Maurice Hilleman, a researcher at Merck, was the first to discover that both Salk’s and Sabin’s polio vaccines contained SV40. Hilleman then performed an experiment that terrified public health officials and, within several years, made SV40 one of the most studied viruses in the world. Hilleman injected SV40 into newborn hamsters, finding that ninety percent developed tumors under their skin as well as in their lungs, kidneys, and brains. At the time of Hilleman’s discovery, Salk’s vaccine had been injected into tens of millions of Americans.
Sabin’s vaccine hadn’t yet been licensed in the United States, but it had been given to more than 90 million people in Russia.
During the next few years, studies of SV40 were reassuring.
To make his vaccine, Salk had inactivated polio virus with formaldehyde, which also inactivated SV40.
Further, researchers found that although SV40 caused cancer when it was injected into hamsters, it didn’t cause cancer when it was fed to hamsters.
Sabin’s vaccine was swallowed, not injected. And none of the children inoculated with Sabin’s vaccine developed antibodies to SV40.
Apparently, the virus just passed through the intestines without causing an infection.
Researchers then compared cancer rates in children who had received SV40-containing polio vaccines with unvaccinated children.
Eight years after receiving the tainted vaccines, the cancer incidence was the same in both groups. The same was true fifteen and thirty-five years later. And it was true for children who received SV40-contaminated vaccines in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden.
By the mid-1990s public-health officials were confident that the inadvertent contamination of polio vaccines with SV40 in the early 1960s hadn’t caused cancer.
The false claim that polio vaccines caused cancers has now been put to rest. Toward the end of the Lex Fridman podcast, RFK Jr. said, “There are many times that I found that I've made mistakes, and we correct those mistakes.” More than a dozen studies have shown that the SV40-contaminated polio vaccines in the late 1950s and early 1960s never caused cancer in people. Now is your chance, Mr. Kennedy, to correct yet another of your false claims about vaccines.
https://archive.ph/8hHul
Maurice Hilleman, a researcher at Merck, was the first to discover that both Salk’s and Sabin’s polio vaccines contained SV40. Hilleman then performed an experiment that terrified public health officials and, within several years, made SV40 one of the most studied viruses in the world. Hilleman injected SV40 into newborn hamsters, finding that ninety percent developed tumors under their skin as well as in their lungs, kidneys, and brains. At the time of Hilleman’s discovery, Salk’s vaccine had been injected into tens of millions of Americans.
During the next few years, studies of SV40 were reassuring.
By the mid-1990s public-health officials were confident that the inadvertent contamination of polio vaccines with SV40 in the early 1960s hadn’t caused cancer.
The false claim that polio vaccines caused cancers has now been put to rest. Toward the end of the Lex Fridman podcast, RFK Jr. said, “There are many times that I found that I've made mistakes, and we correct those mistakes.” More than a dozen studies have shown that the SV40-contaminated polio vaccines in the late 1950s and early 1960s never caused cancer in people. Now is your chance, Mr. Kennedy, to correct yet another of your false claims about vaccines.
Maybe they only studied people who had the oral Sabin vaccine??
Maybe it causes some other defects in humans and not cancer? DNA damage for the next generation?