>>10283278

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-bill-gates-covid-vaccine/

Bill Gates on Covid Vaccine Timing, Hydroxychloroquine, and That 5G Conspiracy Theory

Bill Gates, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, has become, for better and worse, a central character in the story of Covid-19. The good news: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $350 million to fight the disease, including funds for vaccine manufacturing efforts at AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. The bad news: Gates has been vilified by anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists who claim he seeded the virus for his own nefarious purposes.

Gates says he’s optimistic about the world’s chances of seeing through the wilder theories and of beating the coronavirus, too. His remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity.

>>10283285

How confident are you we’ll have a working vaccine that can be widely distributed by the end of 2020?

Well, the initial vaccine won’t be ideal in terms of its effectiveness against sickness and transmission. It may not have a long duration, and it will mainly be used in rich countries as a stopgap measure.

We’d be lucky to have much before the end of the year. But then, in 2021, a number of other vaccines are very likely to get approved. The strongest response will probably come from the protein subunit. With so many companies working on it, we can afford quite a few failures and still have something with low cost and long duration.

For years, people have said if anti-vaxxers had lived through a pandemic, the way their grandparents did, they’d think differently. Whoops.

The two times I’ve been to the White House [since 2016], I was told I had to go listen to anti-vaxxers like Robert Kennedy Jr. So, yes, it’s ironic that people are questioning vaccines and we’re actually having to say, “Oh, my God, how else can you get out of a tragic pandemic?”

Given the skepticism, should a Covid vaccine be mandatory?

Making something mandatory can often backfire. But you might say that if you’re going to work in an old-folks home or have any exposure to elderly people, it would be required.

How long has it been since you hugged someone who doesn’t live in your home?

>>10283288

What do you make of the conspiracy theories that you’re pursuing vaccine research to control people’s minds using 5G radio waves and so on?

It’s strange. They take the fact that I’m involved with vaccines and they just reverse it, so instead of giving money to save lives, I’m making money to get rid of lives. If that stops people from taking a vaccine or looking at the latest data about wearing a mask, then it’s a big problem.

What about the conversation around hydroxychloroquine, which the White House has promoted despite its repeatedly being shown to be ineffective and, in fact, to cause heart problems in some patients?

This is an age of science, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. In the test tube, hydroxychloroquine looked good. On the other hand, there are lots of good therapeutic drugs coming that are proven to work without the severe side effects.

We’ve seen the U.S. and other countries buying up vaccine supplies even before they’re approved. Is that harmful?

We need cooperation within countries and between countries. The U.S. as yet has not helped come up with procurement money for poor countries. We’ve funded more research and development than any country, but on factories and procurement, we’ve only taken care of ourselves. Every call I’m on with the pharma leaders and the leaders of countries is with the goal of, “Hey, we need everybody to be protected.”

How do you think this all ends?

The innovations in therapeutics will start to cut the death rate, but the true end will come from the spread of natural infections and the vaccine giving us herd immunity. For rich countries, that will be sometime next year, ideally in the first half. We’ll get out of this by the end of 2021.

So we’re going to be OK?

Certainly. We’re lucky this one wasn’t a more fatal disease.

>>10283293

>In the test tube, hydroxychloroquine looked good.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-zdoggmd-covid-antivaxxers/

Fighting Anti-Vaccine Pseudoscience, One Viral Video at a Time

In January, as the first cases of Covid-19 were gaining global attention, Nicole Baldwin, a pediatrician in Cincinnati, posted a playful 15-second clip on TikTok, listing the diseases that inoculation prevents and rebuking the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause developmental disorders. After accruing a dozen or so views, she posted it to her Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts in the hope it would reach a wider audience. Almost overnight, it did, but not the audience she intended.

“Come near me or my child with a needle and I will put it in your jugular,” one comment read. “Dead doctors don’t lie,” read another. A militia of vaccine opponents, thousands strong, was conducting a coordinated attack. Not content to keep it to social media, they threatened Baldwin’s practice, leaving false reviews meant to incriminate her on Google and Yelp. Some made threats to her life that were repeated and credible enough to land a police detail outside her home.

As the fervor grew, Todd Wolynn, a fellow doctor and a co-founder of Shots Heard Round the World, an informal group that seeks to protect vaccine advocates from online abuse, enlisted 16 volunteers to help get hateful posts removed and some of their 6,000 authors banned. Wolynn also thought a counterattack might be in order—so he called in Zubin Damania.

Damania is something of a health-care avenger. His YouTube videos, in which he raps in costume or rants about the anti-vaccine movement and wider problems with the medical system, have been viewed tens of millions of times. He’s one of a growing number of physicians turned online influencers able to communicate compellingly to viewers who might otherwise fall prey to pseudoscience. After getting the call from Wolynn, he organized a virtual rally, calling on health workers of all stripes to post videos, statements, and evidence to discredit Baldwin’s aggressors alongside the hashtag #DoctorsSpeakUp. The resulting campaign trended nationally on Twitter.

>>10283323

The fight against vaccine misinformation has taken on new urgency during the current pandemic. Life won’t return to normal unless an overwhelming majority of people develop some measure of immunity to the novel coronavirus, which essentially means either sufficient numbers get a vaccine or get the disease and develop antibodies, even as many more victims die along the way. Yet a poll published by Gallup in early August found that 35% of surveyed Americans would decline a government-approved Covid-19 shot offered to them at no cost.

Some of those seeking to combat vaccine misinformation stick to staid recitations of scientific fact. Damania does do serious interviews with leading medical professionals, but more than most, he hits anti-vaxxers where they lurk. His videos are often goofy, profane, or outraged; one fitting the latter two descriptions, A Doctor Reacts to “Plandemic,” posted in response to the widely circulated pseudoscientific documentary claiming the flu shot contains coronaviruses, has attracted 3 million views.

To mitigate the influence of anti-vaxxers, Damania argues, more of his colleagues will have to find imaginative ways to connect with an audience prone to getting its diagnostics from Facebook groups. “We’re probably a good three years of hard work behind in terms of cultural influence, and we just have to fight fire with fire,” he says. “If the anti-vaxxers are weaponizing social media and using the algorithms to their advantage, then why shouldn’t we?”

In the 1990s, Andrew Wakefield, a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a pair of papers in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet, positing links between vaccination and disease. The first, from 1995, claimed that 3,545 people who’d received a live measles vaccine for a 1964 trial had experienced higher prevalence of Crohn’s disease and other digestive disorders than an unvaccinated control group. The second, published in 1998, sought to establish a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, based on a study in which the parents of 8 of 12 autistic children described the onset of behavioral symptoms associated with the disorder within two weeks of receiving an MMR vaccination.

The papers brought Wakefield international fame, despite comprehensive epidemiological studies subsequently carried out by the U.K. National Health Service, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that no link existed between the MMR vaccine and autism. In 2000, Wakefield appeared on 60 Minutes, where he falsely claimed during a heated debate that the MMR vaccine’s cumulative strength made it more likely to adversely affect children than separate doses for the three target viruses. A year later, he resigned from the Royal Free Hospital and decamped to the U.S., where he became one of the most prominent promoters of anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and medically unsubstantiated cures for autism.

In 2010, Wakefield was struck from the U.K.’s medical register following the longest ethics investigation in the history of Britain’s General Medical Council. The council found that, among other breaches, he’d once paid children at his son’s birthday party to let him draw their blood. It also said that he’d failed to disclose glaring conflicts of interest, such as his application to patent a rival vaccine to the common MMR shot, and that he’d been paid almost $1 million to carry out his research by lawyers representing families seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers. The Lancet’s editor-in-chief subsequently retracted the 1998 paper, calling it “utterly false.” The following year, the British Medical Journal published an editorial showing that Wakefield had manipulated evidence to reach his conclusions.

As his stature declined in respectable circles, Wakefield went after a fringier and more impressionable segment of the American populace. His notoriety spiked in 2016, when a film he’d produced, Vaxxed, was released and he spoke at a seven-day “Conspira-Sea” cruise off the coast of Mexico, alongside fellow guests such as a self-described alchemist who claimed to have visited secret colonies on Mars. In the runup to that year’s U.S. election, Wakefield and two other noted anti-vaxxers also had an audience in Florida with Donald Trump, who’d repeatedly proclaimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism prior to running for president.

>>10283337

Throughout the decade, millions of anti-vax sympathizers were banding together online to craft and spread propaganda, coordinate conferences and demonstrations, and mount guerrilla efforts to abuse vaccination advocates. They exploited gaps in social media oversight, often working anonymously and adopting tactics such as sharing the same video hundreds of times to hike its chances of going viral. Occasionally, their aversion to evidence-based medicine hurt one of their own. Earlier this year, for example, a 4-year-old boy died of influenza in Colorado after his mother, one of 148,000 followers of a Facebook group called Stop Mandatory Vaccination, decided to treat him with a concoction of breast milk, elderberry, and thyme recommended by a fellow member, rather than with the antiviral flu drug the child’s pediatrician had prescribed.

Although hardcore anti-vaxxers are still fewer in number than proponents, they appear to be succeeding in growing the ranks of agnostics. A study published in Nature in May assessed almost 100 million people who’d expressed views on vaccines on Facebook and estimated, based on the pages they followed, that 4.2 million were anti-vaccine and 6.9 million were pro-vaccine, while a staggering 74.1 million were undecided. The authors raised the prospect that people holding anti-vaccination views would be the majority within a decade.

That same month, Wakefield appeared at the virtual Health Freedom Summit, where he suggested that the reported number of Covid-19 deaths—more than 735,000, so far—was “greatly exaggerated.” He also compared the vaccine industry to the slave trade and said the refusal to be immunized was worth dying for. Wakefield didn’t return phone calls or respond to voicemails and text messages seeking comment for this article.

The media and the medical profession have tried to challenge Wakefield and his followers. In the past decade, he’s topped Medscape’s annual list of the world’s worst doctors and been named one of science’s great frauds by Time magazine. He was also awarded a Golden Duck for “lifetime achievement in quackery” by the nonprofit Good Thinking Society. But Wakefield’s opponents have failed to match his followers’ energy and tech-forward methods.

That’s where Damania, who grew up in California, the child of two physicians, came in. In 2010 he uploaded his first video to YouTube, of his commencement speech at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine. From there he began to experiment, rapping about ulcers and crooning ballads such as Pull and Pray—The Safe Sex Song under his online moniker, ZDoggMD. As his channel grew in popularity, he became convinced that it could be an important platform for sound health information.

>>10283341

The following year, while Damania was working at Stanford University Medical Center and the Washington Hospital Healthcare System in Fremont, he uploaded Immunize, a parody of the Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars song Billionaire, which included the lyrics “Everywhere I turn my eyes/ The internet is spreading lies/ So many parents scared by fairy tales and hate/ I need to educate so I can vaccinate.” The video featured a fellow doctor as a scrub-wearing, sword- and nunchuck-wielding “immu-ninja.” “It was my first foray into that sort of counterprogramming, and it came from a place of just abject disgust,” says Damania, who’s 47, with excitable, deep-set brown eyes and a wide smile.

The video quickly racked up more than 200,000 views, accompanied by praise and disdain in equal measure. His critics questioned his credentials, posted his private information online, and even called Stanford to accuse him of ridiculing parents with “vaccine injured” children. Damania found the onslaught terrifying but fascinating. He learned that the more views and comments the video received, the more likely YouTube would suggest it to people searching for vaccine-related terms. Encouraged, he began spending more time on anti-vax Facebook groups, looking for insight into how their members created and shared viral content.

As he read, he came across a loose “anti-anti-vax” movement that had begun to form. Its leading lights included David Gorski, an American surgical oncologist who also served as managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, an informational website. Such work was honorable, in Damania’s view, but too dry. The groups “spent a lot of time countering all of the misinformation but doing it in a very unemotional, Spock-like way that I didn’t find particularly compelling for the average Joe,” he says. His attitude was, “Let’s get into the emotion of it, because that’s what really sways people.”

In 2012, Damania left Stanford to start a network of preventive-care clinics in Las Vegas, backed by Tony Hsieh, the chief executive officer of online clothier Zappos.com LLC. When the initiative foundered five years later, Damania moved his family back to California and began vlogging and public speaking full time, dubbing himself “Healthcare’s Unfiltered Voice” and traveling the world to lecture before institutions such as Doctors Without Borders. On his social media channels he kept staging satirical scenarios alongside grounded conversations with pro-vaccine figures, including one with the physician Paul Offit that was interrupted by anti-vaxxers violently pounding the studio walls. These days, Damania works out of a gated complex at an undisclosed Bay Area location, to ensure his safety. He regularly receives death threats—some, he says, peppered with the additional threat of castration.

The hundreds of videos he’s posted since 2010 have now cumulatively attracted about 60 million views—enough to gain the notice of social media executives, who’ve long been criticized for their inaction on misinformation. “Facebook and YouTube are well aware of what we do,” he says. “I’ve had calls with their highest folks, where we talk about how it’s possible to cut through the haze of misinformation and promote the information that’s actually positive.”

Damania isn’t seeking censorship of anti-vax content. His preferred approach is tagging, along the lines of the disclaimers Twitter has started to affix to troublesome tweets. On YouTube, he says, this might consist of banners linking to channels like his, reading, “Hey, by the way, this is total BS—here’s a video that tells you why.”

Despite his online stardom, Damania started worrying earlier this year that his work wasn’t helping bring about some of the larger changes he’d had in mind when he set out—grand goals such as galvanizing U.S. health care to reform with an emphasis on preventive care. In some videos he solemnly asked viewers whether his work mattered and whether he should quit. Hundreds of people wrote in saying he’d changed their minds about vaccines. He also got supportive notes from some of the U.S.’s most accomplished health-care figures. And one junior doctor said Damania’s videos about coping with burnout had pulled him back from the brink of suicide.

When the pandemic took hold, Damania swiftly gained tens of thousands of new followers on YouTube and Instagram. His Facebook page jumped by 400,000 followers, to 1.8 million. Americans were hungry for reliable information on the virus, on immunity, on whether Plandemic was real, on whether President Trump was on to something when he mused about injecting bleach. The attention reinvigorated Damania and got him thinking ahead to the showdown that’s all but sure to take place if a vaccine becomes available. “The anti-vaxxers will activate en masse and try to sow enough doubt and dissension that you will not get the critical vaccination levels and it will fail,” he says.

>>10283344

The anti-vax movement has long since popularized the belief that Big Pharma and the CDC are conspiring to profit from medicine they know to be unsafe. Damania foresees a distinct challenge with Covid-19 in the unprecedented pace at which large pharmaceutical companies are racing to develop vaccines, gain regulatory approval, and build out their supply chains. The scientific consensus around the safety of current vaccines exists in part because they were tested over a time frame that’s typically three to four years and because they ultimately went on to decades of harmless use in large populations. Damania is concerned that, if a Covid-19 shot becomes available, anti-vaxxers will accuse manufacturers and regulators of rushing out a dangerous product, regardless of how thorough the trial process has actually been.

Medical workers should be prepared, he says, to mount a major communication effort to get the vaccination rate where it needs to be. Others share his thinking. A working group at Johns Hopkins University, for example, published a report last month that includes recommendations to U.S. policymakers and doctors for persuading the public to accept a future vaccine to prevent Covid-19. The report emphasizes continuously sharing data about its benefits, risks, and supply.

In June, after a flurry of anti-vax sites falsely claimed Bill Gates had said a coronavirus vaccine could kill 1 million people, Damania uploaded his most ambitious music video to date. Set to Eminem’s Stan—in which the rapper imagines getting letters from an obsessive, increasingly aggrieved fan—the parody version, Dan, has ZDoggMD receiving pleas for attention from an anti-vaxxer who has, among other afflictions, been bitten by his service weasel, which he’s fed a measles-laced burrito in an attempt to confer immunity without a vaccine. ZDoggMD ultimately replies in a firm but compassionate tone: “I know you’re mad, Dan/ I’m sad you don’t feel heard/ But I get mad when kids get hurt/ Because damn, these vaccines work.” Dan, like Stan, dies before he can hear the rapper’s message, but he was never the target audience, anyway. As long as viewers get it, Damania says, it’s one more step toward turning the anti-vax tide.

>>10283341

>ZDoggMD

A Doctor Reacts To “Plandemic"

Here is my take on the recently viral video about researcher Judy Mikovits, Fauci, and COVID-19.

>>10283356

oh shit now we're getting somewhere

>>10283333

>>10283382

>>10283170

weird

>>10283178

>Got it enlarged for <3 you

>>10283181

RuN iT THRouGH GHiDRa!!1

>>10283175

>Canadian

>>10283416

>>10283429

>>10283481

>WANAB

https://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-politics/michelle-bolsonaros-grandmother-dies-of-covid-19-in-federal-district-public-hospital/

Michelle Bolsonaro’s Grandmother Dies of Covid-19 in Federal District Public Hospital

https://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/sao-paulo/politics-sao-paulo/doria-says-he-is-not-taking-chloroquine-i-follow-doctors-not-bolsonaro/

Governor Doria Says He Is Not Taking Chloroquine: I Follow Doctors, Not Bolsonaro

where are we going today

>>10283521

>>10283528

>>10283535

I have traveled across the universe through the years to find her. Sometimes going all the way is just a start…

>>10283539

>>10283560

>store manager who said he didn’t support police

>>10283602

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/511921-israel-uae-breakthrough-proves-trumps-critics-wrong-again

Israel-UAE breakthrough proves Trump's critics wrong — again

For nearly four years, Washington foreign policy experts and Obama administration alumni warned that the Trump administration was jeopardizing any prospects for Middle East peace. By withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, we were told, the U.S. would alienate itself from its allies. By moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, it would inflame the anger of millions of Arab Muslims. By recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, it would estrange the Arab states. By maintaining close relations with the Israeli government, it would imperil the lives of Palestinians.

With such a grim record of prediction, Thursday’s historic announcement that the U.S. brokered a normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates — the first Gulf Arab state to announce formal relations with the Jewish State — has the D.C. establishment with its tail between its legs once again. Especially now that so many have accepted prominent roles with the Biden campaign, they might want to consider where they went wrong.

I’d recommend starting with why even the prospect of a Biden administration has been enough to push Israel and many of its Arab neighbors closer together. During the Obama-Biden years, the U.S. prioritized bringing Iran “in from the cold” over regional stability and violence reduction. It also considered Western Europe a higher authority on revolutionary changes to the Middle East balance of power than the U.S. allies who actually live there. The threat of a return to those ways of thinking, and the desire to maximize the advantages of the current administration, helped ink the deal that many saw as impossible.

Rather than instigate a new round of doomsday predictions and too-cute-by-half analyses of how Thursday’s news is somehow “bad” for anyone but the Iranian mullahs, the experts and campaign officials who got this issue so wrong might want to revisit some other previous assumptions.

>>10283608

Sanctions on Iran were supposed to escalate tensions in the Persian Gulf. Expelling Iran from global oil markets was supposed to destabilize the region. The assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was supposed to trigger World War III. Bringing troops home from Iraq and Syria was supposed to be a capitulation to Russia. Altering the U.S. attitude toward greater Turkish action in the region was supposed to be a needless provocation to Russia. (Either way, it’s always about Russia.) And, most importantly of course, it was an outrage to Western Europe.

Critics who have lamented the Trump administration’s supposed abandonment of allies somehow missed the years of effort it put into building consensus where it counts. Just because an agreement is local, doesn’t receive the blessing of the European Union, and is negotiated outside the walls of the United Nations, does not make it any less “multilateral.” The Biden-world understanding of agreements such as these is that they must take place in the context of the G-20, and must be led by a consensus which, first and foremost, serves the interests and self-image of the “P5+1” or “E3+3.” The consent of the regional stakeholders who actually have to live with the consequences of these agreements is seen as largely irrelevant.

As the Washington establishment and their Potemkin candidate panic about a historic diplomatic achievement that serves U.S. interests, keep an eye on next steps. One possible issue on the horizon is Lebanon. That long-suffering country, Israel’s northern neighbor, is undergoing another heartbreaking period of instability and tragedy, largely imposed by the violent predations of the terrorist organization Hezbollah. For the past three and a half years, the Trump administration has relentlessly squeezed the Iranian terror proxy, chasing it out of international finance, clamping down on its transnational money-laundering schemes, and cooperating with allies such as Germany to eliminate its fundraising and recruiting activities on European soil.

The Trump administration now should consider conditioning current levels of aid to Lebanon (America is its largest foreign-aid donor) on the weakening of Hezbollah’s influence, and a normalization path between Beirut and Jerusalem. The White House also should lean heavily on France for cooperation.

But here’s the difference between the Trump administration and November’s alternative: Just as with all other regional issues, President Trump begins with a policy that he believes serves the U.S. national interest, then cooperates with the U.S. allies who have the most skin in the game. Joe Biden and his army of “experts” surely will spend this fall arguing the opposite: That the U.S. must begin by being ashamed of its own interests, then reach out to like-minded progressives who will agree to impose their preferences on ordinary people elsewhere in the world.

President Trump has now proven that not starting new wars, bringing U.S. troops home, and signing peace deals is only possible when an outsider ignores the Washington foreign policy establishment.

>>10283607

>>10283323

>As the fervor grew, Todd Wolynn, a fellow doctor and a co-founder of Shots Heard Round the World, an informal group that seeks to protect vaccine advocates from online abuse, enlisted 16 volunteers to help get hateful posts removed and some of their 6,000 authors banned. Wolynn also thought a counterattack might be in order—so he called in Zubin Damania.

>>10283613

>>10283616

>>10283620

>CHY-Na

durr I can't spell on purpose

^(?!(Anonymous$|Q$|Ron$))

>>10283630

>>10283612

>Todd Wolynn, a fellow doctor and a co-founder of Shots Heard Round the World

https://twitter.com/DrToddWo

>>10283640

>Todd Wolynn, a fellow doctor and a co-founder of Shots Heard Round the World

https://twitter.com/ShotsHeard

>>10283645

>>10283648

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRC-5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WI-38

>>10283661

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_contaminated_cell_lines#Contaminated_human_cell_lines

Many cell lines that are widely used for biomedical research have been contaminated and overgrown by other, more aggressive cells. For example, supposed thyroid lines were actually melanoma cells, supposed prostate tissue was actually bladder cancer, and supposed normal uterine cultures were actually breast cancer.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/938.full

“If…if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! … We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/aborted-fetuses-vaccines/story?id=29005539

17 February 2015

What Aborted Fetuses Have to Do With Vaccines

And why religious leaders still endorse vaccines.

A small but growing number of parents who object to vaccinating their children on religious grounds say they do so because many common vaccines are the product of cells that once belonged to aborted fetuses.

There is a grain of truth to this statement. But even religious leaders, including a future pope, have said that shouldn't deter parents from vaccinating their children.

Vaccine and Cell Line Science

Some childhood vaccines, including the one against rubella which is part of the MMR vaccine given to millions of children worldwide for measles, mumps and rubella is cultured in "WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts," according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's fact sheet on the vaccine's ingredients.

Merck, the vaccine's manufacturer, acknowledged that those cells were originally obtained from an electively aborted fetus. They were used to start a cell line, which is a cell multiplied over and over again to produce cells that are of a consistent genetic makeup. The WI-38 cell line is used as a culture to grow live viruses that are used in vaccines.

Vaccines Developed Using Human Cell Strains

"Merck, as well as other vaccine manufacturers, uses two well-established human cell lines to grow the virus for selected vaccines," Merck said in a statement to ABC News. "The FDA has approved the use of these cell lines for the production of these Merck vaccines."

Other common vaccines, including those for chicken pox, hepatitis and rabies, are also propagated in cells originating from legally aborted human fetuses, according to the FDA.

"These abortions, which occurred decades ago, were not undertaken with the intent of producing vaccines," said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Centers Disease Control and Prevention.

The original cells were obtained more than 50 years ago and have been maintained under strict federal guidelines by the American Type Culture Collection, according to Merck.

"These cell lines are now more than three generations removed from their origin, and we have not used any new tissue to produce these vaccines," the company added in its statement.

To say that the vaccines contain a significant amount of human fetal tissue, as some objectors to the vaccines claim, is misleading, stressed Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the vaccine education center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

"There are perhaps nanograms of DNA fragments still found in the vaccine, perhaps billionths of a gram," he said. "You would find as much if you analyzed the fruits and vegetables you eat."

And to remove human fibroblast cells entirely from vaccines is out of the question, Offit explained, noting they are necessary because human viruses don't grow well in animal cells.

"They have also been tested for safety and the fetal cells can go through many more divisions than most other cells before dying," he said.

>>10283748

Ethical Considerations

Religious organizations have sided in favor of vaccines as well, even those generally opposed to abortion.

"We should always ask our physician whether the product he proposes for our use has an historical association with abortion," the National Catholic Bioethics Center states on its website, but then goes on to say "one is morally free to use the vaccine regardless of its historical association with abortion."

"The reason is that the risk to public health, if one chooses not to vaccinate, outweighs the legitimate concern about the origins of the vaccine," the center's position statement continued. "This is especially important for parents, who have a moral obligation to protect the life and health of their children and those around them."

Offit said he was glad the Catholic Church supports vaccination.

He noted it is particularly ironic to object to the rubella vaccine using fetal cells because Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, commented on the subject in 2003, saying: "Universal vaccination has resulted in a considerable fall in the incidence of congenital rubella, with a general incidence reduced to less than 5 cases per 100,000 livebirths."

In other words, Offit explained, the rubella virus increases the risk of spontaneous abortion.

In the U.S., vaccination prevents up to 5,000 miscarriages each year in the U.S. alone, he said.

>>10283751