I’m so passionate about the MMR vaccine and the eradication of the measles. If you’re interested in learning about some interesting new research and some more about the vaccine and virus, listen to this new podcast of me interviewed by Outbreak News Today!
Measles is 6 times more contagious than influenza. Around 400 people die from measles EVERY DAY worldwide. Measles is one of the leading killers of children on this planet. (As reported by the Measles & Rubella Initiative.)
As of the beginning of the year to mid April the CDC has confirmed 61 people from ten different states (California, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Washington) have tested positive for measles.
Let’s travel back in time…
2016: 70 cases across 16 states
2015: 188 cases across 24 states
2014: 667 cases (record number) from 27 states
2008: Measles cases rise due to the increase of unvaccinated people.
Elimination (not eradication) of measles was documented in the United States in 2000. Only between 37 and 220 people were reported to have the measles each year.
Measles vaccines became routine in 1963.
Before 1963 measles infected millions of people each year and was responsible for hundreds of deaths. The CDC reports that 3-4 million people were infected every year.
Back to today…
There is a good chance that someone will be diagnosed with measles TODAY in the United States. It is a fact that hundreds of people on this planet will die from measles by nightfall. Many of these people will be babies and children–babies and children whose parents WISH they had access to vaccines that would have saved their lives.
Why not save your child? If you haven’t vaccinated your children what’s holding you back?
Please visit the Measles an Rubella Initiative to learn how you can help.
Are there fetal cells in vaccines? No. Do some vaccines contain viruses grown in cells from the human fetal origin? Yes. But, I feel this needs some explanation.
And before I get started, this isn’t meant to be a debate or opinion article. These are just the facts as I’ve researched them. And before I get into the issue at hand, you’re going to be getting a microbiology lesson…
The cell theory states: All cells arise from pre-existing cells.
Remember the term mitosis from biology class? That’s how parent cells make their daughter cells. The parent cell replicates all of their chromosomes into two sets and then splits into two cells, leaving one set of chromosomes in each cell. That’s it, in a nutshell. This happens over and over and over: parents forming daughters, and daughters becoming parents and forming more daughters.
Under the right conditions, cells love to reproduce. Scientists can take all kinds of cells and grow them in the laboratory under controlled conditions. Cells that are grown in an artificial environment, such as a culture dish, in a nutrient-rich solution to support the growth of the cells, and under controlled/ideal conditions of temperature, humidity, and gaseous atmosphere are called a cell culture.
Cells in a culture can be grown directly from living tissues. This is called primary cell culture. And oftentimes a primary cell culture will contain many types of cells in one dish.
These primary cultures can be manipulated in the lab until only one type of cell remains. Cell culture with only one type of cell is called a cell strain.
The cell strain is then used to establish a cell line. A cell line is a cell culture formed from a single cell, and thus, each cell in the culture will be daughters of that cell. That means each cell in the culture will have the exact same genetic makeup. This uniformity allows for experimental control.
Got it? Okay. Now, just focus on the cell line, daughters of just ONE CELL. Daughters becoming parents and making more daughters…
And a side note: Cells do not reproduce to infinity. There are a set number of times a cell can reproduce before it can no longer make daughter cells (called the Hayflick limit). So, scientists have to introduce a genetic mutation into cell lines that allow them to reproduce indefinitely, this is called an immortalized cell line.
Now we jump to virology. A virus lacks the ability to reproduce on its own. It needs to use a cell in order to make many, many copies of itself in order to cause disease. Therefore, to make a vaccine to create immunity to a virus, you must first have many copies of a virus, and to have many copies of a virus, you need cells to infect the virus with.
So, researchers infect cells with a virus to get more viruses to use in a vaccine. Okay. But, you can’t use the virus as is in the vaccine because it will lead to infection with the disease, so there has to be something done to the virus so that it cannot cause disease. A virus is unable to cause disease if it cannot make enough copies of itself to infect enough cells in the body. So, the best way to weaken, or attenuate a virus, is to make it so that it is unable to replicate in the body.
How do you do this?
A cell line is infected with a virus. Once the virus establishes itself and begins to reproduce in the cells, the conditions under which the cells are grown are slowly changed. This causes a mutation in the virus so that the virus grows best under the altered conditions. These are conditions that are different from those of the normal human body. We call this new virus an attenuated (weakened) virus.
The attenuated virus is the virus that can now be injected into the body as a live attenuated vaccine. The weakened virus provokes an immune response by the body but cannot replicate efficiently, so it is unable to cause disease. This type of vaccine elicits the most potent and long-lasting of all vaccine-related immune responses on the market today, requiring the fewest boosters.
On to the matter at hand: The cells used to make the cell lines.
There are two human cell strains used to create vaccines that are in use today. The cells used to grow the viruses for these vaccines are descendants of aborted fetal cells. And I want to stress the fact that NOT ALL vaccines use pathogens grown in human cell lines.
The first cell line, WI-38 (Winstar Institute 38), was developed by Leonard Hayflick in 1962. These cells are descendants of lung cells (human diploid lung fibroblasts) from a four-month-old female fetus aborted because the family felt they had too many children.6
Notice the phrase, “descendants of”. All of the cells in this cell line are daughters of one cell found in the lung tissue of a fetus, generations removed from the original cell.
The cell line, WI-38, was found to grow many viruses very well, including the rubella virus. The history and making of the rubella virus vaccine paints a great picture of how an attenuated viral vaccine is made using a human cell line:
The rubella virus was isolated by an unrelated physician, Stanley Plotkin, also working at Winstar Institute. Plotkin grew the rubella virus in the WI-38 cells at a much lower temperature [86°F (30°C)] than normal human temperature [98.6°F (37°C)]. This created a rubella virus that grew best at lower than normal temperature, and that grew very poorly at normal body temperature. After 25 growth cycles of cells in culture, the virus was considered unable to reproduce efficiently and cause disease in a human. It could still, however, evoke quite the immune response and leave the body with powerful memory antibodies to the rubella virus.
This rubella vaccine is still used in the United States today.
The following are the vaccines created using WI-38 cells:
Live vaccines against rubella2:
Other vaccines2:
The second human cell line used to grow viruses in for vaccines is called MRC-5 (Medical Research Council 5), developed by J.P Jacobs in 1966.5 This cell line is also a descendant of a human lung fibroblast. The cells came from a 14-week male fetus aborted for “psychiatric reasons” from a 27-year-old woman in the UK.
The vaccines produced with viruses grown in MRC-5 cells include:
The WI-38 and MRC-5 cell lines are the only two human cell lines used in the making of vaccines.
Some things to note:
Resources:
The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is safe. The end. Phew, that was easy!
Of course I’m only kidding. That’s definitely not the end, not even close. There’s so much information out there about the MMR vaccine—good and bad, informative, and plenty of opinions—that it’s hard to know what to believe. I’m not going to give you my opinion on the vaccine (although I’m sure you could guess), that’s for another post. These are the facts.