This is the story of the MMR vaccine and two Merck scientists who filed a lawsuit in 2010 over Merck’s efforts to allegedly “defraud the United States through Merck’s ongoing scheme to sell the government a mumps vaccine that is mislabeled, misbranded, adulterated and falsely certified as having an efficacy rate that is significantly higher than it actually is.” Merck allegedly did this from 2000 onwards in order to maintain its exclusive license to sell the MMR vaccine and keep its monopoly of the US market.
Folks, if you haven’t already heard this elsewhere, this is HUGE news. HERE is Hilary Butler’s excellent account of the ordeal as well as both the 2010 and 2012official legal complaints.
In the complaint, the scientists outline in great detail exactly how Merck manipulated the efficacy results in order to be able to say they had a 95% effective vaccine so that they could meet the fairytale goal of vaccine-induced “herd immunity by 2010.” Well, it turns out that the vaccine could not meet the goal that CDC projected to eradicate mumps by 2010, BECAUSE the vaccine, in its current state cannot reliably confer immunity, and is in fact a dilute version of what it once was when Maurice Hilleman invented it using the virus of his five year old daughter. The same viral mumps strain has been in use in every mumps or MMR vaccine Merck has made since 1967.
In order to mass-produce live but non-infective vaccine virus, the “wild” virus from 1967 has had to be “passaged” through different cells or animals over and over and over. In that passaging, mutations take place that render the virus non-infective or “attenuated” but also, those many years of passaging the same original viral strain has lowered the antigenicity, or the antibody-stimulating capacity of the virus.
When testing was performed to show the efficacy (neutralizing antibody provoking potential) of the forty-year-old virus strain, for use in the newer combination mumps vaccines, Merck’s scientists could not produce a 95% efficacy rate.
Merck got the old virus to pass its new tests by doing three things. First they tested efficacy on the vaccine strain virus and not the wild virus as had previously been done. The testing is done by vaccinating children and testing the ability of their blood to neutralize the virus before and after the vaccine. There should be a marked difference between the two tests. For the new testing method, the children’s blood was tested for its ability to neutralize the virus, using the vaccine strain virus, instead of the wild type strain that is much more infective, and the one that your children would most likely catch. By using a weaker virus, the old vaccine strain virus allowed the neutralization to occur much more easily. But still it was not 95% effective.
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