Monday, January 16, 2012

Vincent Racaniello on poliovirus vaccine litigation

Vincent Racaniello on poliovirus vaccine litigation – a must read in its entirety:

Second, a single monkey with a 3-3 neurovirulence score appears to have played an important role in this case, but that ignores the fact that there are almost always wide variations that result in “outliers” whenever biological assays are involved.  We have studied poliovirus infection of mice in my laboratory, for example, and outliers are common – the one mouse in twenty that becomes ill or dies, while the others remain well. Other investigators have shown that poliovirus recovered from the spinal cord of an outlier monkey – one with a 3-3 neurovirulence score – does not produce these results when re-injected in a different group of monkeys. The monkey with a 3-3 score observed in the government’s test of one monopool of type 3 poliovirus vaccine is clearly an outlier. The other 14 monkeys in the intraspinal test had very low scores, and Lederle’s neurovirulence test did not produce a monkey with a 3-3 score. I conclude that the neurovirulence test on this type 3 monopool clearly did not exceed that of the reference virus – there is no scientifically valid justification for arguing otherwise.

If you don’t believe in outliers, there is another way to look at this issue: does a monkey with a 3-3 score in the neurovirulence test mean that the lot of vaccine is more likely to cause paralysis in humans? We cannot carry out such an experiment prospectively, but we can do the next best thing – compare the results of the monkey neurovirulence test with the rate of vaccine-associated poliomyelitis. In the entire history of the monkey neurovirulence test – from 1962-1999 – some monopools of vaccine periodically had one or two monkeys with a 3-3 neurovirulence score, and others did not. Nevertheless, the rate of vaccine-associated paralytic disease remained remarkably constant over this time: 5-10 cases per year. There were no spikes in the years when the “3-3″ vaccines were in distribution. The conclusion is clear: no lot of vaccine is associated with an increase in the number of paralytic cases in any year.

Why do the Sabin vaccine strains cause paralytic disease in some recipients and contacts? Albert Sabin derived these vaccine strains by serially passing neurovirulent isolates in different cell types, empirically identifying viral mutants with a reduced capacity to cause disease. There are few mutations responsible for the reduced neurovirulence of the Sabin strains – 5 for type 1, and 2 each for the type 1 and type 2 strains. These mutations rapidly revert during multiplication of the vaccine viruses in the human gut, and that occurs in every recipient of the vaccine. Within several days, the recipient sheds viruses that no longer bear the mutations that Sabin so painstakingly selected. These excreted revertants, when tested in monkeys, are more neurovirulent than the vaccine that was fed to the recipient.


Oral polio vaccine has an inherent risk that public health authorities deemed to be acceptable, given the extraordinary benefits of the vaccine. However, in a sense, the ~400 individuals who contracted vaccine-associated polio from 1962-1999 paid a price for the greater good of the population. For this reason alone they deserved compensation, which is what they now receive under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Compensation for these individuals is given without the need to castigate life-saving vaccines likes OPV.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are most welcome! But please:

- No SPAM whatsoever, no supplements, no pharmaceuticals, no herbs or any other advertisements

- Absolutely no quack-doctors pushing their quack-BS websites (and if you are a quack, I will call you out)

- Be critical if you want to, but try to be coherent

Comments are moderated, because I am tired of Gerwyn-V99-The-Idiot and his moronic sockpuppets, and tired of the story of the two dogs, but I will try to publish everything else.

If you are not Gerwyn (and want to tell me something other than the story of the two dogs), then relax and write something! :-)

Labels

5-AZA A. Melvin Ramsay Acne Advocacy Alan Light Alternative medicine is an untested danger Ampligen Andrew Wakefield Anecdote Anthony Komaroff Antibiotics Antibodies Anxiety Aphthous Ulcers Apnea Asthma Autism Autoimmune Disease Behçet’s Ben Katz Bertrand Russell Biology Blood sugar Bruce Carruthers Caffeine Calcium Cancer Capitalism Cardiology Carmen Scheibenbogen CBT/GET CDC Celiac Disease Cereal Grains CFIDS Chagas Charité Charles Lapp Christopher Snell Chronix Clinician Coconut Milk Cognition Common Sense and Confirmation Bias Conversion Disorder Coxiella Burnetii Coxsackie Criteria Crohn's Cushing's Syndrome Cytokine Daniel Peterson Darwinism David Bell Depression Diabetes Diagnostic Differential Disease Diseases of Affluence DNA DNA Sequencing Dog DSM5 EBV EEG Eggs Elaine DeFreitas Elimination Diet Enterovirus Epstein-Barr ERV Etiology Evolution Exercise Challenge Faecal Transplant Fame and Fraud and Medical Science Fatigue Fatty Acids Fibromyalgia Francis Ruscetti Fructose Gene Expression Genetics Giardia Gordon Broderick Gulf War Illness Gut Microbiome Harvey Alter Health Care System Hemispherx Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome Herpesviridae High Blood Pressure Historic Outbreaks HIV HPV Hyperlipid Ian Hickie Ian Lipkin Immune System Infection Intermittent Fasting It's the environment stupid Jacob Teitelbaum Jamie Deckoff-Jones Jo Nijs John Chia John Coffin John Maddox José Montoya Judy Mikovits Karl Popper Kathleen Light Kenny De Meirleir Lactose Lamb Laszlo Mechtler LCMV Lecture Leonard Jason Leukemia Life Liver Loren Cordain Low Carb Low-Dose Naltrexone (LDN) Luc Montagnier Lucinda Bateman Ludicrous Notions Lumpers and Splitters Lyme Mady Hornig Mark Hasslett Martin Lerner Mary Schweitzer MCS ME/CFS Medical Industry Medicine is not based on anecdotes Michael Maes Migraine Milk and Dairy Mitochondria MMR Money and Fame and Fraud MRI Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Multiple Sclerosis Mutton My Symptoms n-1 Nancy Klimas Narcolepsy Neurodermitis Neuroscience NK-Cell Nocebo NSAID Nutrition Obesity On Nutrition Pain Paleo Parathyroid Pathogen Paul Cheney PCR Pharmaceutical Industry Picornavirus Placebo Polio Post Exertional Malaise POTS/OI/NMH PTSD PUFA Q Fever Quote Rare Disease Research Retrovirus Rheumatoid Arthritis Rituximab RNA Robert Gallo Robert Lustig Robert Silverman Robert Suhadolnik Rosario Trifiletti Sarah Myhill Sarcasm Science Sequencing Seth Roberts Shrinks vs. Medicine Shyh-Ching Lo Simon Wessely Sinusitis Sjögren's Somnolence Sonya Marshall-Gradisnik Speculation Stanislaw Burzynski Statins Stefan Duschek Study Sucrose Sugar Supplements Symptoms T1DM T2DM There is no such thing as Chronic Lyme There is no such thing as HGRV Thyroid Tinitus To Do Toni Bernhard Tourette's Treatment Tuberculosis Vaccine Video Vincent Lombardi Vincent Racaniello Virus Vitamin B Vitamin D VP62 When Evidence Based Medicine Isn't Whooping Cough Wolfgang Lutz WPI XMRV You fail science forever