Dr. Bernice E. Eddy
Salk IPV vaccines
[Dr. Bernice E. Eddy found that the Cutter vaccine had been improperly inactivated, and that the polio vaccine was contaminated with a cancer causing animal virus--SV40.]
See: Dr. Herbert Ratner, MD The Cutter incident, 1955 SV40
[2005] Salk vaccine cover-up resonates today
Quotes
In 1954 Eddy was fifty-one years old. Born in a mining town in West Virginia,
she got a Ph.D. in 1927 from the University of Cincinnati and came to Washington
during the Great Depression to work at the Hygienic Laboratory, as she continued
to call it. Her job from then until she retired in 1973 was the safety testing
of vaccines.
In 1954 the rush was on. Her lab had gotten samples of the inactivated polio
vaccine to certify on a "due-yesterday" basis. "This was a product that had
never been made before and they were going to use it right away,” she recalled.
She and her staff worked around the clock. "We had eighteen monkeys. We
inoculated these eighteen monkeys with each vaccine that came in. And we started
getting paralyzed monkeys." She reported to her superiors that the lots were
Cutter's, and sent pictures of the paralyzed monkeys along as well. "They were
going to be injecting this thing into children."
William Sebrell, the director of the NIH, stopped by the animal house where
they were working, not to thank her for blowing the whistle but to
ask if she and her co-workers wanted their children immunized with the
vaccine, as it was in short supply. "I thanked him but said that my children had
escaped polio so far and that I preferred to wait until the testing program was
over before having them immunized," said Eddy. "Everyone there turned down the
offer."
She heard nothing more about her report and never got the photographs back.
"They went ahead and released the vaccine anyway, a lot of it. The monkeys they
just disregarded."
[Book extract. The
Health Century] Dr. Bernice E. Eddy, whose lab
tests found that the Cutter vaccine had been improperly inactivated.
In 1960 Bernice Eddy, a government researcher, discovered that when she injected hamsters with the kidney mixture on which the vaccine was cultured, they developed tumors. 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. [2000] The Virus and the Vaccine by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher
