Darpa’s Veggie-Based Vaccines

July 30, 2012

By ROBERT BECKHUSEN| WIRED | JULY 30, 2012

In the event of a global and highly lethal flu pandemic, we’ll need to churn out millions of vaccines as soon as humanly possible. Not easy to do considering a true vaccine can’t be developed until the pandemic has already arrived. So it’s not surprising the military wants better vaccines that can be produced at blazing speed. Preferably ones it can grow.

The trick is to make lots of flu vaccines by growing tons of vegetables. That’s under exploration by researchers who hold $21 million worth of funding from the Pentagon’s mad scientists at Darpa — and Darpa has been pursuing veggie-based vaccine research, called Blue Angel, since 2005. This week, Darpa-funded vaccine firm Medicago announced it hit a key goal: producing 10 million doses of a plant-based H1N1 influenza vaccine within a month.

A month might sound like a long time during flu season. But a fast-spreading, lethal contagion is perhaps the most likely kind of mass-casualty disaster humans can face. Remember the 2009 H1N1 influenza? According to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate, the virus killed an estimated 284,500 people worldwide.

If H5N1, another subtype of influenza we know as “bird flu,” mutated into an airborne virus, the global mortality rate could reach higher than 60 percent. (By comparison, the last major pandemic in 1918 killed 50 million people with a mortality rate of 2.5 percent.) Your target population for the vaccine? Everyone, according to the World Health Organization (.pdf). That means the 7 billion people of Planet Earth would need to be vaccinated.

“In short, the potential for a pandemic exists and current technological limitations on defensive measures put the health and readiness of U.S. military forces at risk,” a DARPA statement announcing Medicago’s grow-your-own vaccine achievement reads. “A technological solution to increase the speed and adaptability of vaccine production is urgently needed to match the broad biological threat.”

The standard method of creating flu vaccine involves chicken eggs. Seriously: researchers combine the virus with a chicken embryo. But it takes months to ramp up production, and it takes a lot of eggs to cover a population. One estimate has it at nearly a billion eggs just to cover the U.S. alone. That’s a billion eggs you might not have during an outbreak.

Plant-based vaccines, however, are developed using “virus-like particles,” which consist solely of protein and are non-infectious. They can’t spread between people, and they help produce anti-viral antibodies. To produce the particles, scientists synthesize the DNA of the flu virus, combine the flu DNA with bacteria, and then soak the plants with it. After soaking for a few minutes, the plants then start producing the flu-fighting particles. The DNA stays in the plant. The protein is then extracted and becomes the basis for a vaccine.

The most popular plant? Tobacco, as it grows relatively fast. The U.S. is also estimated to produce a heaping 450 metric tons of tobacco per year. And the whole process of turning tobacco into vaccines only takes a matter of weeks to complete. On a large enough scale, plant-based vaccines could be conceivably produced at 100 million vaccines a month. Egg-based vaccines, though, can take months just to develop.

A flu pandemic would also be a new kind of flu, striking a global population without a pre-existing immunity. This means the virus can take more than one dose of vaccine to prevent. But Darpa hopes the plant-based vaccines can be produced strong enough to only require a single dose. The fewer the doses per person, the fewer vaccines you have to produce.

In 2009, the Army expressed fears in an annual summary of its military programs that “High rates of absenteeism [caused by a pandemic] could generate civil unrest, requiring Army action at a time when the Army’s own readiness might be degraded.” The military could also be called on to help prevent the influenza from spreading, and it won’t be able to do that if its troops are incapacitated with the illness.

The military better hurry. And Medicago still has to send the vaccine through clinical trials before it gets FDA approval. While H5N1 hasn’t mutated into a form that can spread into humans — outside of a laboratory, that is — the virus has blown away any doubts that it can. All it might take is a chance mutation to make the threat real.

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Fahrenheit 11/11/11

November 10, 2011 3 Comments

by David Swanson
Global Research
November 10, 2011

Believe it or not, November 11th was not made a holiday in order to celebrate war, support troops, or cheer the 11th year of occupying Afghanistan.  This day was made a holiday in order to celebrate an armistice that ended what was up until that point, in 1918, one of the worst things our species had thus far done to itself, namely World War I.

World War I, then known simply as the world war or the great war, had been marketed as a war to end war.  Celebrating its end was also understood as celebrating the end of all wars.  A ten-year campaign was launched in 1918 that in 1928 created the Kellogg-Briand Pact, legally banning all wars.  That treaty is still on the books, which is why war making is a criminal act and how Nazis came to be prosecuted for it.

“[O]n November 11, 1918, there ended the most unnecessary, the most financially exhausting, and the most terribly fatal of all the wars that the world has ever known. Twenty millions of men and women, in that war, were killed outright, or died later from wounds. The Spanish influenza, admittedly caused by the War and nothing else, killed, in various lands, one hundred million persons more.” — Thomas Hall Shastid, 1927.

According to U.S. Socialist Victor Berger, all the United States had gained from participation in World War I was the flu and prohibition. It was not an uncommon view. Millions of Americans who had supported World War I came, during the years following its completion on November 11, 1918, to reject the idea that anything could ever be gained through warfare.

Sherwood Eddy, who coauthored “The Abolition of War” in 1924, wrote that he had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of U.S. entry into World War I and had abhorred pacifism. He had viewed the war as a religious crusade and had been reassured by the fact that the United States entered the war on a Good Friday. At the war front, as the battles raged, Eddy writes, “we told the soldiers that if they would win we would give them a new world.”

Eddy seems, in a typical manner, to have come to believe his own propaganda and to have resolved to make good on the promise. “But I can remember,” he writes, “that even during the war I began to be troubled by grave doubts and misgivings of conscience.” It took him 10 years to arrive at the position of complete Outlawry, that is to say, of wanting to legally outlaw all war. By 1924 Eddy believed that the campaign for Outlawry amounted, for him, to a noble and glorious cause worthy of sacrifice, or what U.S. philosopher William James had called “the moral equivalent of war.” Eddy now argued that war was “unchristian.” Many came to share that view who a decade earlier had believed Christianity required war. A major factor in this shift was direct experience with the hell of modern warfare, an experience captured for us by the British poet Wilfred Owen in these famous lines:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The propaganda machinery invented by President Woodrow Wilson and his Committee on Public Information had drawn Americans into the war with exaggerated and fictional tales of German atrocities in Belgium, posters depicting Jesus Christ in khaki sighting down a gun barrel, and promises of selfless devotion to making the world safe for democracy. The extent of the casualties was hidden from the public as much as possible during the course of the war, but by the time it was over many had learned something of war’s reality. And many had come to resent the manipulation of noble emotions that had pulled an independent nation into overseas barbarity.

However, the propaganda that motivated the fighting was not immediately erased from people’s minds. A war to end wars and make the world safe for democracy cannot end without some lingering demand for peace and justice, or at least for something more valuable than the flu and prohibition. Even those rejecting the idea that the war could in any way help advance the cause of peace aligned with all those wanting to avoid all future wars — a group that probably encompassed most of the U.S. population.

As Wilson had talked up peace as the official reason for going to war, countless souls had taken him extremely seriously. “It is no exaggeration to say that where there had been relatively few peace schemes before the World War,” writes Robert Ferrell, “there now were hundreds and even thousands” in Europe and the United States. The decade following the war was a decade of searching for peace: “Peace echoed through so many sermons, speeches, and state papers that it drove itself into the consciousness of everyone. Never in world history was peace so great a desideratum, so much talked about, looked toward, and planned for, as in the decade after the 1918 Armistice.”

Let us try to revive some memory of that foreign world on the occasion of the latest “veterans day” this Friday in this brave new era of searching for more war.

David Swanson is the author of “When the World Outlawed War” from which this is adapted.

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Medical Industry Admits Current Flu Shots are Useless

November 8, 2011 1 Comment

NaturalNews.com
November 8, 2011

The medical community is in the process of unveiling a “universal” influenza vaccine that it claims will prevent all flu strains with a single jab. The only problem is that, in the process, the system has inadvertently admitted that current flu shots are medically useless because they fail to target the correct flu strain in many cases, and they do not stimulate a natural flu-fighting immune response even when the strain is a match.

A recent report by CBS 11 News in Dallas / Fort Worth explains that researchers from the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas have identified a compound they say spurs the growth of a key protein known as REDD-1, which prevents cells from becoming infected. By injecting this compound into patients, REDD-1 will increase, say the researchers, and thus effectively prevent any strain of flu from taking hold.

But what about current flu vaccines? Dr. Beatrice Fontoura, one of the head researchers involved with the new universal flu shot, explained to CBS 11 that it works differently than current flu shots because it “stimulates our own (immune) response which is already there and boost[s] it to fight an infection.”

In other words, flu shots being sold today at pharmacies across the country do not actually promote natural immunity at all, which begs an important question. If current flu shots do not boost the immune response, then what, exactly, are they good for?

Not much, according to a recent study published in The Lancet. Though the mainstream media widely reported that the study’s findings showed an effectiveness rate of 60 percent for flu shots, actual data in the study reveal that flu shots help about 1.5 out of every 100 adults. This, of course, translates into a measly 1.5 percent effectiveness rate (http://www.naturalnews.com/033998_i…).

And yet, for years, medical professionals everywhere have been hounding the public to get their flu shots or else face horrific sickness and even death. And those who continue to avoid the flu shot based on concerns about its safety and effectiveness have been routinely dubbed “anti-science,” or worse.

Ironically, the CBS 11 piece about the universal flu shot also contains an interview with a woman who admits that she stopped getting the flu shot because it made her sick every single year. Once she stopped getting flu shots, she stopped getting the flu. So why, again, do we even need a universal flu shot?

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Australia Blames Fluvax for Children Convulsions

October 8, 2010

Australian Department of Health and Ageing reported that flu vaccination was “causally related” to fever and convulsions in 99 Australian children this year. Of those, 74 had no other possible cause.

New Scientist

Image: Reuters

As the northern hemisphere braces itself for the flu season, and for the first time the US recommends flu vaccination for everyone over 6 months of age, Australia has confirmed that its main seasonal flu vaccine, Fluvax, caused convulsions in 99 children, all of whom recovered. Fluvax is made by the Australian firm CSL.

Epidemiologists insist that the benefits of flu vaccines outweigh the risks, however, and are calling for better surveillance to pick up occasional problems faster.

Last March, Australia started vaccinating ahead of the southern hemisphere’s flu season. All the drug firms’ vaccines contained three killed strains of flu, one of which was last year’s pandemic strain, which persists as the dominant seasonal virus in Australia, North America and elsewhere.

In early April, reports came in of children with fever and convulsions following vaccination. On 22 April Australia suspended flu vaccination for children under 5. In late July, vaccination resumed with other makers’ vaccines, but not CSL’s Fluvax.

Fevers and convulsions

Last week the Australian Department of Health and Ageing reported that flu vaccination was “causally related” to fever and convulsions in 99 Australian children this year. Of those, 74 had no other possible cause, and Fluvax had been given to all 66 of those where the vaccine’s name was known, CSL says it is trying to identify the problem.

Fever is an occasional side effect in children given flu vaccines, and about 1.4 per 10,000 people vaccinated have seizures. High fever can cause seizures in 2 to 4 per cent of otherwise normal children 3 years and under, though no one is sure why. Fluvax caused seizures 50 times as often as would be expected with a vaccine.

In an analysis published in the journal Eurosurveillance, Heath Kelly, head of epidemiology at the state infectious diseases laboratory in Melbourne, calculates that Fluvax might have been worse than flu, causing two or three cases of convulsions for every case of flu it prevented that would have required a hospital stay during the pandemic.

Pandemic flu

But David Isaacs, professor of paediatric infectious diseases at the University of Sydney says the comparison is unfair. Children usually recover completely from fever-related seizures, though there can be brain damage in rare cases. By contrast, 1 per cent of children admitted to hospital with pandemic flu in Australia died.

Fluvax may well have prevented additional cases of convulsions caused by flu itself. In the biggest study so far of the neurological effects of the 2009 pandemic, Joshua Bonkowsky of the University of Utah reported last week that swine flu caused as many cases of neurological complications in five months as ordinary flu had in the previous four years. The most common were seizures. Moreover, the complications were more severe and lasting than ordinary flu. “Given how bad some of the complications from the H1N1 influenza were, we are really encouraging people to get vaccinated,” he says.

Kelly is also adamant about the need for vaccination. “The issue is not influenza vaccines in general, but one manufacturer’s vaccine in one year,” he says. “Such problems must be acknowledged rapidly on the rare occasions when they occur.”

Partly due to the scare, only 19 per cent of Australians were vaccinated this year. So far swine flu is known to have killed 16, including some with no previous health problems.

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IDflu: Sanofi-Pasteur’s Vaccine Cocktail

September 7, 2010

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
September 7, 2010

As The Real Agenda reported a few weeks ago, the globalists who created the fraudulent H1N1 influenza pandemic, widely recorded as such, are back hungrier than ever for more fraud and more dollars. Recently, the newspaper La Nacion of Costa Rica published an article concerning the availability of the new vaccine from the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Pasteur called IDFlu. The article, like almost everything this newspaper publishes is full of lies and half truths, so I was forced to write an article that talks about the details that Irene Rodriguez, the newspaper’s writer, omitted.

This is the tiny needle used to inject IDflu which is sold as one of the new "conveniences" because the pinch people feel is not so painful.

I wrote her an e-mail describing the details that were omitted, although I do not expect her to re-write it with the information documented in the e-mail. “I read your article on the new vaccine from Sanofi- Pasteur called IDFlu. I am concerned about omission of important details about the vaccine.” These details are precisely those that are never described to the public and for which many people still believe it’s a great idea to get vaccinated continuously.

First, the vaccine is the first of several types that will be offered to the public as a “cocktail” with various viruses including the infamous H1N1. With this, the consumer no longer has the option to choose which vaccine he wants to use, but will have to take them all; all in one. This eliminates the right to choose. In fact, the vaccine contains three viruses: A / New Caledonia/20/99 (H1N1) like strain (A / New Caledonia/20/99 (IVR-116)) 9 micrograms HA, A/Wisconsin/67/2005 (H3N2 ) like strain (A/Wisconsin/67/2005 (NYMC X-161), 9 micrograms HA, B / Malaysia/2506/2004 like strain (B/Malaysia/2506/2004) 9 micrograms HA. View the original document descriptive of the vaccine.Page 32

Second, the article does not highlight the list of side effects, which are as severe as in other types of vaccines: Blood and lymphatic system disorders,encephalomyelitis (inflammation of the brain and spinal cord), Neuritis, Guillain Barre Syndrome, Inflammation of blood vessels, seizures, neurological diseases and immunogenicity, or the appearance of immunological reactions that usually end in partial or complete paralysis. Page 39

In addition, the article does not say that the clinical studies were conducted only from the time the vaccine is injected up to three weeks later, a period during which it is difficult to detect serious side effects, such as those cited above, (especially immunogenicity) because they usually occur after that period. The pharmaceutical company follow ups conveniently end at the end of six months, meaning that it does not carefully observes side effects that appear later. Therefore, Sanofi-Pasteur cannot say it can rule out serious side effects caused by the use of the vaccine, because monitoring is not done. However, Sanofi-Pasteur says that these effects are rare or nonexistent (Bottom of Page 4). Based on what does it make this observation? Not through scientific studies.

Third, according to the descriptive document that details the origin, manufacture and composition of the vaccine, clinical studies were conducted in European populations. In other words, any result obtained in these studies can not be used to prove the vaccine’s effectiveness or safety in other populations. How is it that the sale of a product that has not been studied to see its efficacy or risk of side effects in specific populations is allowed on the market? This question should be asked to your Department of Health.

Fourth, the results obtained regarding the safety of the vaccine for human use are based on animal studies (5.3 on page 6) and these studies, according to the pharmaceutical company, DO show immunogenicity.

Fifth, safety studies were not conducted after the vaccine was placed on the market and neither were incompatibility or clinical studies on the effects the vaccine may have on human motor skills, for example, to operating a vehicle equipment or machines, etc.

Finally, the vaccine contains formaldehyde, or formalin -in its liquid form-, a toxic ingredient used in vaccines and whose cumulative effect weakens the immune system, causes genetic alterations, metabolic acidosis, circulatory shock, respiratory failure and acute renal failure. Formalin is also a sensitizer, which means it can make you sensitive or allergic to many other things. It is corrosive if ingested, and is a possible carcinogen. In addition to the above, vaccines usually contain other ingredients such as thimerosal, squalene, adjuvants, sodium chloride, potassium chloride, disodium phosphate dihydrate and potassium dihydrogen phosphate.

However, the news about this vaccine are not its ingredients, but its behavior in the body. According to details contained in the official document, the vaccine is not injected into the muscle as traditionally done. Sanofi uses a new method, the intradermal. The exact dose of 0.1 ml is injected just under the skin, for more immediate action. Is it possible that the same speed with which such acts in the supposed task of immunization can be seen in the appearance of side effects? The pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Pasteur does not detail anything about it.

Perhaps the only positive side, specifically for Costa Ricans, is that health authorities are not going to buy the vaccine from the pharmaceutical company, at least for now, so those who want to inject the cocktail of viruses and formalin will have to take 24 dollars out of their pockets to buy it from local pharmacies. In this case, there is no taxpayer money for enriching the bank accounts of the corporation Sanofi-Pasteur.

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