The polio vaccine: a critical assessment of its arcane history, efficacy, and long-term health-related consequences

Polio (poliomyelitis) is a potentially dangerous viral ailment. To combat this disease, researchers developed two polio vaccines (inactivated and live) grown in cultures made from monkey kidneys. Beginning in the 1950s, these vaccines were administered to millions of people in the United States and throughout the world. Officially, the polio vaccine is considered safe and effective, and has been credited with singularly reducing the incidence of this disease. These tenets are not supported by the data. A cancer-causing monkey virus–SV-40–was discovered in polio vaccines administered to millions of people. SV-40 has been found in brain tumors, bone cancers, lung cancers and leukemia. SV-40 is transmitted through sexual intercourse, and from mother to child in the womb. Monkeys that were used to make polio vaccines were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a virus closely related to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the infectious agent associated with AIDS. Some researchers question whether HIVs may simply be SIVs “residing in and adapting to a human host.” Polio vaccines also contain calf serum, glycerol and other parts of the cow that may have been infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, a fatal brain-wasting ailment that some researchers link to Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), its human equivalent. Current disease reduction techniques that emphasize short-term gains over long-term health consequences need to be reevaluated and discontinued while new and safer health paradigms are researched and implemented. © Copyright 2004, Neil Z. Miller. All rights reserved.