January 10, 2025
A study published on December 29, 2024, has confirmed previous findings by independent researchers that residual DNA from the manufacturing process for Pfizer's mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine can be found in vials at levels exceeding the World Health Organization's (WHO) and US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) safety limit.
The study was published in the Journal of High School Science and is titled " A rapid detection method of replication-competent plasmid DNA from COVID‑19 mRNA vaccines for quality control". It was done by high school students Tyler J. Wang, Alex Kim, and Kevin Kim, who worked under the supervision of FDA scientists at a lab at the FDA White Oak Campus in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The students found contaminant DNA in Pfizer's COVID‑19 vaccine at levels 6 to 470 times greater than the FDA's safety limit of 10 nanograms.
The discovery that mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines are contaminated with plasmid DNA from the manufacturing process was first made by genomics expert Kevin McKernan, who published his findings in OSF Preprints on April 10, 2023.
The fact that the DNA contamination has now been confirmed in an FDA lab in a study supervised by FDA scientists illuminates the agency's absolute malfeasance in having to date dismissed the legitimate concerns about the theoretical health risks it poses, including the risk of genomic integration into human DNA and a potentially increased risk of cancer.
McKernan has also observed that the vaccines administered to the public were manufactured using a different process than the products that underwent clinical trials.
Notwithstanding efforts by the mainstream media to gaslight us, the vaccines were incontrovertibly sold to the public on the basis of willful lies, including the scientifically fraudulent claim from so-called "public health" officials that two doses of one of these products would confer durable sterilizing immunity that would stop infection and transmission of SARS‑CoV‑2, infection with which is a necessary but insufficient factor in the pathogenesis of the clinical disease known as COVID‑19 (hence many people becoming infected but never developing the disease).
Government officials who told that willful lie include President Joe Biden; Dr. Deborah Birx, then White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator; Dr. Rochelle Walensky, then director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and Dr. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In fact, the claim that the vaccines would confer herd immunity was faith-based, not science-based.
In Congressional testimony on July 23, 2022, Birx admitted that the clinical trials were not designed to determine vaccine effectiveness against infection and transmission and that their claim was based not on scientific evidence but on the "hope" that "the vaccines would work in that way".
In an interview published on March 3, 2022, Walensky CDC director Rochelle Walensky visits #WashUMedCDC director Rochelle Walensky visits #WashUMed that the basis for the claim was that they "wanted to be hopeful" that the vaccines would end the pandemic by conferring herd immunity, without considering the possibility that the protection afforded by the vaccines would wane so rapidly.
The truth that the vaccines were never expected to confer sterilizing immunity because they weren't designed to was finally admitted by Fauci in an article published in Cell Host & Microbe in January 2023.
Journalists like myself who at the time were trying to warn members of the public how they were being brazenly deceived were censored on social media on the grounds that to provide any information that didn't align with the proclamations of lying government officials was "misinformation"-the usual euphemism for any information, no matter how factual, that does not serve the adopted political agenda.
For instance, I was banned from LinkedIn for having accurately reported how the CDC's August 2021 lie that natural immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2 was inferior to that induced by mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines was contradicted at the time by virtually all the non-CDC-originating medical literature and subsequently falsified by the CDC's own data as reported by its own researchers in its own MMWR journal.
In September 2023, when I tried to share another factually accurate report by Maryanne Demasi, PhD, about the finding of DNA contamination in Pfizer's COVID‑19 vaccine, my post was censored by LinkedIn on the false grounds that it contained "misinformation".
Another claim made throughout the government's mass vaccination campaign was that it was scientifically impossible for genetic material from the mRNA vaccines to integrate into human DNA. The CDC's argument to support that conclusion was that since the vaccine mRNA never enters the cell nucleus where the DNA resides, it cannot become integrated. However, that was a non sequitur fallacy because it overlooked the phenomenon of reverse transcription of mRNA into DNA, which genetic material can then potentially enter the cell nucleus and integrate into host DNA.
As McKernan and colleagues noted in their April 2023 preprint study, the finding of plasmid DNA in the vaccines at levels exceeding the FDA's safety limits means that reverse transcription of mRNA into DNA is not even required for the genetic material from the vaccines to become integrated into human DNA.
McKernan's team discovered that, in addition to DNA, the vaccines are also contaminated with a gene sequence called the "SV40 promoter", which is used in the manufacturing process to produce the mRNA for the vaccines. This is a fragment of simian virus 40 (SV40), which infamously was found in the 1950s and '60s to be contaminating polio vaccines, a residual from rhesus monkey kidney cells used to culture the virus, raising concerns for decades about a potentially increased risk of cancer in polio vaccine recipients.
The SV40 promoter can enable contaminant DNA in COVID‑19 vaccines to be transported into the cell nucleus, where it can theoretically become incorporated into the host genome.
McKernan's discovery of DNA contamination in COVID‑19 vaccines was subsequently verified by numerous other researchers, including cancer genomics expert Dr. Philip Buckhaults, who explained how this raised legitimate safety concerns to a South Carolina Senate committee.
That testimony was reported by Maryanne Demasi in her article that I shared on LinkedIn only to be removed on the false grounds that it contained "misinformation". The YouTube video of Dr. Buckhaults' testimony has also since been removed by Google ostensibly for violating YouTube's terms of service-another clear example of how inconvenient truths exposing government-approved disinformation have been systematically censored by social media companies in service to the criminal organization in Washington and, by extension, the pharmaceutical industry.
The FDA has been repeatedly notified about the finding of DNA contamination, such as by Kevin McKernan at an open public hearing during a meeting of the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on June 15, 2023. (His presentation starts at about 4:58:45 in the following video on the FDA's YouTube channel.)
In an article on January 2, 2025, Demasi also reported the additional verification of the DNA contamination by students working at the FDA lab, noting how their study "challenges years of dismissals by regulatory authorities, who had previously labelled concerns about excessive DNA contamination as baseless."
McKernan told Demasi that the study's methods may have underestimated the level of contamination.
The students working at the FDA lab also found fragments of the SV40 promoter, which they said was "practically unlikely" to be functional. However, as McKernan told Demasi, "To assert that the DNA fragments are non-functional, they would need to transfect mammalian cells and perform sequencing, which wasn't done here." Additionally, the methods they used "don't effectively capture the full length of DNA fragments", and a "more rigorous sequencing analysis could reveal SV40 fragments several thousand base pairs long, which would likely be functional."
The student authors acknowledge that the risk posed by this DNA contamination remains "currently unknown", which is true in large part because the FDA to date has refused to conduct a safety assessment despite legitimate concerns about it posing a risk to human health.
As also acknowledged by the study authors, this includes the risk that "DNA fragments can be directly integrated into host genome, increasing the risk of insertional mutagenesis" and the risk that "DNA fragments may contain oncogenes that may induce carcinogenesis if ingressed into host cells." In other words, the foreign DNA could potentially integrate into human DNA and cause mutations or even cancer.
Apart from those risks, they also acknowledged the risk of even tiny DNA fragments to stimulate the immune system and contributing to adverse events experienced after vaccination.
On January 3, McKernan published his own article constructively critiquing the study, in which he remarks how, "Even in FDA labs, the few lots they survey are over the limit."
He further notes the study authors' failure to appreciate the practical irrelevance of the FDA's safety limit since it was established for naked DNA and hence is inapplicable to the DNA in the COVID‑19 vaccines, which is encapsulated by lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) specifically designed to carry the genetic material into the cells.
In other words, the FDA's "safe" limit is ipso facto too high in the context of these mRNA products developed using gene therapy technology.
Dr. Brian Hooker, the chief scientific officer for the organization Children's Health Defense (CHD), remarked,
It is ironic that it takes student researchers at the FDA to do the work of the FDA regulators. It is alarming that the public is made aware of this contamination in an obscure journal that features high school science research. One has to ask, "Where is the FDA now?" and "Why hasn't the public been alerted of this?"
On January 6, Demasi followed up on her earlier report by noting that the FDA had responded to her inquiry about the new study by disavowing responsibility for it, notwithstanding the involvement of three FDA scientists in supervising the student researchers, and saying that the FDA "does not comment on individual studies".
The FDA further maintained its untenable position that the DNA contamination poses no health risks, stating that,
Based on a thorough assessment of the entire manufacturing process by the agency's scientific experts, the FDA is confident in the quality, safety, and effectiveness of the COVID‑19 vaccines that the agency has approved and authorized.
The agency's benefit-risk assessments and ongoing safety surveillance demonstrate that the benefits of their use clearly outweigh their risks. Additionally, with over a billion doses of the mRNA vaccines administered, no safety concerns related to residual DNA have been identified.
McKernan commented on the FDA's dismissal by saying, "It's the same script on auto-repeat at every regulatory agency. They always say, 'billions of doses given, benefits outweigh the risks, we've seen no evidence of harm.' But billions of cigarettes were smoked, too, and that didn't make them safe."
He also rhetorically inquired, "If the FDA supplied the materials for the study and provided the technical advice through staff supervision, then how can they not be responsible for the data?"
Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, Professor of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Australian Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Institute, similarly expressed disappointment in the FDA's dismissal. As he pointed out to Demasi,
It completely circumvents whether or not the level of DNA contamination in mRNA vaccines exceeds regulatory limits (as the study performed in their lab would indicate) and what they intend to do about it.... Just claiming there's no safety issue and pointing to the billions of doses administered, without offering any evidence of safety, is far from satisfactory.
In fact, as observed by Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida's Surgeon General, in a letter to the FDA dated December 6, 2023, the FDA itself has previously acknowledged the health risks posed by contaminant DNA-hence its establishment of a "safety limit".
The FDA responded to Ladapo's letter by making clear that it had no intention of conducting any safety assessments to address concerns about the DNA contamination.
In a policy document from November 2007, the FDA acknowledged that
Theoretical concerns regarding DNA integration include the risk of tumorigenesis if insertion reduces the activity of a tumor suppressor or increases the activity of an oncogene. In addition, DNA integration may result in chromosomal instability through the induction of chromosomal breaks or rearrangements. [Emphasis added.]
In addition to acknowledging the risk that DNA integration could cause cancer, the FDA document states that if vaccine manufacturers find plasmid DNA in their products at levels exceeding the FDA's suggested limit, they "should evaluate whether the DNA has integrated into the genome" in animal studies.
The mainstream media establishment, for its part, has served the usual function of deceiving the public in service to the government and its policy goal of maintaining high vaccination rates, which is diametrically opposed to the alternative goal of properly educating people to be able to make their own truly informed choice about whether to get vaccinated.
For example, the finding of DNA contamination was alluded to by the New York Times on January 3, 2024, in an article maligning Dr. Ladapo for calling on the FDA to either demonstrate the safety of the contaminated vaccines or withdraw them from the market. The lazy Times reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, a so-called "science reporter" with a track record of atrocious so-called "journalism", mindlessly dismissed Dr. Ladapo's legitimate concerns on the false grounds that the idea that genetic material from the vaccines could ingtegrate into human DNA has been "widely debunked". Mandavilli falsely claimed that "scientific evidence has found no basis for his declarations", thus completely ignoring the repeatedly verified finding of DNA contamination and leaving Times readers with the false impression that this evidence does not exist.
Scientific American likewise mocked that vaccine recipients have a "better chance of becoming Spider-Man" than being harmed by DNA from mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines. The lazy author, Tanya Lewis, similarly lied that Dr. Ladapo's concerns were "without convincing evidence" and "unfounded", even though the vaccines had been proven to be contaminated with plasmid DNA and despite the FDA's own policy document explaining how contaminant DNA poses health risks, including the potential for integration into the host genome and a heightened risk of cancer.
The mainstream media thus have refused to properly inform the public that the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines are contaminated with DNA from the manufacturing process, much less to inform people about the health risks this poses. Those examples illustrate how professional propagandists masquerade as "science reporters" who do policy advocacy instead of journalism.
Fortunately, there are people out there such as Maryanne Demasi who do real journalism, as you can tell by their articles being censored solely on the grounds that their truthful reporting does not align with the official government disinformation.
This article was originally published at JeremyRHammond.com.