Open Letter to Legislators on Fetal DNA in Vaccines - Theresa Deisher

8 April 2019.

My name is Theresa Deisher. I am the founder and chief scientist of Sound Choice Pharmaceutical whose mission is to educate the public about vaccine safety and pressure manufacturers to provide better, safer vaccines. I received my doctorate from Stanford University in Molecular and Cellular Physiology in 1990 and completed my postdoctoral work at the University of Washington. My career has been in the commercial biotechnology industry, and I have done work ranging from drug discovery and basic biology to clinical development.

I am writing about undisputed scientific facts about fetal DNA contamination in the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine that must be made known to lawmakers and the public.

Merck's MMR II vaccine (as well as the chickenpox vaccine, Pentacel, and all hepatitis A-containing vaccines) is produced using human fetal cell lines and are heavily contaminated with human fetal DNA from the manufacturing process. Levels in our children can reach up to 5 ng/ml after vaccination, depending on the child's age, weight and blood volume. This level is known to activate Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9), which can cause autoimmune attacks.

To illustrate the autoimmune capacity of very small amounts of fetal DNA, consider this: Labor is triggered by the baby's fetal DNA accumulating in the mother's bloodstream, triggering massive immune rejection of the baby. This is labor.

It works like this: fragments of fetal DNA⁽¹⁾ of a child with a length of approximately 300 base pairs are found in the serum of a pregnant mother. When they reach a concentration between 0,46 and 5,08 ng/mL, they trigger labor through the TLR9 mechanism⁽²⁾. The corresponding blood levels are 0,22 ng/ml and 3,12 ng/ml. Fetal DNA levels in a baby after injection of fetal-produced vaccines reach the same level that triggers autoimmune rejection of the baby by the mother.

Anyone who says that the fetal DNA contaminating our vaccines is harmless either knows nothing about immunity and Toll-like receptors or is not telling the truth.

If fetal DNA can trigger labor (a naturally desired autoimmune reaction), then those same levels in vaccines can trigger autoimmunity in a baby. The fragmented fetal DNA contained in vaccines is similar in size, ~215 base pairs.⁽³⁾

This is direct biological evidence that fetal DNA contaminants in vaccines are not in harmless quantities. This is a very strong pro-inflammatory trigger.

Administering fragments of non-self human (primitive) fetal DNA to a child could generate an immune response that would also cross-breed with the child's DNA, as the contaminating DNA could have overlapping sections very similar to the child's own DNA.

Children with autistic disorder have circulating antibodies against human DNA that non-autistic children do not have. These antibodies may be involved in autoimmune attacks in autistic children.⁽⁴⁾

Duke University demonstrated in a recently conducted study that significant improvements in behavior were observed when children with autism spectrum disorder were treated with their own stored autologous cord blood.⁽⁵⁾ This treatment clearly demonstrates that most children with autism are not born with it, since genetic diseases such as Down syndrome or muscle fibrosis cannot be treated with autologous stem cells. Therefore, it is necessary to identify one or more environmental triggers, introduced into the world around 1980, when autism began to increase, and eliminate or reduce them in the environment.

• There is a strong correlation between rising rates of autism and the switch from animal-derived cell lines for the rubella vaccine to aborted human cell lines in the late 70s.⁽⁶⁾
  • In January 1979, the FDA approved switching the production of rubella virus from an animal line (high passage virus, HPV-77, grown for example in duck embryonic cells) to the human fetal cell line WI-38, using the viral strain RA27/3.⁽⁷⁾ Both the recently approved monovalent rubella vaccine and the trivalent mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine use the WI-38 fetal cell line to produce the rubella vaccine portion.
• The earliest change point for birth year of autistic disorder (AD) was identified in 1981 for the California and US data, preceded by a change in the manufacturing process:
• Before 1980, autism spectrum disorder was a very rare, almost unknown disease. According to CDC data, in 2014 the rate of autism was 1 in 59 children, a very sharp increase from 2000, when the rate was 1 in 150. CDC: "Total annual costs for children with ASD in United States were estimated at between $11,5 and $60,9 billion (2011 US dollars)."⁽⁸⁾
• Recently, de novo duplications and deletions have been recognized in up to 10% of simplex autism spectrum disorders, corroborating environmental factors on the genetics of autism spectrum disorders[ix].⁽⁹⁾
• The rubella portion of the MMR vaccine contains human-derived fetal DNA contaminants of approximately 175 ng, more than 10 times above the WHO recommended threshold of 10 ng per vaccine dose[x].⁽¹⁰⁾
• No other drug on the market would receive FDA approval without a thorough toxicity profile (FDA follows international ICH guidelines) -> this has never been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry for DNA contamination in the MMR vaccine.
• Vaccines produced with human fetal cell lines contain cellular debris and contaminating human DNA, residual human DNA, which cannot be completely eliminated during the downstream purification process of the virus.⁽¹¹⁾ Furthermore, DNA is not only characterized by its sequence (ATCG), but also by its epigenetic modification (e.g. DNA methylation pattern, etc.). This decoration is highly specific to each species, which is why non-human DNA will be eliminated through the activation of TLR9 and the subsequent production of antibodies against non-human DNA, while this does not necessarily happen with fetal human DNA.

Injecting our children with human fetal DNA contaminants carries the risk of causing two well-established pathologies:

1. Insertional mutagenesis: fetal human DNA incorporates into the baby's DNA causing mutations. Gene therapy using homologous recombination of small fragments has shown that already 1,9 ng/ml of DNA fragments insert into the genome of stem cells in 100% of injected mice.⁽¹²⁾ Levels of human fetal DNA fragments in our children after vaccination with MMR, Varivax (chickenpox) or hepatitis A containing vaccines reach levels above 1,9 ng/ml.
2. Autoimmune diseases: Fetal human DNA triggers the baby's immune system to attack its own body.

An additional concern: retrovirus contamination.

Human endogenous retrovirus K (HERVK) is a contaminant of the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine.⁽¹³⁾

• HERVK can be reactivated in humans.⁽¹⁴⁾ It codes for a protein (integrase) specialized in integrating DNA into the human genome.
• Several autoimmune diseases have been associated with HERVK's activity.⁽¹⁵⁾
• It is part of the same family of retroviruses as the MMLV virus used in a gene therapy study, in which inappropriate gene insertion (insertional mutagenesis) led to subsequent additional somatic mutations and cancer in 4 of 9 boys.⁽¹⁶⁾
• It is therefore possible that the HERVK gene fragment present in the MMR vaccine is active, encodes the integrase or envelope protein, and therefore has the potential to induce gene insertion, promoting insertional mutagenesis and autoimmunity.

The presence of a high level of fetal DNA and HERVK contamination in the MMR vaccine is an unstudied risk with enormous implications and dangers for individual and public health.

Solution: Pressure manufacturers to return to rubella vaccines derived from animal cell lines, as has been done successfully in Japan:

• Based on Takahashi strains of live attenuated rubella virus, produced in rabbit kidney cells. A single dose of this vaccine was recently shown to maintain immunity for at least 10 years when rubella was under regional control.⁽¹⁷⁾
• Divide the MMR vaccine into three options offered individually, as is done in Japan.

The manufacturing process of the MMR vaccine must be modified to address and eliminate the aforementioned risks to the public.

Thank you for your consideration. I will be happy to answer any questions regarding the above.

Theresa A. Deisher, Ph.D.