The Virus and the Vaccine: A Fact Sheet

• Between 1954 and 1963, polio vaccine produced in the U.S. was contaminated with a monkey virus called simian virus 40, or SV40.

• Most baby boomers – or about 100 million Americans – received vaccine that was widely contaminated with the simian virus. Many millions of people in Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries were also exposed to the SV40-contaminated vaccine.

• When the virus was discovered to cause cancer in laboratory animals in 1961, federal health officials, fearing the public would lose confidence in the nation’s vaccination program, declined to recall contaminated vaccine, thereby exposing millions more Americans unnecessarily. They took away the laboratory and the staff of the scientist who first discovered the virus caused cancer in laboratory animals after she went public with the news in 1961.

• For thirty years, little research was done on the connection between SV40 and human disease.

• Since the early 1990s, scientists have connected SV40 with four types of cancer in human beings: a lung cancer called mesothelioma, a variety of brain cancers and bone cancers, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a lymphatic cancer. Combined, these cancers strike more than 60,000 people a year in the United States and many more worldwide. The lung and brain cancers are particularly deadly.

• More than 90 peer-reviewed studies from various laboratories around the world have been published confirming SV40’s association with these human tumors.

• Research on how the virus can cause cancer at the cellular level has found that SV40 suppresses critical anti-cancer genes; it causes chromosomal damage; and it causes cells to hyperproliferate. Scientists who have studied SV40 describe it as the most oncogenic virus ever discovered.

• SV40 has been found in fatal tumors, particularly brain tumors, of children too young to  have been exposed to contaminated vaccine in the 1950s and 1960s. Some scientists speculate the virus may be spreading through the population. Others believe the polio vaccine may, at times, have been contaminated through the 1990s.

• Preliminary serological studies indicate that about 12 percent of the adult U.S. population may be infected with the SV40 virus.

• For the last decade, the National Cancer Institute has funded very little research on the subject of SV40’s connection with human disease. For example, it spent less than $2 million in fiscal 2001 and 2002 combined. By comparison it spent $10 million during the same period funding research on HTLV-1, a virus that infects only 25 in 100,000 people and causes disease in only 4 percent of the people it infects. Though some government officials continue to claim that the virus is harmless to humans, the National Cancer Institute has already patented a potential therapy aimed at the virus.

• Beginning in the January 2000, the U.S. switched to a polio vaccine that was not manufactured on monkey kidneys; the vaccine produced since then is unquestionably free of any monkey contaminants. Canada and many European countries ceased using monkey kidneys for polio vaccine production decades ago.

© 2004 Debbie Bookchin & Jim Schumacher. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by St. Martin’s Press.