SV40’s Polio History

History Repeating? The NIH covered up a tumor-causing monkey virus in the polio vaccine and punished the doctor who found it.

The following story is sourced in part from SV40.org.

In 1961, SV40 (Simeon Virus 40) was discovered by Dr. Bernice Eddy of the National Institute of Health, Division of Biologics when she took the material used to grow polio vaccines and injected it into hamsters. Tumors grew in the hamsters. Her discovery was subsequently validated by Drs. Maurice Hilliman and Benjamin Sweet of Merck.

Upon the discovery that SV40 was an animal carcinogen that had found its way into the polio vaccines, a new federal law was passed in 1961 that required that no vaccines contain this virus. However, this law did not require that SV40 contaminated vaccines be thrown away or that the contaminated seed material (used to make all polio vaccines for the next four decades) be discarded. As a result, known SV40-contaminated vaccines were injected into children up until 1963. In addition, it has been alleged that there have been SV40-contaminated batches of oral polio vaccine administered to some children until the end of the 1990s.

The NIH Ignored the Risk

Dr. Eddy reported her findings, accompanied by pictures of the paralyzed monkeys, to William Workman, head of the Laboratory of Biologics Control. Her effort to avert the spread of the polio virus to healthy children failed because her finding was not well received. NIH director William Sebrell was notified of her findings, but he chose to ignore them, and her findings were never given to the vaccine licensing advisory committee. The Cutter vaccine was licensed along with the others; as a result, 40,000 children were sickened with “abortive polio,” 56 children developed paralytic polio, and five children died in what is known as “the Cutter Incident.”

The NIH biography on Dr. Eddy covers the topic by simply saying:

Because of the previous polio epidemics and the race to create a vaccine, Eddy and her team had been working around the clock testing the Salk vaccine. Amidst the scientific and bureaucratic chaos, Workman never told the licensing committee, and the Cutter vaccine was approved and shipped out.

NIH Biography of Bernice Eddy

Doing Her Own Research

In 1959, despite having been removed from polio research in 1955, Dr. Eddy began to conduct polio vaccine safety studies. In 1960, Dr. Eddy discovered that an extract of monkey kidney cells used to propagate the polio vaccine caused tumors in newborn hamsters. She surmised that the monkeys carried a cancer-causing virus. Her supervisors nonplussed; they tried to keep her discovery quiet but Dr. Eddy presented her data at a cancer conference in New York. The cancer-causing virus was isolated by other scientists and dubbed SV40 — the 40th simian virus discovered. She followed up and identified SV40 as the virus present in these cells and in the Salk polio vaccine that had caused tumors in hamsters.

Again, look how the NIH Biography barely covers SV40 at Dr. Eddy’s revelations. How is it that even today the FDA, NIH, NCI, and all our highly funded “health” agencies still ignore the great revelation of their mistake? This behavior makes our NIHGate scandal even more damning.

Eddy continued her ground-breaking research. In 1956, she worked with Dr. Sarah Stewart of the National Cancer Institute, and they identified the SE (Stewart-Eddy) polyomavirus, which can cause tumors. Eddy also identified the simian virus 40. Her work led to the newborn hamster becoming the preferred animal for testing potentially cancer-causing viruses of mammalian origin. Twice Stewart and Eddy were nominated for the Nobel Prize for their work on the S-E polyoma virus, but unfortunately, they never won.

NIH Biography of Bernice Eddy

Dr. Bernice Eddy’s Warnings Were Ignored

NIH officials regarded her discovery as a threat to a pivotal public health policy; namely, mass vaccination. They tried to muzzle her, but in 1960 she presented her findings to the NY Cancer Society; whereupon NIH blocked her from publishing her findings. Meanwhile, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, Merck’s Chief vaccine expert, published similar results at the same time, leading Merck to voluntarily withdraw its killed-virus polio vaccine.

Dr. Eddy Went Public & Was Punished

In 1962, Dr. Eddy finally published her findings in the Journal of the American Societies for Experimental Biology, reporting that the polio vaccine contained SV40, a cancer-causing virus. In 1961, federal health officials ordered vaccine manufacturers to screen for the virus and eliminate it from the vaccine.

However, they kept the discovery of SV40 cancer risk under wraps and never recalled existing contaminated vaccine stocks. For two more years, millions of additional children were needlessly exposed — bringing the total to 98 million Americans from 1955 to 1963. Eventually, Bernice Eddy lost her labs. In successive measures, she was denied permission to attend scholarly conferences, her papers were held up, and finally, she was removed from vaccine research altogether.

This is how the NIH remembers it:

In February 1961, Murray informed Eddy that her research interests conflicted with her control work on respiratory viruses. If Eddy was engaged in basic research with only minor relevance to her control activities, she was allowed to continue her work, but if her research began to identify factors which might require changes in the regulatory control of vaccines, her work was to stop. In July 1961, Eddy began her new role in research only as the chief of the Section on Experimental Virology within the Laboratory of Virology and Rickettsiology in the DBS. This was her new research-only role that kept her out of control activities for vaccines. Much of the treatment of Eddy was revealed during Congressional hearings as part of the Consumer Safety Act of 1972.

NIH Biography of Bernice Eddy

 Dr. Eddy’s treatment became a scandal within the scientific community and was discussed in Senate hearings. Medical historian Prof. Edward Shorter interviewed both Dr. Bernice Eddy and Dr. Maurice Hilleman. Here are his observations about the trials and tribulations of Dr. Eddy and Dr. Stewart:

“It may be that these women were treated as they were not because of overt discrimination but because they evidenced a somewhat different scientific style than did many of their male colleagues. Stewart’s intuitive sense that cancer was caused by viruses is a case in point, and her attempts to prove something that she felt in her heart to be true met with great skepticism. (Dr. Joseph Smadel was Dr. Eddy’s chief was Associate Director of NIH) Why had Smadel gone after Bernice Eddy?

“She was right”

Maurice Hilleman: “Well, because she never had definitive experiments. When you set up an experiment, you set up the controls to go with it. You can’t have public health being upset by experiments that may not be meaningful and that are not definitively run. They tore the hell out of her for that.” In Eddy’s defense, she was aware at the time that all the campus lab animals she might have taken as controls were contaminated with the virus. But what Hilleman and other men were saying, in essence, was that these women lacked rigor, lacked system, that they were too intuitive. “And yet she was right,” added Hilleman.

By contrast, when Hilleman told Smadel the same thing that Bernice Eddy had told him, Smadel listened. Eddy and Stewart had soft scientific styles; Smadel and Hilleman had hard styles, and hard personalities to go with them. Whether Eddy and Stewart had the right style or not, their polyomavirus and SV40 went on to form the basis of the revolution in biotechnology, which is the story of the scientific present and future.

According to the NIH,

Dr. Eddy later won a Superior Service Medal from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1967 for her work on control testing of vaccines for polio-myelitis and respiratory diseases and for her discovery and characterization of tumorigenic viruses.

NIH Biography of Bernice Eddy

(Edward Shorter, The Health Century, 1987; 195–99 excerpt; Michael Horwin. Simian Virus 40: A Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus from FDA-Approved Vaccines, Albany Law J of Sci & Tech, 2003; excerpted at SV40 Cancer Foundation.)

History Repeating?

Now we see fragments of SV40 in the COVID-19 vaccines and the corporate news, ‘science’, and social media censors are all desperate to prevent the world from knowing this.

Is this a case of history repeating?

Lyrics to “History Repeating” by Propellerheads featuring Shirley Bassey

The word is about, there’s something evolving,
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving…
They say the next big thing is here,
That the revolution’s near,

But to me it seems quite clear
That’s it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
The newspapers shout a new style is growing,
But it don’t know if it’s coming or going,

There is fashion, there is fad
Some is good, some is bad
And the joke rather sad,
That it’s all just a little bit of History repeating.

And I’ve seen it before
And I’ll see it again
Yes I’ve seen it before
Just little bits of history repeating

Some people don’t dance, if they don’t know who’s singing,
Why ask your head, it’s your hips that are swinging
Life’s for us to enjoy
Woman, man, girl and boy,
Feel the pain, feel the joy
Aside set the little bits of history repeating

Just little bits of history repeating
And I’ve seen it before
And I’l see it again
Yes I’ve seen it before
Just little bits of history repeating

(From the ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION AHRP.ORG)