in US and worldwide autism rates. This changepoint year (1988) represent the year in which children were born that were subsequently diagnosed with autism.
Through further analysis of this data, Dr. Deisher and her organization Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute found two additional changepoint years. The one widespread exposure that coincided with these three changepoint years, 1980, 1988, and 1995 - was vaccines developed from aborted fetal tissue.
Dr. Deisher stated in her testimony to Minnesota legislature, “What we have found is that across continents, and across decades, changepoints in autism disorder (not considering autism spectrum but only autism disorder) are clearly associated with the introduction of vaccines produced using human fetal cell lines. Each time we inject our children with one of these vaccines, we are also injecting them with residual fetal human DNA.”
The FDA allows for 10 nanograms (ng) of residual DNA per vial, and in the chicken pox vaccine there is on average over 140 ng of human DNA. In the rubella vaccine there was found 2 micrograms of DNA, over 200 times the “safe” level set by the FDA.
This research has now been published in the peer reviewed Journal of Public Health and Epidemiology.
How could human DNA in vaccines possibly cause autism? In a review article in The Journal of Immunotoxicology Helen Ratajczak states:
The human DNA from the vaccine can be randomly inserted into the recipient’s genes by homologous recombination, a process that occurs spontaneously only within a species. Hot spots for DNA insertion are found on the X chromosome in eight autism-associated genes involved in nerve cell synapse formation, central nervous system development, and mitochondrial function (Deisher, 2010). This could provide some explanation of why autism is predominantly a disease in boys. Taken together, these data support the hypothesis that residual human DNA in some vaccines might cause autism.
So obviously there needs to be more research into the connection between human DNA in vaccines and autism, but the evidence so far is compelling and cannot be ignored.
More information on this subject can be found at the following links: