DNA Contamination and Scientific Fraud in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Trial

Introduction

I highly encourage you to watch this episode of With the Wind with Dr. Paul Thomas, featuring guest Josh Guetzkow, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

First, Dr. Thomas has some uplifting words for us for getting through tough times.

Then Thomas interviews Guetzkow, who explains recent research uncovering that the manufacturing process for the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine was switched during the clinical trial, so that most of the people in the trial got the version manufactured by “Process 1”, whereas the shot that was rolled out for global mass vaccination was manufactured by “Process 2”. Guetzkow describes this as a “bait and switch” tactic.

The altered manufacturing process, which was done to be able to mass produce the mRNA for the global mass vaccination campaign, ultimately resulted in contamination of the vaccines with DNA encoding the SARS‑CoV‑2 spike protein, which heightens concerns about the theoretical possibility of integration of genetic instructions from the vaccine being integrated into human DNA.

Guetzkow discusses the potential health risks resulting from what amounts to scientific fraud facilitated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Later in the show, Dr. thomas explains why he no longer stands behind his book The Vaccine-Friendly Plan. This is really an episode that you won’t want to miss!

Persecuted for Making the CDC Look Bad

In the first segment, Dr. Thomas describes the struggle he has gone through first trying to keep his license and continue his pediatric practice in Portland in the face of persecution from the Oregon Medical Board, and then dealing with having to surrender his license due to the insurmountable obstacle posed by his legal battle with the state government.

I tell his story in my book The War on Informed Consent, which features a Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. To briefly summarize, Dr. Thomas came under fire from the board after publishing his book The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, which advocates an individualized approach to determining the risks versus benefits of vaccinations, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach of public vaccine policy that is “standard of care” in pediatric practices across the country.

Whereas the state’s goal was to achieve high vaccination rates, Thomas’s conflicting goal was to achieve good health outcomes for his pediatric patients.

The board demanded that Thomas produce peer-reviewed evidence to support his alternative approach, which, in collaboration with Dr. James Lyons-Weiler of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), he proceeded to do.

The pair published a study on November 22, 2020, indicating that Thomas’s completely unvaccinated patients were the healthiest children in his practice. Just days after producing the evidence that the board had asked for, the board held an “emergency” meeting to suspend his license on the grounds that his alternative approach represented a threat to public health.

The irony is that the CDC has never supported its own approach by producing a study comparing health outcomes between children vaccinated according to its routine childhood schedule and children who remained completely unvaccinated.

The study by Thomas and Lyons-Weiler was later retracted by the publishing journal for reasons that were obviously political, not scientific. In short, the retraction was preposterously based on an anonymously written letter of complaint to the editors. The anonymous author absurdly speculated that their findings were not because unvaccinated children are truly healthier but because the parents of unvaccinated children just don’t care enough about their children’s health to take them in to see the doctor, and therefore they are just as sick as vaccinated children but remain undiagnosed.

In fact, the study already included an analysis to address the hypothesis that the lower incidence of diagnoses for various health conditions among unvaccinated children was due to differences in health care usage between parents who vaccinate their children and parents who don’t. Thomas and Lyons-Weiler showed that, while vaccinated children had more office visits for fever, as expected since fever is a known adverse event caused by vaccines, they were not more attendant at routine well-child visits.

Although Thomas was forbidden by the board from participating in any further research using his practice’s clinical data, Dr. Lyons-Weiler with Dr. Russell Blaylock published a follow-up conducting several additional analyses showing that Thomas’s unvaccinated patients showed up for routine well-child visits just as much as vaccinated patients, if not more so.

For more information about the journal editors’ disgraceful retraction of the original study and the findings of the follow-up analyses, read my follow-up article “Breakthrough Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier”.

In the first segment of the above episode of With the Wind, Thomas opens up about his personal struggles and offers this excellent piece of wisdom for getting through hard times: “From our deepest struggles come the most amazing opportunities for growth. In fact, I don’t think we really grow well or quickly without struggle.”

Later in the episode, he explains why he now views his book The Vaccine-Friendly Plan as “not friendly enough”. That segment, which I’ll share some additional thoughts on below, is also well worth watching.

Pfizer’s “Bait and Switch”

In the interview segment, Josh Guetzkow discusses recent research showing that the manufacturing process used for the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine results in the shots being contaminated with DNA encoding the spike protein of SARS‑CoV‑2, as well as something called an SV40 promoter, which is a genetic piece of a monkey virus called “simian virus 40”.

Kevin McKernan’s Discovery of the DNA Contamination

During the interview, Guetzkow references research by researcher Kevin McKernan, CSO and Founder of Medicinal Genomics, who discovered the DNA contamination somewhat accidentally. McKernan summarizes his key findings in this 14-minute interview with Rebel News:

The Fallacies of the “Fact Checkers”

McKernan discusses the possibility of mRNA or DNA contaminants from mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines being integrated into human DNA.

While the media’s self-proclaimed “fact checkers” have insisted from the start that such genomic integration is scientifically impossible, the arguments they have used to support that conclusion are logical fallacies.

The main argument used by the CDC is that since the mRNA from the vaccine does not enter the cell nucleus, it cannot possibly be integrated into the host DNA. This is a non-sequitur fallacy since it ignores the fact that mRNA can be reverse transcribed into DNA, which then is potentially capable of entering the cell nucleus and being incorporated into human DNA.

Occasionally, a “fact checker” would acknowledge that possibility, but in those rare instances, the risk would be offhandedly dismissed with the argument that the vaccine mRNA does not encode the enzyme reverse transcriptase, which would be necessary for the reverse transcription to occur. This is also a non sequitur fallacy since it ignores the fact that the body makes its own reverse transcriptase.

The fallacious nature of both of those arguments was spotlighted by a study published in February 2022 demonstrating reverse transcription of COVID‑19 vaccine mRNA into DNA in human cancer cells in vitro.

The response from the “fact checkers” to this study was to rightly correct those who were falsely claiming that this study went further and showed that the DNA then entered the nucleus and was incorporated into human DNA, while refusing to acknowledge how the study had demonstrated the fallacious nature of the arguments the very same “fact checkers” had been using to claim that genomic integration was scientifically impossible.

For more information about how the “fact checkers” have deceived about this, and how integration of vaccine mRNA into host DNA is theoretically possible, see my detailed case study of media propaganda “Can mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines alter your DNA? Here’s what the CDC and ‘Fact-Checkers’ got wrong.”

Reverse Transcription Isn’t Even Necessary

In the Rebel News interview, McKernan also references research showing that RNA from the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus itself can be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the genome of virus-infected cells, which adds additional weight to the possibility of the same occurring with vaccine mRNA.

But McKernan further argues that reverse-transcription isn’t even necessary for genomic integration to occur given that the vaccines are contaminated with high amounts of DNA encoding the SARS‑CoV‑2 spike protein.

Explaining what he means by describing the amount of contamination as “high”, he says that the European Medical Authority (EMA) has established a standard of allowable double-stranded DNA of “1 DNA molecule for every 3,030 RNA molecules”. The FDA has looser guidelines, and the amount of DNA McKernan and his team have found “so far is above these numbers, which implies that the manufacturing is not being held to traditional standards, and these integration risks are higher.”

In a preprint study published at OSF Preprints on April 10, 2023, McKernan and coauthors state:

There has been a healthy debate about the capacity for SARs-CoV-2 to integrate into the human genome (Zhang et al. 2021). This work has inspired questions regarding the capacity for the mRNA vaccines to also genome integrate. Such an event would require LINE-1 driven reverse transcription of the mRNA into DNA as described by Alden et al. (Alden et al. 2022). dsDNA contamination of sequence encoding the spike protein wouldn’t require LINE-1 for Reverse Transcription and the presence of an SV40 nuclear localization signal in Pfizer’s vaccine vector would further increase the odds of integration. This work does not present evidence of genome integration but does underscore that LINE-1 activity is not required given the dsDNA levels in these vaccines. The nuclear localization of these vectors should also be verified.

A “promoter” is defined by the National Human Genome Research Institute as “a region of DNA upstream of a gene where relevant proteins (such as RNA polymerase and transcription factors) bind to initiate transcription of that gene. The resulting transcription produces an RNA molecule (such as an mRNA).”

Basically, the SV40 promoter was used in the vaccine manufacturing process to produce the mRNA in the vaccine that is designed to instruct human cells to produce the SARS‑CoV‑2 spike protein. This process also involved replication of the mRNA using E. coli bacteria.

McKernan argues that the presence of the SV40 promoter may increase the ability of the contaminant DNA being transported into the nucleus and incorporated into the host genome.

Relevant articles McKernan has published on Substack, a platform to which many people experiencing censorship elsewhere have flocked, include the following:

• Deep sequencing of the Moderna and Pfizer bivalent vaccines identifies contamination of expression vectors designed for plasmid amplification in bacteria
• Pfizer and Moderna bivalent vaccines contain 20-35% expression vector and are transformation competent in E.coli
• DNA contamination in 8 vials of Pfizer monovalent mRNA vaccines
• Nuclear permeability during cell division

A helpful summary of McKernan’s findings is provided by Dr. Michael Palmer and Dr. Jonathan Gilthorpe in a paper published by the group Doctors for COVID Ethics. As Palmer and Gilthorpe conclude (bold emphasis added):

The presence of contaminating plasmid DNA in Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines entails severe health risks, in addition to those which were already known and understood. Preeminent among these risks are the prolonged expression of spike protein, which may lead to correspondingly prolonged and more destructive autoimmune-like inflammation, and the induction of malignant disease after chromosomal integration of the plasmid DNA. Furthermore, the sheer scale of the contamination proves conclusively that the manufacturers have not mastered or properly implemented the designed production processes. Each of these issues alone would be reason enough to demand the immediate withdrawal of these vaccines.

Quantifying the Amount of DNA Contamination in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine

McKernan joined Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi in an interview published on May 20 on the channel “GreerJournal” on Rumble, a non-censoring alternative to YouTube. In the interview, McKernan explained how researchers had already shown how SARS‑CoV‑2 RNA itself can be reverse transcribed into DNA, enter the cell nucleus, and be integrated into human DNA. He also notes how it had additionally been shown that vaccine mRNA can be reverse transcribed into DNA.

Referring to his findings about DNA contamination in the vaccines, McKernan continued:

Here, the likelihood is even higher because we don’t have to go through a reverse transcription step to get to DNA. We already have the DNA packaged in a liposome being delivered to a cell that can potentially even get into the nucleus, or if it’s during cell division, there’s no nucleus, and the integration potential is potentially much higher.

Discussing how the amount of contamination is over the regulatory limits even according to the most conservative method of measurement, which was quantitative PCR, McKernan drew a comparison to the amounts of SARS‑CoV‑2 RNA that would result in a “positive” PCR test for COVID‑19.

To provide some context needed to understand his comparison, reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) assays work by reverse transcribing viral RNA into DNA and then cyclically amplifying the genetic material to a detectable level. The number of cycles required to reach the threshold for positivity is called the cycle threshold (Ct) value, which is a proxy measure of “viral load”. A fewer number of cycles indicates a larger amount of viral RNA in the sample, whereas a larger number of cycles indicates a smaller amount of viral RNA.

During the COVID‑19 pandemic, PCR tests were run at such Ct values that they were routinely returning “positive” results for people who had no active infection and could not possibly be contagious.

The fact that PCR tests run at high Ct values would return false positives was, of course, well understood from the very start within the scientific community, but it wasn’t until the end of August 2020—six months into the pandemic—that the New York Times finally got around to explaining to the public why getting a positive PCR test didn’t necessarily mean that you had COVID‑19.

In fact, the Times acknowledged, because the tests were being run at such high Ct values, “up to 90 percent of people testing positive” gave samples most likely representing non-viable RNA as opposed to infectious virus.

What can explain the science writers at America’s “newpaper of record” withholding that truth from the public for so long? Perhaps the Times felt that it was finally permissible to impart that wisdom upon the population after Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infamous director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who was also then Chief Medical Advisor to the President and a prominent member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, similarly acknowledged the problem of false positive PCR tests.

In a little-publicized interview published in July 2020, Fauci mentioned how one way to determine whether a positive PCR test represents infectious virus or non-viable RNA was to use cell culture for replication of viable virus. If you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more with a PCR test, Fauci admitted, “the chances of it being replication competent are miniscule”. With such high Ct values, he said, “you can almost never can culture” the virus.

The media’s faux “fact checkers” nevertheless maintained the absurdly false claim that a person with a positive PCR equaled a “COVID‑19 case”. (By definition, a person who does not have a SARS‑CoV-2 infection cannot have COVID‑19; and even if someone does have an infection, it doesn’t mean that they will develop the clinical disease. It’s called “asymptomatic infection.”)

A study by Dr. Sin Han Lee published in October 2022 estimated a 42 percent false discovery rate for COVID‑19 PCR tests. Noting that during clinical trials for the mRNA vaccines, the measured outcome was one or more symptoms of COVID‑19 plus a positive PCR test, Dr. Lee drew the logical corollary that the trial data upon which the FDA based its decision to issue emergency use authorization was scientifically invalid.

Coming back to McKernan’s comparison, he said that, to put the level of contamination into perspective, if you got a COVID‑19 PCR test, you would be called positive with a Ct value under 40. For the measurement of DNA contamination in the vaccine, his team was getting Ct values under 20:

That’s a million-fold more contamination than you would be called ‘positive’ for having the virus. Now, the virus they’re swabbing is outside of your mucosal membrane in your nose, alright. We’re talking about a contaminant that’s getting injected, bypassing your mucosal defenses at a million-fold higher concentrations.

“Hot Lots” of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID‑19 Vaccine

In a letter to the editor of The BMJ, Guetzkow and MIT professor Retsef Levi called attention to how an October 2020 amendment to the clinical trial protocol for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID‑19 vaccine indicated that “nearly all vaccine doses used in the trial came from ‘clinical batches’ manufactured using what is referred to as ‘Process 1’.”

However, a new method was developed, called “Process 2”, “in order to upscale production for large-scale distribution of ‘emergency supply’ after authorization”. Each lot of “Process 2”-manufactured shots would be administered to approximately 250 trial participants. To the best of the letter authors’ knowledge, “there is no publicly available report on this comparison of ‘Process 1’ versus ‘Process 2’ doses.”

They also cited a study published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation in March 2023 that “found significant variability in the rate of serious adverse events (SAEs) across 52 different lots of Comirnaty [the trade name of the FDA-approved version of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine] marketed in Denmark.” That finding “underscores the importance of understanding better the potential impact of variability in the production process of COVID‑19 mRNA vaccines on efficacy and safety.

In the With the Wind interview, Thomas and Guetzkow discuss this study and show the following graphical representation of the varying rates of adverse events by lot, indicating the existence of “hot lots”:

In a Twitter thread also mentioned during interview, Guetzkow summarized some key points from these recent revelations:

Was the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine clinical trial a bait-and-switch?

There were >44,000 people in the trial, but only ~250 of them were given doses made with a new manufacturing method ('process 2') that was used to make enough doses to sell around the world. pic.twitter.com/6mBwjyqujD

— Josh Guetzkow (@joshg99) May 16, 2023

As Guetzkow emphasizes, “Taken together, evidence from trial documents and existing research underscores the need to better understand the potential impact of variability in the production process of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines on efficacy and safety.”

In his discussion with Dr. Thomas, Guetzkow also explained that “Process 1” involved the use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology to amplify the mRNA for vaccine manufacturing, whereas “Process 2” involved the replication of mRNA using E. coli bacteria.

According to Guetzkow, it was this latter manufacturing process that was used for the vaccines ultimately rolled out to the public in global mass vaccination campaigns because they needed a way to mass produce mRNA for the “emergency” global mass vaccination campaign.

Concessions from a COVID‑19 Vaccine Defender

I have been keeping an eye on developments regarding DNA contamination in mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines, but I have not been able to make time to research it very deeply, and this article represents the furthest I have delved into the topic. Much of the discussion is very technical and beyond my knowledge, so I wanted to see what critics of McKernan’s analyses have had to say about his findings.

This is always a useful way to determine a basis of common ground: What are the points of agreement, and what are McKernan’s detractors saying to defend the use of these vaccines? Doing this type of analysis helps you understand which key points are disputed and which we may regard as uncontroversial.

In this case, it proved an extremely useful exercise. I quickly found a couple of articles responding to McKernan’s findings written by Dr. David Gorski, who publishes his infamous screeds against “anti-vaxxers” under the pen name “Orac” on his website Respectful Insolence.

Lyin’ and Strawmen and Jeers, Oh My!

The first is of Gorski’s attempted rebuttals is titled “Toxins and and [sic] monkey DNA and SV40, oh my! COVID‑19 vaccines vs. a zombie meme”, published May 31, 2023.

In it, Gorski asserts that “McKernan’s claim that contamination of COVID‑19 vaccines with SV40 promoter will lead to a wave of cancer” is wrong because the SV40 found in mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines “is not a whole SV40 virus.” McKernan “must know”, Gorski writes, “that an SV40 promoter is a very different thing from SV40 virus.”

For context, poliovirus vaccines administered during the late 1950s and early 1960s were infamously found to have been contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40), a monkey virus that, as Gorski acknowledges, “can cause cancer in various animal models”.

Gorski argues that SV40 does not cause cancer in humans “as far as we can tell”. But what that really means is just that we don’t know for sure yet whether it does or not. As noted by a 2003 review by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the evidence is “inadequate to conclude whether or not the contaminated polio vaccine caused cancer.”

The fundamental problem with Gorski’s whole argument on this point is that he is not addressing what McKernan has actually said but is instead arguing against claims of his own invention that he falsely attributes to McKernan. This is known as the fallacy of strawman argumentation—a favored tactic of propagandists.

In the articles of his I’ve read and the interviews I’ve watched, McKernan has neither claimed nor implied that the whole SV40 virus is present in the vaccines. You can see in the Rebel News interview above that McKernan states explicitly that he is not talking about the whole virus.

In fact, Gorski himself even later quotes a paragraph from McKernan in which he says, “It’s not the entire virus.” So, Gorski’s use of the strawman argument in this instance suggests a willingness to pathologically lie reminiscent of the characteristic of psychopaths that they will lie to a person’s face even if they know that what they are saying is obviously untrue.

(The transparency of a lie can ironically make the target believe the lie. The psychology of “the big lie” was infamously written about by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. As Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare write in the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, “What contributes significantly to their success in engendering trust in their victims is their almost pathological ability to lie with impunity.” They are “[u]nencumbered by social anxieties, fear of being found out, empathy, remorse, or guilt”, and, “Surprisingly, psychopaths will lie even to people who already know the truth about what they are saying. Amazingly, more often than not, victims will eventually come to doubt their own knowledge of the truth and change their own views to believe what the psychopath tells them rather than what they know to be true.”)

Further illustrating Gorski’s deceptive use of strawman argumentation for the purpose of obfuscation, McKernan also did not claim that the vaccines “will lead to a wave of cancer” due to the presence of the SV40 promoter. Instructively, Gorski does not quote or provide any reference to McKernan ever making that claim.

Here is an example of what McKernan has said from the very same podcast from which Gorski self-contradictorily quoted him saying that it wasn’t the whole SV40 virus in Pfizer’s vaccine (bold emphasis added):

Whenever we see DNA contamination, like from plasmids, ending up in any injectable, the first thing people think about is whether there’s any E. coli endotoxin present because that creates anaphylaxis for the injected. . . .

At least on the Pfizer side of things, it has what’s known as an SV40 promoter. This is an oncogenic virus piece. It’s not the entire virus. However, the small piece is known to drive very aggressive gene expression. And the concern that people, even at the FDA, have noted in the past whenever injecting double-stranded DNA is that these things can then integrate into the genome. If you’re not careful with how you manufacture these things, and you have excess amounts of this DNA, your concern for genome integration goes up. . . .

If you get an SV40 promoter in front of an oncogene, you will end up with a high expression of a gene that can drive cancer; it will be a very rare event, but you don’t need many of these cells to be hit with something like this for it to take off. . . .

Having the promoter inside some of these vectors isn’t necessary. It seems to be superfluous oversight they could have eliminated, yet it’s still there because they ran this out the door so quickly, they didn’t really have time to get rid of superfluous parts of the plasmid. So, that piece of DNA is something we really need to pay attention to.

Gorski, by utilizing his pair of strawman arguments to avoid substantively addressing McKernan’s legitimate concerns, essentially asserts that there’s nothing to see here.

Setting aside Gorski’s obfuscation, we can see that he concedes the presence of SV40 promoter in the vaccines.

Gorski also concedes that “it is indeed true that SV40 can ‘drive very aggressive gene expression’”, which is “why it’s used in plasmids and genetically engineered viral vectors to drive the expression of genes introduced into these constructs!”

Then Gorski asks, “so what?”

Humorously, given the dismissive nature of his rhetorical question, Gorski next concedes that the SV40 promoter could indeed cause cancer if it were “to integrate right in front of just the right gene (e.g., an oncogene, or a gene that can, when too much of its product is made, induce cancer).”

Thus, while on one hand dismissing McKernan’s concerns, on the other, Gorski tacitly acknowledges that McKernan is correct.

Also notice how McKernan explicitly stated that it’s a piece and not the whole SV40 virus and how he characterized this theoretical possibility as likely being “a very rare event”—as opposed to having claimed that the result will certainly be “a wave of cancer”.

Despite having explicitly acknowledged that this was theoretically possibly, Gorski humorously complains that McKernan “has to fear monger by saying it’s ‘possible.’”

Thus, by Gorski’s perverse reasoning, the public shouldn’t be told the truth that it is indeed theoretically possible that the SV40 promoter in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine could cause cancer because doing so might make people more afraid to accept the experimental vaccination.

The best Gorski can do to rebut this fact is to express his opinion that this outcome is “unlikely”—thus once again essentially agreeing with McKernan but relying on his strawman to make it appear as though McKernan, by contrast, were saying something batshit crazy.

Similarly, Gorski acknowledges that the vaccines are contaminated with plasmid DNA, or DNA encoding for the spike protein of SARS‑CoV‑2 resulting from the manufacturing process using E. coli bacteria to mass produce the mRNA that goes into the vaccines.

In fact, he tries to make light of this fact, as well, by characterizing this contamination as completely unsurprising and even expected: “Where does this DNA come from?” he rhetorically asks. Then he answers that, to make RNA, “it’s necessary to use a DNA template, usually a plasmid, and minute traces of that DNA can be left over from the manufacturing process”. Once again, nothing to see here. This is “not dangerous”, he insists.

Then, as though it supported that conclusion, he curiously states that the FDA limits that are surpassed by the amount of DNA contamination in the vaccines are “more or less arbitrary.”

That argument, of course, could work the other way (and it’s worth noting again that the FDA’s limits are less stringent than the EMA’s).

Setting aside his obfuscation, we can similarly see that Gorski further concedes that the vaccines are contaminated with plasmid DNA, and he even concedes that the “presence of double-stranded DNA also brings up another major concern, and that is the possibility of genomic integration.”

As though it contradicted what McKernan has said about it, further into his blog post, Gorski cites an article from the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) essentially agreeing with McKernan that, while an outcome of “low-probability”, it was possible that DNA contamination in the vaccine could “integrate into the human genome and affect a person (make them prone to cancer perhaps or result in mutations)”.

The essential difference between the ORF’s and McKernan’s acknowledgment of that risk is that the ORF puzzlingly says it is “puzzling” to be concerned about it, whereas McKernan more sensibly concludes that the DNA contamination “is something we really need to pay attention to.”

The Simian Virus 40 (SV40) Controversy

Seemingly forgetting all the concessions he had made in that May 31 article, Gorski published another article on June 6 purporting to debunk McKernan’s claims, which he titled “Return of the revenge of ‘vaccines permanently alter your DNA’”.

This one was in response to a Substack article published by McKernan on June 4, 2023, titled “Nuclear permeability during cell division”, in which McKernan shared the interview he appeared in alongside Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi.

Gorski began by referencing McKernan’s supposedly “false claim” that “SV40 promoter sequences in plasmid DNA contaminating the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA-based COVID‑19 vaccines were somehow putting people at risk for cancer.”

Gorski thus pretended as though his previous blog post had somehow proven this to be biologically impossible, as opposed to having conceded that this is indeed a theoretical possibility.

At the same time, he once again falsely asserted that we know that the SV40 virus contaminating the polio vaccine did not put people at an increased risk for cancer, the truth being that this remains an area of controversy in the scientific literature.

A 2003 review in the Journal of Virology, for instance, explained that concerns about this contamination in polio vaccines were generally dismissed initially in the scientific community; “Gradually, however, the case for SV40 infecting humans and contributing to cancer has become more compelling, supported by both experimental and circumstantial evidence . . . .”

A paper published in Clinical Microbiology Reviews in July 2004 similarly described the “mounting evidence”, acknowledged by the IOM as well as “two other independent scientific panels”, that “SV40 exposure could lead to cancer in humans”. As SV40 was increasingly “recognized as a potent oncogenic agent, it is important to evaluate the increasing data that implicates the virus in some human malignancies.”

An article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2006 described the question of whether SV40 can cause cancer in humans as “one of the most highly controversial topics in cancer research during the last 50 years.”

More recently, in 2019, a review published in Frontiers in Oncology discussed the ongoing controversy and concluded that “The role of SV40 in human tumors, if any, remains to be proven.” (Which is quite different from Gorski’s assertion that it has been disproved.)

‘No Evidence’ of Reverse Transcription of Vaccine mRNA into DNA?

Next, Gorski mocks “antivaxxers” for making a claim that we are meant to believe reveals their “utter ignorance and/or misunderstanding of some very basic molecular biology”. Referencing his past writings purporting to debunk the claim, he writes the following (with my bold emphasis added):

None of this has stopped antivaxxers from citing studies that are claimed to demonstrate that the mRNA from the vaccine can somehow reverse transcribe itself and then integrate its gene sequence for the COVID‑19 spike protein into the DNA of the cell’s nucleus but, when examined by people with molecular biology expertise, are fairly trivially shown not to be good evidence of anything of the sort. Basically, there’s no evidence that the mRNA from the vaccine gets into the nucleus or is reverse transcribed into DNA, much less “permanently alters” your DNA.”

Gorski’s propaganda device here is a fallacy of composition. It is true that some within the health freedom movement have falsely claimed that the February 2022 study in Current Issues in Molecular Biology showed that the vaccine mRNA that was reverse transcribed into DNA also entered the cell nucleus and was incorporated into the host cell’s DNA.

As I already mentioned, the study did not go that far. But what Gorski is doing is rightly correcting that misinformation while deliberately ignoring the factually accurate observations of those who do not make that same mistake. Consequently, Gorski deceives his readers into believing that there is “no evidence” that mRNA from the vaccine can be “reverse transcribed into DNA”, even though he is perfectly well aware that this is precisely what the study showed.

Further attempting to rebut McKernan’s concerns, deeper into his article, Gorski states that “The mRNA from the vaccine doesn’t have the ability to reverse transcribe itself into DNA”—which is true but also irrelevant, as already noted, since the body makes its own reverse transcriptase enzymes (and therefore the enzyme does not need to be encoded for in the vaccine mRNA for reverse transcription into DNA to occur, as demonstrated in vitro—as Gorski, again, perfectly well knows).

Distribution of Vaccine LNPs Throughout the Body

Gorski goes on about McKernan’s ostensible “fear mongering about plasmid DNA ‘contamination’ of mRNA vaccines”, placing “contamination” in quotation marks as though the presence of this plasmid DNA in the vaccine wasn’t really contamination. Gorski is thus evidently incognizant of how the alternative explanation, that the manufacturers put it in there deliberately, is even more frightening.

In his Substack article, McKernan noted how Dr. Bhakdi had pointed out during their interview that, during cell division, the nucleus disassembles, “exposing the nuclear genome to the cytoplasm”, and that “transcription is still active during this time window.”

Gorski’s response to this is to point out that vaccines are injected into the muscle, and muscle cells do not divide. Anticipating the objection, he writes that “antivaxxers like to point to biodistribution studies showing that the LNPs go elsewhere”.

He’s referring to the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that encompass the mRNA to protect it from degradation so that it has a chance to enter the cells and use the cell’s mechanisms to generate spike protein. He asserts that “huge doses of LNPs were given to rats to determine these results.”

But so what? As Gorski explains in an earlier article linked to from this one, “Biodistribution studies frequently use much higher doses than the human dose, the better to be able to detect distribution in low uptake organs, which, it turns out, the ovaries are.”

The fact that biodistribution studies have shown that LNPs from the vaccine travel to tissues and organs throughout the body rather than remaining at the injection site is relevant. Gorski poo poos the distribution of LNPs to the ovaries on the grounds that we can expect the amount to be “low”, but this just sidesteps the legitimate concern that it is reaching the ovaries and other organs at all.

The ‘Conspiracy Theory’ of Dr. Fauci and The New York Times

Coming to McKernan’s comparison of the amount of DNA contamination as measured by PCR with the Ct values used for COVID‑19 PCR tests, Gorski ridiculously retorts:

This harkens back to an old conspiracy theory about the PCR tests used to diagnose COVID‑19 and the CT (cycle threshold) used as “positive.” . . . Back in the day, the “casedemic” conspiracy theory claimed that setting the CT at 40 cycles was too high and therefore produced a lot of false positives, making most “positive” PCR tests false positives. They weren’t.

He then acknowledges that, “Yes, false positives were a problem,” but he claims it was “just not nearly as big a problem a COVID‑19 conspiracy theorists claimed”.

He doesn’t provide any examples of how big a problem any “conspiracy theorists” claimed it to be, but evidently, we are supposed to believe that the New York Times and Dr. Anthony Fauci are conspiracy theorists.

Fauci, after all, admitted that any test result with a Ct value over 35 had a “miniscule” chance of representing infectious virus, and it was the New York Times, recall, whose investigation determined that PCR tests were being run at such high Ct values that “up to 90 percent of people testing positive” did not actually have COVID‑19.

So, Kevin McKernan is . . . Right!

Nearing the end of his diatribe, Gorski again admits, “Yes it is possible that DNA fragments that get into cells can integrate in the genome, but the likelihood is very small . . . .”

Which is precisely what McKernan has said.

Finally, Gorski acknowledges that McKernan has indeed detected “plasmid DNA contamination” in the vaccines—this time without the quotation marks around “contamination”. But he contrarily describes the amount of contaminant DNA as “small”—despite concentrations exceeding the EMA’s and FDA’s respective limits (which, remember, Gorski dismissed as “arbitrary”).

Gorski concludes that McKernan “has not shown that this DNA can get into the nucleus, much less integrate into the genome and ‘permanently alter your DNA.’”

Which is true. But then, neither has McKernan claimed otherwise. While attributing that quote to McKernan’s June 4 Substack article, in fact, those words do not appear in McKernan’s article. Once again, we see that Gorski is simply a liar who depends on fallacies such a strawman argumentation in his untenable defenses of the government’s criminal vaccine policies.

‘Vaccine’ or ‘Gene Therapy’?

As a final point, with respect to the question of whether vaccine mRNA or plasmid DNA contaminants can become integrated into human DNA, it’s worth pointing out that these experimental mRNA pharmaceutical products were developed based on decades of research in the field of gene therapy.

In fact, when the “fact checkers” argued that the mRNA technology used in these vaccines was not new, but “has been in development for almost two decades”, they were referring to this gene therapy research.

In 2015, the journal Nature published a profile of the “little-known biotechnology company Moderna Therapeutics”, which would go on to partner with the NIH and Fauci’s NIAID to develop one of the two mRNA COVID‑19 used rolled out en masse in the US in December 2020 under emergency use authorization, a regulatory status for experimental pharmaceutical drugs.

The Nature article reported how Moderna had successfully obtained over $1 billion in financing from investors, “making it the most highly valued venture-backed private company in drug development today.” The business that Moderna was in, according to Nature, was “gene therapy”.

An article in the journal Molecular Therapy the same year remarked that mRNA was “emerging as a new class of drug that has the potential to play a role in gene therapy that once was envisioned for DNA.” The instructive title of the commentary was “mRNA: Fulfilling the Promise of Gene Therapy”.

A letter to the editor published in Genes & Immunity in June 2021 described the mRNA vaccines as “a breakthrough in the field of gene therapy” and “a great opportunity for the FDA and EMA to revise the drug development pipeline to make it more flexible and less time-consuming.”

In other words, the “emergency” situation created by the COVID‑19 pandemic represented an opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry to roll out this experimental gene therapy technology without having to undergo years of study to ensure safety and effectiveness.

Moderna itself in a June 2020 Security and Exchanges Commission (SEC) filing stated that, “Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA.” Reiterating that its developmental mRNA products were “classified as gene therapies by the FDA and the EMA”, Moderna further disclosed its financial concern that “the association of our investigational medicines with gene therapies could result in increased regulatory burdens, impair the reputation of our investigational medicines, or negatively impact our platform or our business.”

In other words, there was a risk that regulatory classification and public perception of Moderna’s mRNA products as “gene therapies” would delay licensure and stifle market demand, thus threatening the company’s financial bottom line.

Moderna and Pfizer surely cannot have been disappointed to see how the media’s “fact checkers” all rushed to proclaim that the scientists knew with absolute certainty that it is biologically impossible for the mRNA from COVID‑19 vaccines to alter human DNA.

These pharmaceutical companies surely cannot have been upset to see the chorus of proclamations that it is “false” to say that these mRNA products are a “gene therapy” technology while self-contradictorily reassuring during the rush to market under “Operation Warp Speed” that the technology behind these products was not new—an allusion to the years of prior research into the application of mRNA technology for gene therapy.

Dr. Thomas’s Journey of Awakening

In the first part of my book The War on Informed Consent, I describe Dr. Thomas’s journey of awakening, how he started out practicing medicine as he was taught, which meant vaccinating according to the CDC’s schedule. But over time, he began to have doubts about whether this practice was really producing the best possible health outcomes.

He started doing his own research and ultimately decided to leave the group practice he was with to start his own practice founded on the principles of informed consent and individualized care.

This path led him to publishing his book The Vaccine-Friendly Plan with coauthor Dr. Jennifer Margulis, which book presents an example alternative schedule to the CDC’s that is primarily aimed at reducing the total amount and frequency of aluminum exposure.

The Problem with Thomas’s Book ‘The Vaccine-Friendly Plan’

In the final segment of the above episode of his show With the Wind, Dr. Thomas had a discussion with his colleague DeeDee Hoover, who puts the question to him, “Do you recommend The Vaccine-Friendly Plan anymore?”

Thomas replies, “So the short answer is ‘No.’”

He discloses that, even by the time the book was published, he was already unsure, and his continued journey of discovery has since led him to conclude:

There’s just massively too much aluminum. It’s insane how much aluminum. It’s insane how much aluminum we’re injecting into babies. I mean, just the Hepatitis B alone—which I don’t recommend in that book for newborns anyway; it’s more like, wait until a little later—but the total cumulative aluminum in The Vaccine-Friendly Plan is too much. And Jack Lyons-Weiler and I published a study that showed that.

He is referring to Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, who also goes by “Jack”. As I discuss in The War on Informed Consent, Dr. Thomas and coauthors including Dr. Lyons-Weiler authored a study published in December 2019 in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology comparing the acute exposure to aluminum that children receive from the CDC’s schedule with that from Dr. Thomas’s “Vaccine-Friendly Plan”. Here is a graph showing the result:

Thomas bluntly states, “So, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan is not safe. Period.”

“I am now in a position knowing what I know,” he adds, “that, while there’s no one-size-fits-all, and there will be situations where it makes sense to give a certain vaccine to a certain person, for the most part, most people will be far better off if they don’t vaccinate at all.”

Most pediatricians, he notes, will simply say “vaccines are safe and effective”, characterizing the benefits as very high and the risks as extremely low. “The truth of the matter is it’s exactly the opposite. How do I know that? Well, my own data.”

DeeDee Hover then provides the important context that the study Thomas did with Dr. Lyons-Weiler published in November 2020, just days prior to the Oregon Medical Board’s “emergency” suspension of his license, which showed much better health outcomes for unvaccinated children, did not compare unvaccinated children with children who followed the CDC’s schedule.

Because parents flocked to his practice precisely because they wanted a pediatrician who would respect their right to make their own informed choice, he had a lower vaccination rate. Very few of his patients followed the CDC’s schedule. Therefore, it was essentially a study of no vaccines versus his “vaccine-friendly plan”.

They show the following image from that study graphically illustrating the superior health of the unvaccinated:

“When I got that data”, Thomas continues, “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh! It’s way worse than I thought.’ I did not realize the extent to which The Vaccine-Friendly Plan was causing harm. I mean the CDC schedule, way worse, but it’s an unacceptable level of chronic medical conditions, acute infections, allergies, asthma, ADHD, almost anything we looked at.”

Indeed, as I relate in my book, when I interviewed Dr. Thomas about the medical board’s suspension of his license, he lamented, “I realized after writing The Vaccine-Friendly Plan that it wasn’t friendly enough.”

The book still has a limited role, they both agree, in the sense that the example alternative schedule presented is still much safer than the CDC’s schedule, and there are still many parents who are going to vaccinate at least to some extent no matter what. So, the book is a good starting point for those who are not yet confident enough in their own intuition to completely reject the CDC’s recommendations.

The only “one-size-fits-all” solution, Thomas quips further into the discussion, is trusting your God-given natural immune system to take care of you.

Be Prepared to Confront Bullying Pediatricians

Anecdotally, this is the path that my wife and I have chosen for our own son, and while we have made plenty of mistakes as parents, when it comes to our choices regarding childhood vaccinations, we have absolutely no regrets. At age ten, our son is a happy, healthy, and incredibly smart child.

For acting in the best interests of our own child rather than blindly following the CDC’s schedule, we were expelled by our son’s pediatric practice. I share that story along with the excoriating letter I wrote to the four pediatricians in that group practice in my June 2021 article, “Expelled by Pediatricians for Declining CDC’s Vaccine Schedule”, which I encourage you to read.

On that note, Thomas continues in the show to discuss the matter of dealing with ignorant pediatricians who view it as their duty to bully you into adhering to the CDC’s one-size-fits-all schedule.

He offers the recommendation that, “if you are vaccinating and you see anything, any change that’s negative”, you should stop. This includes any changes “in the area of language, your language progression stops or regresses; or it could be eye contact that used to be there, and now your kids, like, avoiding eye contact; or maybe they’re just getting a little clumsier than usual”.

And he advises that you need to be prepared for confrontation because most pediatric practices will try to bully you into compliance—which certainly proved true in my own family’s experience.

Thomas has an additional very important message for parents who do not want to talk about how they didn’t vaccinate their own kids, which I took to heart by just publicly acknowledging for the very first time that our son is completely unvaccinated.

(I had previously disclosed that we did not follow the CDC’s schedule, but I had always avoided stating the full truth out of concern for my son’s privacy; now, though, I see that Dr. Thomas is right, and I should just tell it like it is. Among the regrets we do have as parents is letting the doctors give our son the aluminum-containing vitamin K shot at birth, which we were deceived into conceding to, despite our natural impulse to decline, because they outright lied to us that it was just an injection of vitamin K, and we were gullible enough at the time to believe them.)

Thomas’s message to parents like me is: You have precious knowledge that you have a duty to share with others. He says, “It’s almost like a secret: Oh, unvaxxed kids are really, really healthy, what I’ve got here is amazing!” At this point in the show, he cups his hands like he’s holding something in secret that he doesn’t want others to see. Then he continues by explaining, “You want them to ask, well, what is it that you are holding in your hands there?!”

Speaking up takes confidence, and to gain that confidence requires acquiring the knowledge. Once attained, we have a duty to then share that knowledge with others.

Indeed, when I first started researching vaccines in the medical literature, it was for personal reasons. But once I acquired that knowledge, I found myself compelled to publicly share it with others. I couldn’t not speak out about the huge disparity between what the government and media say science says about vaccines and what I was actually finding in the scientific literature.

This is why, even prior to the COVID‑19 pandemic, I had already shifted the focus of my journalism entirely away from foreign policy to public vaccine policy. (Which is why I ceased publishing Foreign Policy Journal. My magnum opus in the area of US foreign policy is the book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.)

Further into the discussion, Paul asks DeeDee, a new mom, what her best piece of advice is for other new parents. Her response is one that I completely agree with: As a mom or dad, we know what’s best for our children. And we need to learn to listen to our own inner voice and trust our own judgment.

Here is some empowering knowledge to help you gain that mental fortitude:

Order a copy of The War on Informed Consent today!