Gavin de Becker, bestselling author of “The Gift of Fear,” asked ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that uses natural language processing to create humanlike conversational dialogue, to explain the significance of DNA particles from Simian Virus-40 that were found in Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.

GAVIN: Tell me about SV40.

ChatGPT: SV40, or Simian Virus 40, is a type of polyomavirus that primarily infects monkeys, especially rhesus monkeys. It was first discovered in 1960 as a contaminant in polio vaccines that were produced using monkey kidney cells. The name “SV40” comes from the fact that it was the 40th simian virus to be isolated in cell culture.

Here are some key points about SV40:

1. Discovery and Contamination: SV40 was unintentionally introduced into the human population through contaminated polio vaccines in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Millions of people received these vaccines, and as a result, many individuals were exposed to SV40.

2. Tumorigenic Properties: Laboratory studies have shown that SV40 has the ability to transform certain types of cells and make them cancerous. In experimental settings, it has been linked to the development of tumors in animals, particularly in rodents.

3. Human Infection: SV40 has been detected in some human tissues, including certain types of tumors, but its role in human cancers remains a subject of debate and research. While there is evidence to suggest that SV40 can infect humans, its role in causing cancer in humans is still not fully understood.

4. Controversy and Research: The discovery of SV40 in polio vaccines led to significant controversy and concern. Researchers have conducted extensive studies to determine whether SV40 plays a role in human cancer, particularly mesothelioma and brain tumors. Some studies have suggested an association, while others have not found a clear link.

5. Vaccine Production: After the discovery of SV40 contamination in early polio vaccines, measures were taken to minimize its presence in subsequent vaccine production. Modern polio vaccines are produced differently and are not known to be contaminated with SV40.

6. Regulatory Measures: Regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have implemented strict guidelines to ensure the safety of vaccines and other biological products to prevent contamination with adventitious agents like SV40.

In summary, SV40 is a polyomavirus that was accidentally introduced into the human population through contaminated polio vaccines. While it has the ability to transform cells in laboratory settings and has been detected in some human tissues, its role in causing cancer in humans is still a subject of ongoing research and debate. Modern vaccine production processes have largely eliminated the risk of SV40 contamination in vaccines.

GAVIN: When you use the word “contaminated” in your last paragraph above, what do you mean?

ChatGPT: In the context of the last paragraph, when I use the word “contaminated,” I mean that SV40, the Simian Virus 40, unintentionally found its way into the polio vaccines during their production process. This was not an intentional addition but rather an inadvertent inclusion of the virus. The contamination occurred when the monkey kidney cells used to grow the polio virus for vaccine production were infected with SV40. As a result, some batches of the polio vaccines produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s contained SV40 alongside the intended polio virus.

This contamination raised concerns about potential health risks associated with exposure to SV40 through these vaccines, especially regarding its possible role in causing cancer. Consequently, steps were taken to reduce the risk of such contamination in subsequent vaccine production processes, and modern vaccine production methods have largely eliminated the presence of SV40 in vaccines.

[…]

GAVIN: And yet this “contamination” occurred in some batches, correct. (Yes or No answer please.)

ChatGPT: Yes.

GAVIN: Can you, an AI language model, know about something being accidental, intentional, or unintentional?

ChatGPT: I apologize for any confusion. You are correct that as an AI language model, I don’t possess the capability to determine the intent or motive behind specific actions. I can only provide information based on the knowledge and context provided to me. When I mentioned that the contamination of SV40 in some batches of polio vaccines was accidental, it was based on historical information and the widely accepted understanding that the introduction of SV40 into the vaccines was unintended. However, I cannot definitively ascertain the intent of individuals involved in the vaccine production process at that time.

GAVIN: Do any studies or published research address the issues of SV40 as a cause of cancer?

ChatGPT: Yes, there have been numerous studies and published research addressing the potential association between Simian Virus 40 (SV40) and cancer. SV40 is a polyomavirus that was introduced into the human population through contaminated polio vaccines in the mid-20th century. Its potential role as a cause of cancer, particularly mesothelioma and brain tumors, has been a subject of scientific investigation and debate.

[…]

GAVIN: Given this controversy and uncertainty, would it be safe to inject SV40 into my body?

ChatGPT: No, it would not be safe to intentionally inject SV40 or any other potentially harmful virus into your body. SV40, while it has been a subject of scientific investigation and debate, is not used in any approved medical treatment or vaccine for humans. The use of SV40 in vaccines was discontinued decades ago due to concerns about its safety.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/chatgpt-ai-covid-vaccine-dna/

Two U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical officers involved with the agency’s decision in 2022 to license Moderna’s “Spikevax” COVID-19 vaccine immediately took jobs with Moderna after they left the FDA, a new investigation by The BMJ revealed.

The report comes just months after the U.K.’s former deputy chief medical officer, who made governmental contract decisions about the company’s COVID-19 vaccines, joined Moderna as a senior medical consultant.

Peter Doshi, a senior editor at The BMJ who wrote the report, told The Defender, “The revolving door is of course a standard Washington story, but these cases feel particularly egregious.”

According to The BMJ’s investigation, Doran Fink, M.D., Ph.D., worked his way up at the FDA “with a focus on the regulation of vaccines.”

After starting as a clinical reviewer in 2010, Fink was promoted to lead medical officer in the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, according to his LinkedIn profile.

During the pandemic, Fink served on the agency’s senior leadership team for COVID-19 vaccine review and policy activities and “took part in the ultimate decision to license the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.”

In April 2022, Fink became acting deputy director of the Office of Vaccines Research and Review. He left the FDA in December 2022, and two months later was heading up Moderna’s translational medicine and early clinical development program in infectious diseases.

Dr. Jaya Goswami, in March 2020, became a medical officer in the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research where she was responsible for evaluating whether the clinical data for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine met regulatory standards for approval, The BMJ said.

In June 2022, Goswami left the FDA and joined Moderna as its director of clinical development in infectious diseases, her LinkedIn profile (which is no longer visible) stated, according to The BMJ.

“To review Moderna’s approval and then work for the company a few months later, it just does not inspire confidence,” said Doshi, who also is an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and a drug approval process researcher. “It risks undermining public trust in the regulatory process.”

FDA has a ‘real problem’

Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, agreed with Doshi. He told The Defender, “The FDA clearly has a real problem when it comes to the revolving door.”

The revolving door “goes both ways,” Holman said, noting that the FDA routinely hires people from the pharmaceutical industry.

According to Holman, the revolving door is problematic in two ways. First, people working at the FDA know that, after getting regulatory experience at the agency, they will have more lucrative job prospects in the pharmaceutical industry.

“You wonder if they’re actually pursuing the public interest while in office,” Holman said. It would be easy to have a conflict of interest by making decisions at the FDA that benefit a pharmaceutical company where one wishes to one day be employed, he said.

Second, once individuals leave the FDA, they “are very expensive to hire” because they have connections at the FDA and regulatory know-how.

This means that only wealthier companies like Moderna can afford to hire them.

Jeremy Kahn, an FDA press officer, told The BMJ the FDA has “more enhanced ethics restrictions than most other federal agencies.” He said:

“The FDA takes seriously its obligation to help ensure that decisions made and actions taken, by the agency and its employees, are not, nor appear to be, tainted by any question of conflict of interest.

“The agency provides robust information and resources to employees regarding the steps that must be taken to fulfil these ethics obligations.”

However, The BMJ pointed out that adherence to these obligations is “inevitably self-enforced.”

Khan did not respond to questions from The Defender regarding who, if anyone, checks to ensure that FDA employees are fulfilling their ethical obligations.

The BMJ filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FDA to discover whether Fink or Goswami sought guidance from the FDA’s Office of Ethics and Integrity before shifting to Moderna.

Legislation needed

Holman told The BMJ those in the public sector “are expected to serve the public interest … so, we need safeguards to make sure they are serving the public interest.”

There is no law forbidding employees who leave the FDA to immediately begin working for the industry they had been regulating, Holman said.

Holman advocates for a “cooling off” period of at least two years. “You need a period of time where the close relationships and the networks kind of break down,” he told The BMJ.

Doshi agreed. “Public service can’t be treated as ‘just another job,’” he said. “I think it’s imperative that HHS [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA] institute some kind of mandatory ‘cooling-off’ period for employees leaving public service.”

To that end, Holman helped draft legislation — introduced in last year’s congressional session by former Rep. Karen Lorraine Jacqueline “Jackie” Speier (D-Calif.) — that would have prohibited anyone in the FDA responsible for issuing a contract to a company from taking a job with that company for two years.

It also would have prohibited FDA workers who had previously worked for pharmaceutical companies to “influence” FDA decision-making in a way “that provides a direct and substantial pecuniary benefit for a former employer or former client.”

However, “the bill did not even get a hearing,” Holman said.

Speier has since left Congress, so it would be up to someone else to pick it up, he added.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/fda-employees-spikevax-approval-work-for-moderna/

Researchers from Tulane University linked high fluoride levels in wells to cognitive deficits in children in Ethiopia, finding more impairment with greater exposure. The study adds to concerns over fluoride’s neurotoxicity, especially for early brain development.

Children with chronic exposure to high levels of fluoride in drinking water made more errors on drawing and cognitive tests, according to a new pilot study by researchers at Tulane University.

The study, which linked fluoride exposure and cognitive impairment, was published in the November-December issue of the peer-reviewed Neurotoxicology and Teratology journal.

Lead author Tewodros Godebo, Ph.D., ​​assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, told Tulane News that the testing underlying their study “affirmed a clear association between high fluoride and cognitive impairment.”

“These results add to the growing concern about the potential neurotoxic effects of fluoride, especially during early brain development and childhood,” Godebo said. He said more epidemiological studies should be conducted to validate the findings of his team’s work.

For the study, researchers recruited 74 children ages 5-14 from demographically and ethnically similar rural Ethiopian farming communities with varying levels of natural fluoride in their community wells, ranging from 0.4 to 15.5 mg/L.

The U.S. Public Health Service recommends 0.7 milligrams per liter (mg/L) as the “optimal level” for water fluoridation and the World Health Organization recommends that fluoride levels be kept below 1.5 mg/L.

The children were tested for fluoride exposure and their cognitive performances were measured using two tests.

One test assessed the children’s abilities to draw common objects. The other used the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery, or CANTAB test, to assess memory and learning.

The researchers didn’t analyze IQ. Instead, they used tests designed to identify different markers of cognitive impairment and found that the higher the levels of fluoride exposure, the worse children performed on both tests and that in the CANTAB tests, the total number of errors became “markedly stronger” as the tasks became more difficult.

“This well-conducted study by a team of U.S. scientists is the latest in a long series of studies showing that fluoride is a neurotoxicant that can cause cognitive impairment in children,” Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to end water fluoridation in the U.S.

“At this point, it’s no longer a question of, does fluoride damage the brain? Does fluoride lower IQ?” Connett told The Defender. “It’s a question of, at what dose? How does that dose vary with innate susceptibility among the population?”

He added, “The obliviousness of public health officials to this clear and present danger is becoming intolerable.

Fluoride exposure is receiving more scrutiny from scientists and the public in part because of a lawsuit brought in 2017 by Food and Water Watch, Fluoride Action Network and others alleging water fluoridation violates the EPA’s Toxic Substances Control Act and that fluoride is neurotoxic and lowers children’s IQ.

Numerous recent scientific studies have linked fluoride exposure to cognitive impairment in children, including reduced IQ. Although some studies have not found similar associations.

Epidemiological studies have also shown specific links to reduced IQ and other cognitive effects on children in areas with high endemic levels of fluoride in drinking water supplies.

The authors of the Tulane study called for more research on the topic, particularly for studies to establish at what level fluoride is neurotoxic, as well as the effects of low levels of fluoride in drinking water.

Higher exposure ‘consistently associated with lower IQ’

The Tulane study’s findings support similar findings released — by court order as part of the lawsuit against the EPA — by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) in March in a draft report linking prenatal and childhood fluoride exposure to reduced IQ in children.

Public health officials tried for almost a year to block its publication, documents obtained by plaintiffs through the Freedom of Information Act revealed.

The NTP — which operates under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and analyzes environmental toxins — conducted a six-year systematic review to assess scientific studies on fluoride exposure and potential neurodevelopmental and cognitive health effects in humans.

The report, a monograph and a meta-analysis of existing studies on fluoride’s neurotoxic effects concluded that “higher fluoride exposure is consistently associated with lower IQ in children.’”

The findings from the report will inform the next phase of the trial set to begin at the end of January.

Study will inform growing controversy over water fluoridation

The Tulane study was conducted in the Main Ethiopian Rift Valley, where there are well-known endemic high levels of fluoride exposure. Researchers selected eight rural communities with high naturally occurring fluoride in their community wells.

Children in the study were born and raised in the villages that used the wells and had been chronically exposed to elevated fluoride levels since conception.

Researchers estimated the daily fluoride intake for each child based on their water intake and the fluoride concentration in the water relative to their size. They took urine samples from the children in order to determine their fluoride exposure.

Then they asked the children to use a pencil and eraser to draw three common objects — a house, a person and a donkey — they encountered on a daily basis, using as much time as they needed. The researchers then evaluated the drawings.

Researchers also tested the children using the CANTAB Paired Associate Learning test, which tests spatial memory and learning linked to the medial temporal lobe, the brain region thought to be most affected by fluoride toxicity.

They found a clear association between high levels of fluoride in drinking water and cognitive impairment. The study notes that these levels exceeded the EPA’s no-observed-adverse-effect-level for fluoride.e environmental exposure to fluoride and to “inform the growing controversy over the safety of water fluoridation.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/kids-fluoride-lower-cognitive-tests/