During the 1950s, the inactivated polio vaccine created by Jonas Salk was made using rhesus monkeys that were infected with simian virus 40 (SV40), a monkey virus1 that was later linked to cancer in humans.2
From 1955 to 1963, hundreds of millions of people worldwide — in North and South America, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa — received the vaccines,3 which at the time were heralded as a medical breakthrough. In the archived 1956 video above, you can see a propaganda piece from that era, showing just how the ill-fated vaccine was made.
“Few back then grasped that these vaccines might also be a huge, inadvertent, uncontrolled experiment in interspecies viral transmission,” a 2004 article in The Lancet noted.4
1950s’ Propaganda Reveals How Polio Vaccine Was Made
While Salk’s polio vaccine was considered a medical triumph of its time, its manufacturing process leaves much to be desired. “Welcome to modern vaccinology. A hilariously unscientific process predicated on insane barbarism, rife with fraud and immense hubris,” Inversionism wrote on X, formerly Twitter.5 The investigative journalist detailed the polio vaccine’s manufacturing process outlined in the video as follows:6
1. “Put all the glassware inside a hot steam bath or sterilize it.
2. Import Macaca mulatta monkeys from India for the experiments.
3. Prepare a mixture called “medium 199” — containing 2% calf serum, 200 units/ml penicillin, 200 g/ml dihydrostreptomycin and 50 units/ml Mycostatin (nystatin Squibb); the pH of the medium was brought to 7.0 by the addition of a NaHCO3 solution.
4. Euthanize the monkeys, remove their kidneys, and then place the kidney into a tube and hand mince it with scissors into small bits.
5. After the kidney tissue was weighed and decapsulated, they put the tissue in a centrifuge tube where they washed it in a phosphate buffered saline and placed in a trypsinization flask. Trypsin enzymes break down the proteins, which were then centrifuged at 800-1000 RPM for 10 minutes to separate the tissue and cells.
6. The kidney cells are then mixed with the medium 199 and incubated (fermented, rotted essentially) at 37C for 6-8 days. By the end of the 6-8 day period, the bottles and tubes were covered with a “confluent sheet of cell growth.”
7. Once the medium 199 is exhausted, half is siphoned off to be replaced by fresh medium 199.
8. They then add the “polio virus” for the first time. 3 different strains supposedly, with no other details on source, isolation process, or genome determination.
9. The bottles continue to rock for 4 days in the solution culturing, fermenting, decaying, and then it’s ready for harvesting.
10. Scientists then visually look at the vials under a microscope to do a “titration test” to discern how much live virus is in the solution, hand counting particles that could be ANYTHING. (very scientific …)
11. Next is filtration, the most egregious part. They filter the solution first through porcelain filters (heavy metal risk), and then through MULTIPLE SHEETS OF ASBESTOS to drain out any kidney tissue or stray bacteria.
(This part of the process is not disclosed in the video, but is detailed in the original paper on the polio vaccine process. They made multiple trivalent vaccine pools, with some having additional additives like sodium bisulfite, along with parabens, a known carcinogen and endocrine disruptor).
12. Now rabbits, monkeys, guinea pigs, and chickens are injected with the “live virus” vaccine solutions7 … to ensure it’s free of other pathogens.
13. Now the “climax” of the process as they call it, inactivation. This is where they mix the vaccine solution with formaldehyde, and then let it sit together for 66-68 hours. The narrator then hilariously says “then what remains can only do good, can provide humans with protection of paralytic polio.” “The enemy of man can now become his servant.”
14. Then the process of mass distribution. They get these massive tanks and mix in all the solutions, adjuvants, chemicals, and ingredients for mass production and “preservation”.
15. Before mass administration, they do a couple experiments on mice and monkeys to ensure the vaccine is creating enough “polio fighting antibodies” in humans.
16. The remainder of the process details the various “tests” they do as the vaccine lots are distributed, before really turning up the propaganda and showing President Eisenhower’s son receiving the polio vaccine.”
Paralyzed Children, Deaths Reported Following Vaccination
By 1954, a large-scale study of Salk’s polio vaccine, which included 1 million children, took place. April 12, 1955, Salk declared the shots to be safe and effective. In addition to being given widely throughout the U.S., by 1959, 90 countries were using it.8 But there were signs of problems from the start.
After mass vaccination began, some subjects became paralyzed in the limb where the vaccine was given. Recalls of 250 cases of the shots from two laboratories ensued following the reports of parasitic illness.
“There were also reports of paralysis and death in several children,” Singapore Medical Journal reported. “Investigations showed that improperly inactivated vaccine had released live virus into more than 100,000 doses of the vaccine.”9 As explained in The Lancet:10
“When Salk developed his vaccine, instead of using human tissues, as did the scientists who won a Nobel Prize for first growing poliovirus in tissue culture, he used minced-up rhesus macaque monkey kidneys, which were remarkably efficient poliovirus factories.
Those who sought to supplant Salk’s formaldehyde-inactivated vaccine with live, attenuated oral vaccine also used monkey kidney cultures. Despite a manufacturing problem that, at best, left six children who received the vaccine paralyzed in the arm, and despite concerns about wild simian viruses, Salk’s shots were declared safe and effective after 1954 field trials.
The next year, after grudging approval by skeptical government regulators, free Salk shots were made available throughout the USA. By 1960, scientists and vaccine manufacturers knew that monkey kidneys were sewers of simian viruses.”
Americans Kept in the Dark About Monkey Virus in Polio Shots
It was 1959 when the late Bernice Eddy, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, conducted a study, injecting hamsters with the rhesus monkey kidney substrate used to make the polio vaccines. The majority of them developed tumors.11
“Eddy’s superiors tried to keep the discovery quiet, but Eddy presented her data at a cancer conference in New York. She was eventually demoted, and lost her laboratory,” The Atlantic reported,12 but soon after researchers with Merck pharmaceutical company identified the cancer-causing virus in rhesus monkey kidney cells, naming it SV4013 because it was the 40th monkey virus discovered.
According to Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, in a presentation before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003:14
“Sadly, the American people were not told the truth about this in 1960. The SV40 contaminated stocks of Salk polio vaccine were never withdrawn from the market but continued to be given to American children until early 1963 with full knowledge of federal health agencies.
Between 1955 and early 1963, nearly 100 million American children had been given polio vaccine contaminated with the monkey virus, SV40.”
Did SV40 in Vaccines Cause Cancer?
While there wasn’t an “epidemic” of cancers that followed the widespread administration of polio vaccines contaminated with SV40, which suggests the virus alone may not be causing the cancers, researchers noted “it seems possible that SV40 may act as a cofactor in the pathogenesis of some tumors.”15
As further reported in Oncogene, at least three independent scientific panels agreed “there is compelling evidence that SV40 is present in some human cancers and that SV40 could contribute to the pathogenesis of some of them.”16 Brain tumors and mesotheliomas appear to be the most common tumors associated with SV40, with some studies showing a positivity rate of up to 60%.17
For instance, research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1992 revealed that half the choroid plexus tumors and most of the ependymomas studied contained a segment of T-antigen gene related to SV40. “These results suggest that SV40 or a closely related virus may have an etiologic role in the development of these neoplasms during childhood,” the researchers wrote.18
In 2002, meanwhile, The Lancet published evidence showing SV40 is significantly associated with some types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma after detecting it in 42% of non-Hodgkin lymphomas tested.19 And in a 2004 review of the then-available evidence, it’s noted:20
“Persuasive evidence now indicates that SV40 is causing infections in humans today and represents an emerging pathogen.
A meta-analysis of molecular, pathological, and clinical data from 1,793 cancer patients indicates that there is a significant excess risk of SV40 associated with human primary brain cancers, primary bone cancers, malignant mesothelioma, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
What Else Is Lurking in Vaccines?
While the SV40 polio vaccine contamination occurred decades ago, the controversy continues, as does the potential for present-day vaccines to be contaminated.
Research by cellular and molecular biologist Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., showed that many of our vaccines are contaminated with gammaretroviruses.21 How did this happen? In short, vaccine viruses were replicated and grown in animal cell cultures that were already contaminated with retroviruses. In other words, the root of the problem stems from the use of contaminated cell culture lines, similar to the problems with the original polio vaccine.
Meanwhile, microbiologist Kevin McKernan — a former researcher and team leader for the MIT Human Genome project22 — assessed the nucleic acid composition of four expired vials of the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 shots. “DNA contamination that exceeds the European Medicines Agency (EMA) 330ng/mg requirement and the FDAs 10ng/dose requirements” was found.23
In addition to the spike protein and mRNA in COVID-19 shots, McKernan’s team discovered SV40 promotors.24 McKernan explains that in many cases, when tumors are sequenced they’re found to contain sequences from SV40 and other viruses, which can integrate into your genome, causing disruptions and instability that can trigger the cell line to grow out of control.25
In the case of COVID-19 shots, he says, “The concern is if this DNA integrates the genome, one portion of the SV40 sequence is an SV40 promoter, a very strong promoter, which means it drives transcription wherever it lands in the genome.
If this happens to drop itself in front of a proto-oncogene [a gene that has the potential to cause cancer] and drives a lot of expression off of a gene that’s known, if you hyper-express it and turn the cell cancerous, then we have a concern that DNA is in fact doing that.”26
McKernan and colleagues have tried to spread the word about SV40 promotor and components in COVID-19 shots, but the media continue to try to discredit their findings,27 much like occurred with SV40 in the original polio vaccines. Further, as for why the SV40 promoter and enhancer are in COVID-19 shots in the first place, it’s again related to the plasmid growth medium, which in this case is E. coli.28
Since many types of cells continue to be used as growth mediums during vaccine production, including animal cell strains29 from chickens, dogs, monkeys, hamsters30 and insects,31 as well as cells from bacteria or yeast, and vaccines continue to be fast-tracked to market, it’s more important than ever for scientists and manufacturers to ensure that the treatment or preventative isn’t causing more harm than good.