From the December 2000 Idaho Observer:

FDA approves potentially contaminated Medeva flu vaccine for use in U.S.

Mass vaccination, long believed by many to be the best way to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, is turning out to be a public health nightmare: A congressional delegation has called for a halt to the Department of Defense's mandatory anthrax vaccination program until it is determined why it makes U.S. military personnel chronically ill; scientific links between this nation's epidemic of childhood autism and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine have been published in medical journals since 1995; the Lyme disease vaccine has been linked to an auto-immune condition resulting in chronic arthritis in a significantly large number of vaccine recipients; it was announced last year that oral polio vaccine administered (OPV) until 1964 was contaminated with the carcinogenic SV-40 monkey virus; thimerosal, used as a preservative in most vaccines for decades, was removed after researchers linked the mercury-derivative to an entire menu of degenerative diseases which include chronic fatigue and cancer and; the rotavirus vaccine was removed from the marketplace after it was discovered that it caused intususception -- the potentially fatal telescoping of the bowel into itself that must be corrected with surgery -- in babies who received the anti-diarrhea shot. And now, because, public health officials claim, supplies of influenza vaccine are in short supply this season, the FDA has approved for sale in this country 20 million doses of flu vaccine that may be contaminated with the prion protein crystal that causes mad cow disease.

By Virginia Winston

Earlier this year, according to an October, 2000 article by the The Observer, a leading British newspaper, British pharmaceutical company Medeva's Liverpool plant was found by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to be producing vaccines in filthy conditions. The FDA report found that Medeva neither maintained nor cleaned its equipment. It also reported that Medeva was unable to prove that its vaccines were not contaminated with bacteria or fungi.

Certain fungi provide the medium in which the prion protein crystal that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or “mad cow” disease) to proliferate.

Because it exports flu vaccine to America, Medeva got a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “warning” to clean up its act. However, in a report dated October 22, 2000, The Observer noted that the FDA had not re-inspected the filthy Medeva factory since it sent the warning letter earlier this year and has given the company the green light to sell an estimated 20,000,000 doses of its “Fluvarin” flu vaccine in the U.S. during this cold and flu season.

The British government recently recalled Medeva's oral polio vaccine (OPV) as it had been grown from “bovine material of UK origin” contrary to mandated vaccine production protocols. Until its removal from the marketplace last month, Medeva's OPV had been injected into 11 million people, mostly children, commented another British newspaper the International Herald Tribune.

Hundreds of thousands of “mad” cattle in Great Britain have been destroyed since 1993 in an attempt to control the spread of prion disease that is epidemic in England. Ingestion of beef and other products derived from prion-infected cattle have been linked to the epidemic of prion disease in humans.

Prion disease is called mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in pigs and sheep, whirling disease in fish and wasting disease in deer and elk, is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans. It is estimated that as many as 200,000 Americans that have been misdiagnosed with Alzheimer's disease are actually victims of CJD.

The Medeva Fluvarin vaccine, produced in the same plant that produced the recalled OPV, may have the potential of opening the floodgates of a “mad cow” epidemic in the U.S. Though the administration of possibly contaminated Fluvarin may be a public health disaster of unprecedented proportions, the dominant media has failed to sound the alarm and the FDA has not ordered that Fluvarin be tested for the presence of prions or the fungi in which they grow.

Why?

FDA approval of the potentially contaminated Fluvarin for sale in the U.S. was likely influenced by a shortage of flu vaccine here this season. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Immunization Program Director Dr. William Atkinson, the A-Moscow-1099 strain of flu virus did not incubate properly this year and, therefore, did not produce “serum” in large enough quantities to produce sufficient doses of flu vaccine to meet demand. So, despite Medeva's “history of contamination and production blunders,” FDA has authorized the distribution of Fluvarin to clinics and hospitals all over the nation.

According to The Observer, the FDA claims that the vaccine is safe. The FDA also, at one time, claimed that silicone breast implants and Phen-Phen were “safe” -- and those are just two of many FDA-approved products that have ultimately been linked to serious health side-effects that include chronic degenerative disease and death.

“It stands to reason that Medeva's flu vaccine -- manufactured in the same reportedly filthy plant as the recalled polio vaccine -- could also contain BSE (prion)-contaminated materials,” commented Dr. Len Horowitz. Dr. Horowitz is the author of several books including “Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse” in which he meticulously documented the development and spread of prion disease world wide by following the path of published science.

An official at the National Institutes of Health describes the prion which causes BSE as, “The single most resistant organism on the face of the Earth. You can boil it, you can put it in formaldehyde, you can autoclave it for a little while, you can treat it with the usual disinfectants...and it's like you didn't do anything.”

If Fluvarin is contaminated with BSE, then millions of unsuspecting Americans may be injected this year with a terminal neurological disease. Prion crystals, 100 times smaller than a virus, cause lesions in brain tissue (encephalopathies) that turn the brain to mush and gradually causes dementia and death. British officials predict that hundreds of thousands of Brits will eventually show symptoms of this terminal malady.

CJD is so dangerous that medical examiners are afraid to perform autopsies on people and animals that are suspected as having succumbed to prion disease. Continental Europe, which originally considered itself safe from prion disease, is in a panic over recent discoveries that some of their animals and citizens are showing symptoms.

Fluvarin is currently on the shelves of doctors' offices and health departments all over the country and is being administered to the public. Medical personnel in the northwest U.S. who confirm that they have administered Fluvarin are unaware of the Medeva scandal or the likelihood that the triple-antigen flu vaccine is contaminated.

There are at least two facilities in the U.S. that are capable of testing Fluvarin for prion contamination: The National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. Since neither the FDA nor the dominant media have demanded that Fluvarin be tested for contamination, anyone about to receive Fluvarin should demand the vaccine be properly tested.

Due to this year's flu vaccine shortage, the CDC urges health officials to prioritize the administration of flu vaccines. The CDC recommends that the most immunologically vulnerable members of society -- the elderly and the chronically ill; babies and small children -- be priority one. Healthcare workers exposed to flu victims are priority number two. Otherwise healthy people between the ages of 17-65 should be the last people to receive a flu shot.

If your health officials haven't heard about Medeva's track record, it's time to get them educated. You can copy for them a series of British media reports covering the Medeva scandals. The web address is:

http://www.observer.co.uk/

Go to “Information,” then “Archive,” then type “Medeva” in the keyword box. See especially the October 22 article “Revealed: full scale of vaccine blunders.”