US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has recently made a pretty bold – and misleading – claim about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, stating that it contains “a lot of aborted fetus debris and DNA particles.”
Kennedy Jr made the claim on April 30 when speaking to News Nation about why some religious groups – specifically referring to Mennonites living in Texas, which is currently at the center of the ongoing measles outbreak in the US – might object to having the vaccine.
While misinformation has followed the MMR vaccine for a long time, the US is in a particularly vulnerable situation right now, with over 900 confirmed cases of measles and three deaths from the disease. So, when someone of RFK Jr’s prominence makes a bold claim about it – particularly when they’ve got previous for health misinformation – it’s worthwhile investigating how true that claim might be.
“Aborted fetus debris” – false
To address the “aborted fetus debris” claim requires us to travel back in time to the 1960s, when American researcher Stanley Plotkin was developing the vaccine for rubella, one of the three main targets of the MMR vaccine.
Plotkin did so using a fetal cell line, known as WI-38, which originated from lung cells taken from a single aborted fetus. This abortion was legal, consented to, and wasn’t carried out for the express purpose of vaccine development. The WI-38 cell line could also be maintained indefinitely without requiring the use of any additional aborted material.
The WI-38 cells were used by Plotkin to grow a weakened (also known as attenuated) version of the rubella virus – one that could still trigger an immune response, but not cause illness – which eventually ended up in the MMR vaccine. It’s a method that’s still used to make the vaccine today.
However, contrary to RFK Jr’s claims, it’s only the weakened viruses that end up in the vaccine – not the cells. That’s because they are purified several times in order to isolate the viruses from the cellular material.
As Dr Miriam Laufer, Interim Director of the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland, explained to Reuters: “The virus is grown in these cells, then this virus is purified, meaning everything other than the virus is filtered out, and all that’s left is this attenuated virus that can’t make you sick.”
“DNA particles” – can be true, but it doesn’t cause harm
It’s also important to address what RFK Jr said about “DNA particles”, because there is at least an element of truth to that – but it only extends so far.
Some tiny fragments of DNA from the cells may make it through the purification process, but according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center, it’s both minimal and not going to do anyone any harm.
“Because vaccine viruses go through several steps of purification and because DNA does not withstand these processes very well, any components of DNA that remain are highly fragmented and minimal. When DNA from the production process has been measured in vaccines, it was only present in picogram quantities. A picogram is one-trillionth of a gram (0.000000000001),” the center explains.
“As such, this small amount of fragmented material is not able to cause damage or interact with our own DNA.”
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The content of this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
Source Link: RFK Jr Claims MMR Vaccine Contains “Aborted Fetus Debris” – It Doesn’t
