I admit that the title of this post might be straining an analogy a bit in the service of my love of old Monty Python sketches and movies, but what can I say? I first encountered them in the 1970s on late night PBS when I was a teenager, and they stuck with me. Also, it sort of reminds me of how antivaxxers keep coming back again and again to attack something about vaccines that they have mistakenly or falsely convinced themselves to be a the enemy, something that (to them) makes vaccines horrifically dangerous. The problem is that they don’t possess a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch to destroy this particular killer rabbit, or, if they do, they proceed to count to five and blow themselves up, instead of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog. Such was my nostalgia-fueled take when I encountered yet another antivax screed about the dreaded “plasmid DNA in vaccines”—and SV40, too!—from one of the most inaptly named antivax Substack bloggers of all, the self-proclaimed 2nd Smartest Guy in the World (or, as I like to call him, 2ndSGitW). Yes, antivaxxers are launching another frontal assault on the Killer Rabbit of Plasmids, and, yes, they shouldn’t, because that rabbit’s dynamite.
The post that caught my attention was his Substack entry entitled Would You Like Plasmids with that?, and when I saw it I knew I had to dig into my knowledge base of basic molecular biology and school whoever this fool is on what a plasmid is and does. More importantly, this post gives me an opportunity to demonstrate yet again how there is nothing new under the sun in antivax world, because it explicitly references antivax tropes about SV40 and plasmids in vaccines that date back years and years. Conveniently enough, I’ve also been writing about them for years and years. Moreover, it appears that antivaxxers have been more active lately pushing the old “plasmid DNA in vaccines is making them dangerous” trope has been more “than in the recent past.
When last we encountered 2ndSGitW, he was resurrecting some of the most brain dead claims about vaccines and repurposing them for COVID-19 vaccines. I’m talking the false claim that vaccines cause prion diseases (an oldie moldy antivax claim), which is not surprising given that his entire Substack promotes nothing but quackery, antivax pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories, including the old cancer quack claim that chemotherapy doesn’t work. This time around, let’s see what he’s up to with respect to the dreaded “plasmid DNA”:
Most BigPharma injectables are deliberately contaminated with the extremely cytotoxic and highly carcinogenic SV40 promotor, which is a simian viral DNA sequence that induces cells to multiply and burn out or mutate into cancers.
SV40 is destructive to humans, and serves no therapeutic benefits; this poison was first added into the wholly unnecessary and exceptionally unsafe polio vaccines and was also deliberately put into the slow kill bioweapon C19 “vaccines.”
Is it any wonder then that ever since the polio vaccine rollout the trend in cancer cases has been on an unrelenting upswing, and with the introduction of the PSYOP-19 “vaccines” oncology expenditures have gone parabolic?
Bravo! Not only has 2ndSGitW managed to regurgitate antivax misinformation about SV40 in polio, but he’s done it in an entirely ahistorical fashion. You might remember that I wrote about the fear-mongering about SV40 in the original polio vaccine way, way back in 2013. Let’s explain why this take is so ahistorical.
SV40 in the polio vaccine
Before I move on and discuss more of 2ndSGitW’s nonsense, which, it turns out, is just an introduction to another Substack by an antivaxxer of whom I’d never heard before, Dr. Ah Kahn Syed, formerly @arkmedic on X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter. (I had encountered him before there.) Now he’s on Telegram, and a quick perusal of his feed revealed pretty much what I expected. Before I get to the “meat” of Syed’s post, first let me note what really happened with respect to SV40 and the polio vaccine. The long version from 11 years ago can be found here, but I think it worth repeating a CliffsNotes version for those who don’t want to go back to that post.
Way back in the late 1950s, batches of polio vaccine were inadvertently contaminated with a monkey virus known as SV40, which stands for “Simian Vacuolating Virus 40” or “Simian Virus 40.” The polio vaccines developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin in the 1950s were developed and then manufactured by growing the polio virus in kidney cells derived from Asian rhesus monkeys. Salk’s polio vaccine was a killed vaccine, in which the viral particles were inactivated with formaldehyde and the killed virus injected to produce an antibody response against live polio virus. Moreover, it contained very little SV40, and what little was there was inactive, because the formaldehyde also inactivated the SV40 virus. Sabin’s virus, on the other hand, was a live virus vaccine and was more heavily contaminated with SV40.
In 1959, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health named Bernice Eddy noticed that monkey kidney cells were dying without an obvious cause that she could find. (Note that she was also a critical player in the Cutter incident, in which she discovered that the vaccines manufactured by Cutter Laboratories had live polio virus in them.) She made extracts of the cells and injected them under the skin of 23 newborn hamsters; within nine months 20 of them developed large tumors. Meanwhile, vaccine pioneer Maurice Hilleman and his collaborator Ben Sweet isolated the virus responsible and then found SV40 was found in both the Sabin and Salk vaccines. As an aside, one incident in this history that made conspiracy mongering so much easier occurred when Eddy brought her findings and concerns to Dr. Joseph Smadel, chief of the NIH’s biologics division, who, it must be admitted, made a huge mistake and dismissed the tumors as harmless “lumps.”
By 1961, there was significant concern among U.S. Public Health Service officials, as it had been found that as many as one-third of oral polio vaccine doses were tainted. As a result, although there was no evidence at the time that SV40 was harmful to humans, it was ordered that manufacturers find a way to eliminate SV40 from all future vaccines, which, to their credit, they promptly did. New procedures were developed to neutralize any SV40 and SV40-free African green monkeys were then used to produce the bulk of the vaccine instead of rhesus monkeys. Showing that no good deed goes unpunished, three decades later conspiracy theorists latched on to the African green monkeys as the vector through which the AIDS virus was brought into the U.S. via the new polio vaccines. These actions were all well and good, but the government also didn’t recall the contaminated vaccine stocks and did not notify the public, because government officials were worried about a panic that might jeopardize the vaccine program. In any case, by 1963, SV40 had been eliminated from the nation’s polio vaccine stock. However, millions of people in the US had received oral vaccine contaminated with SV40.
But does SV40 cause cancer in humans, as antivaxxers have been fear mongering about since at least the 1900s? In a word, as far as we can tell, no. I also discussed the evidence in detail in my post on the subject and therefore won’t recount it in detail here, although this 2007 review article summarizes the evidence that there has been no correlation between exposure to SV40-tainted polio vaccine and an elevated risk of cancer.
None of this stops 2ndSGitW from citing Syed and ranting:
The following article is an absolute must-read as it further exposes just what kind of murderous sociopaths are running the Medical Industrial Complex and their BigPharma partners-in-crime — we may conclude that no vaccines are safe and effective, and that all of them must be avoided like the bioterror plagues that they are.
I also like to point out how much of a conspiracy theory this is. Remember, what antivaxxers like 2ndSGitW are saying is not that the government “covered up” that oral polio vaccine had become contaminated with small amounts of SV40 virus (although its not announcing it to the public was unforgivable and only somewhat understandable), but rather that the government had intentionally contaminated the oral polio vaccine with SV40. Of course, this makes zero sense. Given that no one knew what SV40 could do or had any idea that SV40 injected in high concentrations could induce tumors in mice, what possible motive could there be? And, then, why would the government tell vaccine manufacturers to get rid of SV40 contamination strictly on the basis of the precautionary principle based on a rather small animal experiment? Because they’re sociopaths?
One also can’t help but note that, for all his pretensions of being smarter than scientists (and, I suppose, the average antivaxxer), like most antivaxxers, 2ndSGitW conflates the SV40 virus with the SV40 promoter sequence in a plasmid. Let’s just say that the two are not the same thing, as I will discuss. Not even close.
But what about the rest?
“Dr. Ah Kahn Syed” regurgitates a “greatest hits” of plasmid nonsense
So let’s go to the pseudonymous antivaxxer Dr. Ah Kahn Syed, or Arkmedic. Since I’ve been out of it for a while, due to personal issues and my having had to get ready to give a talk in Wisconsin on Friday (a talk that might well end up being the basis for a paper, or at least a decent SBM blog post), I hadn’t noticed that Australian antivaxxers were dredging up the “SV40 DNA contamination in vaccines” claim to attack the Australian equivalent of our FDA.
In any case, Arkmedic (the ‘nym I’ll use because it’s easier to type) first states:
Plasmids are DNA sequences used by laboratories to manufacture vaccines and biologics and contain elements that should never get to the human supply chain.
It turns out that this has been happening for decades, discovered following independent investigation into the COVID vaccines.
Revelations this week implicate every recombinant vaccine currently in use, in this major contamination scandal.
Tell me you don’t understand basic molecular biology without telling me you don’t understand basic molecular biology. It is, of course, true that plasmids contain DNA sequences. In brief, they are small, circular DNA sequences that can replicate outside of the chromosome, most commonly found in bacteria, where they appear to have evolved in order to let bacteria pass useful genes back and forth, such as genes encoding proteins that make them resistant to specific antibiotics. Indeed, plasmids were first discovered in the late 1950s after the discovery that extrachromosomal antibiotic resistance (R) factors are the responsible agents for the transmissibility of multiple antibiotic resistance among the enterobacteria. It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that molecular biologists worked out how useful plasmids could be to use as vectors to introduce genes into cells and induce the cells to make the proteins encoded by those genes, first in bacteria, primarily E. coli. Over the next couple of decades, scientists learned to use restriction enzymes to introduce almost whatever sequence they wanted into plasmids, large quantities of which could be produced by introducing them into E. coli and growing the bacteria in nutrient broth, after which the bacteria could be lysed and the desired plasmid isolated. (I did a lot of this as a graduate student in the early 1990s and was a research fellow in the late 1990s, in preparation to use plasmids in my experiments. Sometimes I can still smell the yeast from the liters of LB broth I used to use to grow up the bacteria.)
So what were the two events that supposedly triggered Arkmedic’s fear-mongering Substack? I’ll let him say:
The first of these events is the dramatic passage of the Port Hedland council motion1in Australia last week to
(1) recognise that there is unacceptable levels of plasmid DNA contamination of the “mRNA” COVID vaccines and
(2) to inform recipients of said vaccines, and health practitioners, of this contaminant.[The story is covered by the excellent Alison Bevage here including articles from Rebekah Barnett and Julian Gillespie with more details on the background to the vote here and Russell Broadbent MP’s letter to the Prime Minister here]
Of the two councillors that voted to continue to keep the citizens in the dark on this issue, one was the mayor who managed to get himself embroiled in a scandal of his own in 2022 whilst on a video meeting with a school board receiving some Vietnamese strawberries in a rather unorthodox manner. There was no suggestion at the time of writing that Mayor Carter’s voting decision was in any way compromised by his holiday escapades. It should be recognised however that Mayor Carter did dye his hair for last week’s event (in case you don’t recognise him).
This should all sound very familiar to any regular reader here, as I’ve been writing about American antivaxxers having claimed the same thing, generally citing bad science by Kevin McKernan and Philip Buckhaults, sadly often believed by legitimate scientists, including a (former) scientific hero of mine, Dr. Wafik El-Diery, an oncologist and cancer researcher who has done a lot of work on the tumor suppressor proteins p53 and p21 who, sadly, found Buckhaults’ bad science far more convincing than he should have. Indeed, Buckhaults himself testified before the South Carolina Senate Medical Affairs Ad-Hoc Committee on DHEC in his lab coat, producing a viral video (language intentional) that promoted the false idea far and wide that COVID-19 vaccines were contaminated with way more SV-40-containing plasmid DNA than the FDA allowed. In this, I considered him a useful idiot for the antivax movement, a legitimate scientist perhaps too interested in making a splash on social media by promoting a contrarian finding that was incorrect.
Unfortunately, it looks as though Australian antivaxxers have been successful in getting a local government to vote to call for the suspension of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and to warn all healthcare providers about the vaccines within its jurisdiction using misinformation and bad science. (Yes, they cited Kevin McKernan’s awful preprint that had been circulating for many months before this and whose bad science in part influenced Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo to issue “guidance” full of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.)
In fairness, it appears to have been a report by David Speicher in September that sparked Australian antivaxxers to act: such as it is:
And here’s a post linking to an article that includes the report, which you can find in a Dropbox link:
I note that David Speicher appears to be using methods similar to the ones used by David McKernan. Moreover, in the methods section, I found that he tested only three vials of vaccine, both of which had expired nearly two years earlier, and for one of the vials the seal had been broken, suggesting that the vaccine vial had been accessed. Seriously, get a load of this:
On May 14, 2024, I received three Australian vials of COVID-19 modRNA vaccines at the University of Guelph (Table 1; from Left to Right in Figure 1). These vials were shipped on 15kg of dry ice, but when the package was received there was no dry ice in the package and contents were cool to the touch, but not warm. Temperature of the package was not recorded. The vials were immediately placed in a laboratory fridge (+2° -8° C ) until tested. The Pfizer vials were unopened were untampered as they had intact flip-off plastic caps with printed lot numbers and expiration dates. The Moderna vial did not have an intact flip-off plastic cap and appears to have been used as the septum appeared to be punctured, and the contents of the vial was at half volume.
Does anyone see the problem with this right away? One thing I’ve emphasized in my previous discussions is how much less stable RNA is than DNA. RNA degrades in aqueous solution much faster than DNA does. We have no idea how these vials had been stored, and the longer they were stored at a temperature that allowed for the degradation of mRNA, the higher the apparent DNA-to-RNA ratio would become. That alone should make you question the results, whatever they are. This is, in fact, a useless experiment. Unsurprisingly, I also noticed some of the same methodological problems that McKernan’s work had, which I might address in a future post, either here or at my not-so-super-secret other blog. Suffice to say that this study is not any more convincing than those of McKernan or Buckhaults, including his finding that by PCR, only two runs of one vial slightly exceeded the recommended 10 ng/ml amount of DNA (the rest did not) and his use of a fluormetric assay that supposedly found much higher levels of DNA contamination, likely due to methodology. (I discussed these problems in the older experiments here.)
Next up from Arkmedic is a real blast from the past, portrayed by Mary Demasi (an antivaxxer with whom we should all be familiar) as a new “bombshell”:
The second thing that has happened is the bombshell exposé released today by Maryanne Demasi of exactly the same problem in the Gardasil HPV vaccinations discovered all the way back in 2011.
Yes, those are the same HPV vaccinations that you were told were safe when your daughter’s school sent out flyers which just forgot to mention the residual plasmid DNA known by the FDA to be a contaminant in the Gardasil vaccine (and others, which we will come to).
I’ll just point out in passing that in that list is a lot of HPV antigen to take in one injection – 270 micrograms. For comparison, the Hepatitis B vaccine (Engerix) has 20 micrograms. It’s equivalent to being injected with 13 injections of Hep B vaccine, each of a different strain. Of course nobody has ever looked at whether having that much antigen or having 9 strains of antigen at the same time is safe in the short or long term. The FDA’s Paul Offit (who has millions of dollars of vested interests in the vaccine industry) said so, but has so far declined to take the 10,000 vaccines in one go that he also claims is safe.
Do I really need to repeat how deceptive that trope is about Dr. Paul Offit. He didn’t say that it was safe to take 10,000 vaccines at a time; he was merely debunking the “too many too soon” antivax trope by pointing out that theoretically an infant’s immune system has the ability to respond to 10,000 vaccines at one time, all in the context of pointing out how, even though the number of vaccines in the CDC-recommended childhood vaccine schedule has increased, children now encounter far fewer antigens in the vaccine schedule than they did in the past.
Arkmedic even cites an old antivax chestnut from an old blog pal, Sin Hang Lee, who claimed to find HPV L1 gene DNA bound up in aluminum adjuvant. Remember Lee’s use of highly sensitive nested PCR to find HPV DNA in the HPV vaccine Gardasil? Yes, that’s what happened in 2011, the scandal that wasn’t but has been resurrected by Demasi 13 years later to bolster the false and intentionally deceptive narrative that DNA contamination in all vaccines is highly dangerous? Here’s where having blogged about this sort of thing for so long comes in really handy. I immediately recognize what antivaxxers are talking about when they resurrect a decade-old specific piece of misinformation in a way that someone who has not been paying attention as long might not.
The same thing with Arkmedic’s take on adjuvants, which takes up a large part of his post. Basically, to boil it down, he points out that several commonly used adjuvants can also be used as transfection agents; i.e., chemicals that facilitate the entry of DNA fragments into cells. Transfection agents are often used in cell culture to introduce a plasmid into cultured cells in order to induce the cell to produce the protein(s) coded for by cDNA(s) inserted into the plasmid. Indeed, the lipid nanoparticles used in the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 were designed to do just that: To introduce the mRNA contained within them into cells, so that the mRNA can serve as a template to produce the viral spike protein, which then serves as an antigen for the vaccines.
Get a load of this:
So which other agents can be used for transfection, that are not commonly regarded as transfection agents?
Here’s a little list to remember – it includes either transfection agents that can act alone, or agents that are enhancers of transfection where other agents exist.
Polysorbate (Tween), which is a surfactant/emulsifier (reference) Metallic cations including Aluminium, Zirconium and Cerium (reference3) Soaps such as saponins used as the “novel” adjuvant in Novavax (reference) Histidine, a positively charged amino acid (reference) Do you notice anything (apart from the fact that each of those claims is referenced)?
They are all adjuvants for vaccines, and pretty much every vaccine has at least one of these but some have more than one. They are everywhere.
The second one interested me. Calcium phosphate transfection used to be commonly used… in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was highly inefficient, usually introducing the plasmid into less than 5% of cells. That’s why calcium phosphate was supplanted by lipid-based transfection reagents like Lipofectin or Lipofectamine in the 1990s. Here’s the thing. These agents were more efficient, but, even so, not particularly efficient. (Why do you think that virus-based methods of introducing genes into cells, such as replication-deficient adenovirus or lentivirus, were developed? Of course, I ask again: Why do you think that it was necessary to package the lipids used in the lipid nanoparticles into microspheres containing “payloads” of RNA? Simple. It’s because all those other methods described by Arkmedic are not very efficient in vivo (in a living organism).
As for aluminum hydroxide, which is indeed often used as an adjuvant, in my 35 years of doing molecular biology starting as a student, I have never used (or seen AlOH used) as a transfection reagent. I note that the paper cited only found that these methods were more efficient than calcium phosphate, which is a mighty low bar. I also note that what we’re talking about is the injection of a tiny amount of adjuvant in a localized spot in the muscle. Even in the event that the adjuvant did function as a transfection reagent, the DNA fragments are short and do not code for any protein because of how short they are. Moreover, contrary to antivax claims, SV40 sequences have not been shown to get into the nucleus in significant amounts and “integrate” into the chromosomal DNA. More importantly, even if they could do this and, in rare cases, turn on a cancer-causing oncogene (or any DNA fragment turn off a tumor suppressor), it would only be in the cell entered. That would mean that the only cancer that could be caused would be from the cell affected, at the site of injection. How many reports of this have we seen?
Hilariously, Arkmedic seems really put off by a 1999 paper that looked at transfection potential of various compounds and adjuvants using a plasmid and a reporter gene:
Arkmedic’s response? It’s hilarious to me:
The problem with this paper is that it is short, poorly written and reinforces the complete lack of experience of the lead author who had never written a paper before and pretty much never touched the subject again. The paper has no transfection graphs and we are expected to believe that every vial tested with a plasmid had zero transfections. That wouldn’t happen. Even naked plasmids transfect a small amount, so zero is an unlikely number.
No. If you dump naked plasmid onto a plate of cultured cells, it is unlikely that you will detect a signal from your transporter gene indicating that some cells were transfected. Remember, in the context of any transfection experiment, a reading of “zero” does not rule out that some transfection has occurred. It merely indicates that whatever transfection did occur produced a signal below the level of detection. In any event, the author used an old assay commonly used in the 1990s, along with a colorimetric immunoassay that produced a colored solution, using different solutions of the enzyme to produce a calibration curve. It was a perfectly acceptable method to measure reporter gene output (and still is, although very dated).
Arkmedic also makes much of the cell line used, saying “No one uses that cell line” and noting that there are only a couple of publications using it in PubMed and claiming that the author knew the transfections would fail. That’s a bit of a conspiracy-mongering claim, if you ask me, but here’s something that, I note, antivaxxers seem not to have done. They haven’t replicated the experiment in other cell lines that they might consider more amenable to transfection and using reporter systems that don’t date back 25+ years. The way is open, although I might regret saying that given how deceptive the experiments of Speicher, McKernan, and Buckhaults have been with respect to something as relatively simple (conceptually) as measuring DNA contamination in a vaccine.
Run away! It’s DNA!
Everything old is new again, as this post by Arkmedic shows. It’s actually much longer, as long as or longer than even—believe it or not—the average length of one of my SBM posts. Arkmedic goes on and on about SV40 and polio (already discussed above) and cites claims that, contrary to all the good epidemiological science that failed to find a link between SV40-contaminated polio vaccine and cancer incidence after the early 1960s. It is truly what we in the biz call a “target-rich” environment that links to other posts with misinformation that would take too long to discuss in this article and likely deserve posts of their own, here and/or at my not-so-super-secret other blog.
The main point is simple. The fear mongering about “DNA contamination” in vaccines somehow insinuating itself into your cells, then into your nucleus, and then into your chromosomes in order to cause cancer or other horrible outcomes is old and appeared shortly after scientists started developing vaccines using genetic engineering to produce the protein or peptide antigen used for a new generation of vaccines. It should therefore surprise no one that this deceptive narrative about vaccines “contaminating” or “altering” your DNA reappeared so rapidly when a new generation of vaccines that use mRNA to drive cells near the injection site to produce the protein antigen rather than simply injecting a protein ± an adjuvant in order to produce an immune response. Unfortunately, as promising as they are and as safe and effective as the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines have been, their technology was basically custom-made to provoke such distortions of science and misinformation from antivaxxers like Arkmedic and 2ndSGitW.
You know, in the end, antivaxxers like 2ndSGitW and Arkmedic actually aren’t at all like King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They do just keep launching frontal assault after frontal assault against the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.
