From DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) to DNA alteration by vaccines

Here we go again, as I’ve come across something that leads me repeat a mantra that I’ve been repeating since the first COVID-19 vaccines started to make the news as they entered clinical trials: In the world of antivaxxers in the age of COVID-19, everything old is new again. I’ve written about many examples of this phenomenon since the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer first received its Emergency Use Approval (EUA) in December 2020, including various claims that soon emerged about the COVID-19 vaccines causing infertility, cancer, death, and other old “vaccine injuries” long attributed to vaccines, while even claiming that “aborted fetal parts” were used to make the vaccines. Indeed, it wasn’t long before “new school” antivaxxers had even invoked one of the hoariest claims of the modern antivax movement, namely that vaccines cause autism. Some of my colleagues were surprised when another old antivax claim was resurrected that invokes fantastical biological mechanisms by which the mRNA vaccines could supposedly “permanently alter your DNA,” but it turns out that those claims were just a predictable resurrection of old antivax claims.

What reminded me of this phenomenon yet again was a post seen yesterday on—where else?—the hellsite formerly known as Twitter but now rebranded as X:

“Before Dr. Bradstreet was murdered he tested the blood of nearly 70+ autistic children & found 3 components of DNA. Mother, father, and a third unknown DNA source. He then realized the third DNA came from the aborted fetal cell lines in vaccines. He concluded that this may… pic.twitter.com/VeXQXjOPs7

— “Sudden And Unexpected” (@toobaffled) July 6, 2024

What interested me about this was that, of all the things I had read and written about Jeff Bradstreet, I had never heard the claim that he had been killed off because he had discovered that “fetal DNA” in vaccines was causing autism and The Trans.

You might recall that Jeff Bradstreet was an an antivax quack who specialized in “autism biomed,” in other words quackery designed to treat autism, which he believed to be caused by vaccines. Back in the day, these quacks even had an organization, Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!). His particular grift in autism biomed was the use of GcMAF to treat autism. GcMAF is an immunomodulatory protein that is found normally in the blood of healthy people. By “immunomodulatory,” I mean that GcMAF activity affects the function of the immune system. The glycoprotein (a protein with sugar molecules attached) GcMAF results from sequential deglycosylation (removal of sugar molecules) of the vitamin D-binding protein (the Gc protein). The protein that results is thought to be a macrophage activating factor (MAF). MAFs are a class of protein known as a lymphokine, and they regulate the expression of antigens on the surface of macrophages. One of their functions is to “activate” macrophages, which can under the proper circumstances attack cancer cells. Of note, the production of GcMAF can be blocked by an enzyme called Nagalase (alpha-N-acetylgalactosaminidase), produced by many cancers, which led to its first incarnation in quackery, as a “cure” for many cancers by Bill Sardi and Timothy Hubbell based on dubious science and a clinical trial that didn’t show what its proponents claimed it did and was later retracted. Yes, for cancer, GcMAF was quackery.

Over the years, the therapeutic claims for GcMAF expanded, so that it wasn’t just for cancer any more. Thanks to Bradstreet and other autism quacks, GcMAF became the next big thing in “autism biomed,” and Bradstreet was a true believer in it as a potential cure for autism, as evidenced by this video of one of his talks from 2012 touting the miracle of GcMAF. In a single-arm, uncontrolled study published in a highly dubious journal, Bradstreet claimed to have observed improvement in autistic symptoms due to GcMAF. Another study with which Bradstreet was involved in claimed that GcMAF could normalize abnormal gene expression in the endocannabinoid system of autistic children, which, of course, links his work with claims made by some in the “autism biomed” movement that medical marijuana treats autism. Of course, this was an unrandomized, unblinded study. Let’s just say that the evidence for GcMAF for autism never got any better.

So where does the conspiracy theory come in (other than, of course, the one about how “They” wanted to suppress GcMAF as a cure for autism)? Sadly, in 2015 Bradstreet’s body was found in the Rocky Broad River in North Carolina. He was the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, and the police determined that he had taken his own life. You can guess where this is going, I bet. It didn’t take long at all for a conspiracy theory to develop around his death, predictably that his death was not the result of suicide but rather murder.

Within a week, Erin Elizabeth, a “health freedom” activist and the longtime girlfriend of the quack tycoon Joe Mercola had taken the story of Bradstreet’s death and run with it, to produce a conspiracy theory that “They” had killed him. Who was “They”? Take your pick, but it involved big pharma, because of course it did, and the CDC, because of course it did, all insinuated without being outright stated. The conspiracy theory grew, too, to encompass more than just Jeff Bradstreet. For example, when cancer quack Nicholas Gonzalez, who had come to “fame” for recommending a regiment to treat pancreatic cancer that involved coffee enemas, died suddenly of an MI, Elizabeth was quick to suggest that Gonzalez’s death might not have been due to natural causes. Let’s put it this way, as she did:

There is currently no evidence of foul play in his death. I am aware that a number of people are reporting on what appears to be a sudden wave of seemingly mysterious deaths among alternative medicine doctors and industry pioneers. There will no doubt be a tremendous amount of speculation that asks whether Dr. Gonzalez has somehow been deliberately killed. Such speculation is entirely premature, as none of us are aware of any facts which would support such a notion at this time.

We can’t rule it out, but there is presently no evidence that foul play is to blame here.

Of course, it wasn’t long before Elizabeth’s readers ran with the idea, speculating about the neuromuscular blocker succinylcholine as a way to mimic a heart attack and noting that the CIA “has admitted they have a frozen dart that will put someone in cardiac arrest.” There was also considerable consternation expressed over Gonzalez dying suddenly even though he was claimed to be in perfect health. Unfortunately, sometimes ventricular fibrillation or another fatal arrhythmia is the first manifestation of heart disease. Sound familiar? That might have been the first time that I had to remind antivaxxers that a fatal arrhythmia is all too often the first clinical manifestation of heart disease.

In any event, the conspiracy theory grew, with Elizabeth adding any unexpected or violent death of a “holistic healer” or antivaxxer to what I started sarcastically calling victims of the “pharma hit squad.” Within a couple of years, dozens of such cases had been added to Elizabeth’s list under the hashtag “holistic doctor deaths.” Although not all of them were called “murder,” the insinuation that “something was not right” was always there.

But back to Bradstreet and the DNA. What got me writing about this was quite simple. I had never heard of the fusion of these two conspiracy theories before, the first being, of course, the conspiracy theory that Jeff Bradstreet had been “murdered,” rather than had taken his own life as the feds closed in. The second was an old antivax claim based on “work” (if you can call it that) by an antivax biochemist named Theresa Deisher, who proposed that there was DNA from aborted fetuses in various vaccines made from virus stock grown up in cell lines derived from fetuses in the 1960s and 1970s and falsely claimed that that DNA contamination was responsible for the “autism epidemic.” It was a claim that resulted in an unholy fusion between the antivaccine and antiabortion movements. You might even remember memes like this from several years before the pandemic:

Basically, claims made based on the finding in vaccines of trace amounts of DNA from the cell lines used to grow up virus stocks to use in the manufacture of the vaccines all end up being similar, at least in terms of the made up mechanism for the DNA to cause autism, to the claim of Helen Ratajczak that fetal DNA from vaccines somehow would get into brain cells and undergo recombination with the baby’s native DNA to result in the production of altered proteins on the cell surface of the brain’s cells, thus provoking an autoimmune reaction and—voilà!—autism. Indeed, old hands might remember that we used to joke about “homologous recombinaltion tiniker,” which was how Ratajczak had somehow misspelled the actual process of homologous recombination that she had been twisting to her antivax ends. The idea was that “aborted fetal DNA” from vaccines was somehow “permanently” altering a child’s DNA through homologous recombination.

Yes, regular readers know that antivaxxers have long demonized certain vaccines because human cell lines that originated from aborted fetuses nearly 60 years ago are used to grow up the virus stock used to make the vaccines. Never mind that vaccines manufactured using such cell lines (WI-38 or MRC-5, for example) have saved millions of lives and prevented billions of cases of disease. Demonizing vaccines that currently require such cells for their manufacture is such a common antivax trope that I even have tags for it, including fetal cell lines, aborted fetal tissue, and (of course) fetal DNA, that last one because one of the most persistent claims among antivaxxers is that vaccines are contaminated with fetal DNA. That last one is particularly persistent, thanks to biochemist turned antivaccine propagandist Theresa Deisher. If you believe Deisher and antivaxxers, that fetal DNA is so magic that truly minuscule amounts of short fragments of fetal DNA can not only somehow pass through the blood-brain barrier but then also get into neurons and express “non-self” proteins that are then somehow recognized by the immune system to produce “autoimmunity” leading to—you guessed it!—autism. Never mind that the speculative contortions of science needed to make such claims, which can sound plausible to the scientifically ignorant and unsophisticated but, are laughed at by anyone who’s ever worked with DNA in a research lab. As I said at the beginning, everything old is new again, as not only did antivaxxers resurrect claim that vaccines “permanently alter your DNA” for COVID-19 vaccines, but they quickly started fear mongering about “fetal cells” being used to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines.

While everything old might be new again, another old thing that is new is the—shall we say?—recombination of multiple antivax conspiracy theories. Now, I don’t know exactly when Candace Lee-Bradstreet started spreading the idea that her brother-in-law had been killed because he had discovered that there was “fetal DNA” in vaccines, given that I had never seen anything from Bradstreet himself suggesting that, either in the form of rhetoric or claims that he had “done a study” that had found a “third” DNA marker. I have so many questions here. First, what were the first two DNA markers? And how would this third DNA marker cause autism and The Trans? And how did he know it came from those evil magical “aborted fetus cell lines”? Also, who was the control group, or was there even one? Inquiring minds want to know, and I don’t mean inquiring minds (if you can call them that) like this one:

In people who have been vaccinated with vaccines made with cultured animal tissue, does that mean there are animal DNA markers altering human cognition?

— Daemon Bernstein (@DaemonBernstein) July 6, 2024

I have long argued that antivax and science denial are inherently conspiracy theories. Indeed, antivax has long been open to cross-pollination of various conspiracy theories, and this is just an example that I’m surprised I hadn’t seen before. I wonder what other strange new combinations I’ll find if I look. In this case, I never would have imagined that DAN! would, years and years later, morph into DNA conspiracy mongering bout vaccines.