MMR Vaccine’s Poison Pill: Mumps After Puberty, Reduced Testosterone and Sperm Counts

From Children's Health Defense

This article represents Part I of a two-part series on mumps. Part II will delve further into the mumps vaccine’s spillover effects on fertility.

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman of the Board, Children’s Health Defense

Across the country, frenzied legislators are responding to the pharmaceutical industry’s orchestrated fear campaign around measles by seeking to impose further mandating of Merck’s measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Although ongoing mumps outbreaks involving thousands of at-risk adolescents and young adults completely dwarf the number of measles cases, no one is covering the mumps story—because it will expose the fact that Merck has been in court for over eight years due to scientists blowing the whistle on Merck’s fabrication and falsification of the effectiveness of the mumps component of its MMR vaccine. Instead of punishing Merck for its chicanery, legislatures are rewarding the company by making it impossible to refuse Merck’s profitable vaccine, subjecting a generation of American children to the risk of serious complications from mumps infection at an age that nature never intended.

When younger children experience mumps, the virus is relatively harmless; infected children often exhibit no symptoms. When mumps strikes adolescents or adults, on the other hand, the infection can cause far more serious adverse effects, including inflammation of various organs (brain, pancreas, ovaries and testicles)—as well as damage to male fertility.

Inflammation of one or both testicles (a condition called orchitis) occurs in approximately one in three post-pubertal men who get mumps and can contribute to sperm defects and subfertility as well as impairing the function of cells that produce testosterone. An estimated 30% to 87% of men with bilateral orchitis induced by mumps experience full-blown infertility—a major cause for concern given the significant declines in male fertility observed over the past several decades. Thus, it appears that Merck’s vaccine, instead of protecting children, not only delays onset of disease to later age cohorts but has the potential to cause serious and permanent injury.

Merck and mumps vaccines

Let’s look at a quick history of mumps and MMR vaccination in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensed Merck’s initial mumps-only vaccine in 1967. In 1971, Merckintroduced its first combination MMR vaccine, followed by the MMR-II vaccine in 1978 (which repurposed the rubella component) and the MMR-plus-varicella (MMRV) ProQuad vaccine in 2005. Since the initial 1967 vaccine, Merck has enjoyed a unique monopoly position in the U.S. market for mumps and MMR vaccines, with combined sales of MMR-II and ProQuad bringing in over $720 million in 2014 alone. Merck consistently places in the top five pharmaceutical companies globally, and the market valued its stocks at a seven-year high as of late 2018.… Merck has willfully and illegally maintained its monopoly through ongoing manipulation and by representing to the public and government agencies a falsely inflated efficacy rate for its Mumps Vaccine.

In order to score the lucrative MMR monopoly, Merck needed to satisfy the FDA that all three components of the combination vaccine could achieve 95% efficacy, but the mumps portion was bedeviling. In fact, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by two senior Merck scientists in 2010 under the False Claims Act, the company has known since the late 1990s that the mumps component of the MMR is “far less” than 95% effective. A 2005 study published in Vaccine estimated the effectiveness of mumps vaccination to be closer to 69%, and the authors noted that their results were consistent with other studies.

The two whistleblowers assert in the lawsuit—which is reportedly headed to trial sometime this year—that Merck has “willfully and illegally maintained its monopoly” through “ongoing manipulation” and by “representing to the public and government agencies a falsely inflated efficacy rate for its Mumps Vaccine.” Specifically, the two scientists claim that Merck executives ordered them to use “rigged” methodologies, including taking antibodies from rabbits and adding them to human blood vials, in order to gull regulators into assuming an antibody response robust and durable enough to merit licensing. When those “enhanced” tactics did not achieve Merck’s “fabricated [95%] efficacy rate,” the whistleblowers allege, the company resorted to simply falsifying the test data and engaging in other fraudulent activities.The fact that we have mumps showing up in highly immunized populations likely reflects something about the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Unprotected adolescents and young adults

The poor performance of the MMR’s mumps component and the doubtful “durability” of mumps-specific immunity following vaccination are of concern. In fact, we are already living with the legacy of this badly flawed vaccine. Rather than protecting a generation of American children from mumps infection in childhood, the vaccine has merely postponed the onset of the virus to older age groups, putting them at much greater risk. Researchers confirm an increase in the median age of mumps patients, a surge in the size and number of mumps outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations and higher rates of complications—including orchitis.

Across the country, galloping mumps epidemics have been ravishing an older generation of vaccinated individuals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 150 outbreaks (9,200 cases) in the year and a half from January 2016 to June 2017, affecting “schools, universities, athletics teams and facilities, church groups, workplaces, and large parties and events.”

Over the past several years, the number of college campuses reporting mumps outbreaks has exploded—at institutions ranging from Harvard and Temple to Syracuse, Louisiana State and Indiana universities. At the University of Missouri, which in 2016 reported 193 mumps cases on campus, the health center director reported not having seen anything like it “in her 31 years at the school.” Commenting on the fact that all of the afflicted students had had the requisite two doses of MMR, she noted,

“The fact that we have mumps showing up in highly immunized populations likely reflects something about the effectiveness of the vaccine.”

The mumps virus has also made a “comeback” in other settings where younger adults congregate. For example, a naval ship deployed to the Persian Gulf, the USS Fort McHenry, has been unable to come ashore since early January because of a mumps contagion that has devastated its crew—even though the military vaccinates all personnel against the virus and despite the Navy having immediately subjected the crew in question to another MMR booster. News accounts have declined to comment on mumps complications but describe the quarantine as “a morale killer” for crew members who are accustomed to having monthly port calls. Infection control protocols stipulate that the Navy cannot declare the situation “under control” until “50 days after the last affected service member recovers.”

Endangering rather than protecting youth

All of these cohorts are part of an age group that should never get mumps. As Children’s Health Defense recently noted, whereas “flares of illness in vaccinated groups should prompt some serious questions about vaccine failure,” legislators and government agencies “are displaying a dangerous indifference to vaccination’s unintended consequences.” Dancing to puppet strings manipulated by Merck, legislators across the country are trying to foist even harsher MMR mandates on unwilling Americans, dooming a generation of children to the serious risks of late-onset mumps infections.

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Part II

It has been about five decades since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Merck’s first mumps vaccine. The company began launching combination MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccines in the 1970s. Coincidentally—or not—an infertility crisis has been brewing over roughly the same time period, with dramatic declines in sperm counts and record-lowfertility levels. However, few investigators seem interested in assessing whether mumps outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations of teens and young adults could be having long-termeffects on fertility or other health indicators.

As described in Part I, childhood MMR vaccination has been an unmitigated disaster where mumps is concerned, deferring mumps infection to older ages and leaving adolescents and young adults vulnerable to serious reproductive complications. Public health reports show that the vast majority of mumps cases and outbreaks occur in youth who have been fully vaccinatedwith the prescribed two-dose MMR series, supporting a hypothesis of “waning immunity after the second dose.” FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials even admitthat mumps outbreaks in the post-vaccination era “typically involve young adults,” and that vaccination is failing to protect those who are college-age and above.

Myopically, many vaccine experts have called for a third MMR dose—or even “booster dosing throughout adulthood”—even though the FDA’s and CDC’s own research shows that MMR boosters in college-age youth barely last one year. As alleged in whistleblower lawsuits wending their way through the courts over the past eight years, Merck presented the FDA with a “falsely inflated efficacy rate” for the MMR’s mumps component, using animal antibodies and other fraudulent tactics to fool FDA—and the public—into believing that the vaccine was effective.

When infection arises after puberty, however, mumps is no laughing matter, presenting an increased risk of complications such as hearing loss, encephalitis and inflammation of the reproductive organs.

Mumps after puberty is no laughing matter

Around the time that the first mumps vaccine came on the market, the 1967 children’s classic The Great Brain humorously depicted mumps infection in childhood as a mere nuisance. The book’s young protagonist goes out of his way to intentionally infect himself with mumps so that he can beat his two brothers to the recovery finish line—and he experiences no adverse consequences other than his siblings’ annoyance.

When infection arises after puberty, however, mumps is no laughing matter, presenting an increased risk of complications such as hearing loss, encephalitis and inflammation of the reproductive organs. About one in three postpubertal men with mumps develops orchitis(inflammation of the testes), which can damage sperm, affect testosterone production and contribute to subfertility and infertility. During a mumps outbreak in England in the mid-2000s, mumps orchitis accounted for 42% of all hospitalized mumps cases; the researchers attributed this outcome—which was the most common reason for hospitalization—to “the high attack rates in adolescents and young adults” that occurred “despite high coverage with two-dose MMR.” An analysis of a 2006 mumps outbreak in the U.S. reported that male patients were over three times more likely than female patients to experience complications, “due primarily to orchitis.”

An estimated 5% to 10% of postpubertal women will develop oophoritis (swelling of the ovaries) following mumps infection. Oophoritis is associated with premature menopause and infertility, but mumps-related oophoritis has garnered little notice.

Mumps infections are often asymptomatic or produce nonspecific symptoms such as fever, while cases of orchitis may present with no other mumps symptoms. Nonetheless, public health officials advise clinicians that orchitis is an instant cue to test for mumps virus, and testing often reveals elevated mumps antibodies. In a case report of MMR failure, British clinicians isolated a novel genetic strain of mumps virus from the patient’s semen two weeks after the onset of orchitis and found mumps RNA in the semen 40 days later; they also noted “the appearance of anti-sperm antibodies,” with “potential long-term adverse effects on the patient’s fertility.”

In 2017, researchers who reviewed 185 studies conducted in Western nations found that sperm counts had plummeted by 50% to 60% between 1973 and 2011—an average decrease of 1.4% annually. Commenting on this work, one analyst estimated that 20% to 30% of young men in Europe and North America have sperm concentrations associated with a reduced ability to father a child. Given estimates that as much as 40% of reproductive problems have to do with the male partner, there is agreement on the importance of “finding and eliminating [the] hidden culprits in the environment” that most researchers believe are to blame.

An estimated 5% to 10% of postpubertal women will develop oophoritis (swelling of the ovaries) following mumps infection. Oophoritis is associated with premature menopause and infertility, but mumps-related oophoritis has garnered little notice.

MMR’s and MMRV’s potential to impair fertility never studied

Merck has not evaluated either of its two MMR vaccines—the MMR-II and the MMR-plus-varicella (MMRV) vaccine—for their potential to impair fertility. Whether such testing would unearth direct effects on fertility (as appears to be possible with HPV vaccination in women) is thus unknown. However, mumps vaccination undeniably increases reproductive-age individuals’ risk of mumps infection and, in the process, increases the risk of fertility-altering complications. These facts alone should be attracting far more attention.

Unfortunately, because clinicians already tend to underdiagnose mumps infection and underestimate mumps complications, it is likely that they are failing to recognize possible vaccine-induced reproductive health consequences of mumps infection in their adolescent and young adult patients. In one university outbreak, “most physicians…did not suspect mumps,” and even when they became aware of the outbreak, “diagnosing mumps was not always straightforward.” Moreover, although differentiating between vaccine strains of mumps virus and wild types could provide valuable information, few clinicians have the capacity or inclination to perform testing of this type. A Japanese study of cerebrospinal fluid and saliva from patients with mumps complications found vaccine strain in nearly all of the samples and noted the information’s importance in helping determine whether the complications were vaccine-related.

Those who have sought to understand mumps vaccines’ poor performance point to a mixture of explanatory factors. These include waning immunity, the high population density and close quarters encountered in settings such as college campuses, incomplete vaccine-induced immunity to wild virus as well as viral evolution such that “the vaccine triggers a less potent reaction against today’s mumps viruses than those of 50 years ago.” However, some also quietly admit that individuals with “mild vaccine-modified disease” could be perpetuating the chain of transmission. This latter point ought to be raising questions about the logic and wisdom of administering further rounds of MMR boosters during outbreaks while ignoring the problems created by the doses already given.

… some individuals respond poorly to mumps vaccination and vaccine-induced antibody levels correlate poorly with protection from mumps infection, irrespective of the number of additional doses of mumps-containing vaccine they receive.

Most scientists appear to be either resigned to ongoing mumps outbreaks in vaccinated populations or actually accept periodic outbreaks as the cost of doing business. Publications by FDA and CDC researchers reveal these agencies’ awareness that some individuals respond poorly to mumps vaccination and that vaccine-induced antibody levels correlate poorly with protection from mumps infection, “irrespective of the number of additional doses of mumps-containing vaccine they receive.” Considering the effects on fertility, the generally abysmal track record of mumps vaccination and Merck’s fraudulent claims about efficacy, it is hard to fathom medical and public health experts’ complacency about current mumps vaccines and vaccine policies.

Anatomy of a Science Study Censorship

From Ghost Ship Media.

Elsevier’s “withdrawal” of a small veterinary study breaks all the rules of scientific publishing. The biggest name in scientific literature has produced fake medical journals for Merck’s advertisers before, so yanking a study that doesn’t pass the vaccine industry’s sniff test would be nothing. Celeste McGovern looks at a case study of how Pharma is killing science.

It’s not often that veterinary research is so controversial that it falls into the jaws of censorship zealots. That is exactly what happened recently, however, when editors at a science journal suddenly turned on a small Spanish sheep study which they had already peer-reviewed and published and stamped it: “WITHDRAWN” — the equivalent of a scarlet letter “A” in the science publishing world.  This was not about shoddy science or ethical breaches; an editor tried to soothe the outraged veterinary professor at the head of the research. But the focus was “delicate” and “controversial” and someone — some anonymous letter-writer – had wanted the study removed, and the journal acquiesced.

“Dear Dr. Luján,

“I wanted to step in here to say that your manuscript is not being retracted – which implies wrongdoing and could damage your professional reputation,” Anne-Marie Pordon, publisher of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences titles for Elsevier journals interjected in a heated e-mail exchange between the lead researcher and various editors.  “We are withdrawing the paper, which does not imply misconduct in any way. There will be simply a statement that says “This paper has been withdrawn at the request of the _____” (Authors or Editors in the blank.)”   Pick your poison. You remove it, or we remove it.

Mercky past

Elsevier journals are described as “one of the world’s major providers of science, technical and medical information.”  They also have a skeleton or two in the closet. A decade ago, they were exposed in a private injury case for being paid by Merck to manufacture and distribute two completely fake journals to market Merck’s drugs. They looked like authentic, peer-reviewed science journals, but they contained only favourable studies about the use of Merck’s deadly Vioxx and another drug with potentially fatal side effects. Nowhere did they disclose that they were paid advertising for Merck.  Four more fake Elsevier journals were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies.

“I’ve seen no shortage of creativity emanating from the marketing departments of drug companies,” consumer advocate Peter Lurie of the non-profit Public Citizen told The Scientist after he reviewed Elsevier’s fake science journals. “But even for someone as jaded as me, this is a new wrinkle.”

An Elsevier press release said the company regretted the “unacceptable practice” of its Australian office. The scandal evoked a flurry of news stories and then it disappeared. Elsevier never revealed the sum they received from Merck or the names of the other pharmaceutical firms that had bought fake science from them. There was no penalty. And there was no authority or oversight agency willing or able to keep Elsevier from doing it, or something similar, again.

Secret critic

Fast forward to 2019.  There was no doubt by any party in the email exchange between Elsevier’s editors and Lluís Luján, the professor of veterinary pathology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, and lead author of the “controversial” sheep study, that this was highly unusual publishing practice.

Luján was obviously livid with a request that he withdraw his own study which had already been peer-reviewed and published online by Elsevier’s journal Pharmacological Research.  He flatly refused. It’s hard to imagine a scientist who believes in the integrity of his research doing otherwise. “Withdrawn,” unlike what Pordon tried to claim, is virtually synonymous with “retracted” in the science world and everybody knows it. It is a death sentence for a paper.

Pharmacological Research’s editor-in-chief, Emilio Clementi, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Milan presented Luján with “concerns from the readership” – a list of accusations of flaws with his methodology to respond to.  Later in correspondence, “concerns from the readership” morphed into “a signed note of concern from a reader” but the letter writer’s identity was kept secret – a big red flag that something foul was afoot.

Ordinarily, if someone has objections to the methodology in a published science paper, they send a letter to the editors. It is difficult to think of any circumstance that the identity of the letter-writer would be hidden.  The only reason someone might want to hide their identity is if they had a conflict of interest – like, they worked promoting a relevant pharmaceutical, for example. In any case, letters to the editors are posted on “Letters to the Editors” pages and rebutted by authors there.

That was not all that was strange, however. Luján answered all the accusations, noting that they were based on flawed assumptions and appeared to be deliberately “misleading” and “spurious.”  They seemed to have been written by someone with very little knowledge of veterinary research or methodology of behavioural science research.

Ignored advice

Clearly defeated on that front, Clementi decided that Luján would have to re-present all of his raw data to the journal’s statistical editor, Elia Biganzoli as well.  In his emails, Biganzoli remarked, revealingly, that the work focused on a “very delicate issue in science” with many “controversial aspects.” He cited a review paper by a self-described “vaccine activist” and pharmaceutically-funded researcher, David Hawkes as being absent from the citations on the list. Hardly a crime. Scientists cite the papers they see as valuable and relevant. Excluding an outlying opinion review paper which contains no original science is not irregular.

In any case, Biganzoli still didn’t think there was reason to withdraw. “I don’t think that withdrawal of the paper should be advised,” he wrote to the Elsevier editors. “Withdrawing the paper for these reasons would imply a similar action on many other works. At present, this option would not be sustainable.”

Besides, Biganzoli said, “the exploratory nature of the paper is implicit” and the researchers themselves said so in the paper.

Clementi and Pordon must not have liked this. They ignored their own expert, stamped the paper “WITHDRAWN” anyway and scrubbed it from the print publishing line-up. They must have known they were breaking understood rules of science publishing, the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) and Elsevier’s own code of ethics.  Did they consider if they were setting a dangerous publishing precedent? Or if they were denigrating science– the pursuit of truth, wherever the trail leads, and whomever it offends?

Stalin-style science censorship should make people,  particularly scientists, curious. Just what did the sheep study find?  Why would a small veterinary study have sparked such attention – and denunciation?  How could a mainstream science journal nullify publishing protocols to retract sound science they have already peer-reviewed and published? Who wields such power over scientific publishing?

Baffling illness

To begin, the study’s lead author, Lluís Luján, could hardly be described as controversial. With 30 years experience in the field of animal pathology, Luján is a sort of Spanish version of a James Herriot country vet — affable, respected by farmers, students and his peers alike. There is not usually much controversy in determining the cause of death of farm animals in northern Spain. Yet Luján stumbled into one of the most controversial arenas of our time more than a decade ago when he was called out to see an oddly-diseased flock in the Aragon region of Spain, where he lives and works.

After the first cold snap of the winter of 2007,  Luján arrived at a sheep farm not far from his veterinary faculty. The farmer was worried; he had worked among sheep his whole like and he’d never seen or heard of anything like this. Initially, just a few animals in his flock were affected, starting about six years earlier. A number of veterinarians had come to see his sheep already and they had seen pockets of this on other farms, but they had not known what to do. The sheep had mostly recovered by spring or summer in the past, but this was the worst the farmer had seen.  Now almost all of his flock was affected.

As soon as he saw the animals, Luján could see that the sheep were ill. They were emaciated and their raw, pink skin showed where great patches of wool were missing from their flanks. This was a sure sign they were wool biting, obsessively yanking the wool from their flock mates and chomping it. Wool biting is well-documented as a behavioural anomaly in veterinary journals but it is not well understood. It has been studied in relation to overcrowded conditions, animal  “boredom” and nutritional deficiencies, but none of these factors had adequately explained the phenomenon and they certainly weren’t the cause of these severe cases Luján was looking at. These animals were restless and skittish. Some were lethargic and weak. Some had tremors and could barely stand.



As a pathologist and an academic, Luján was familiar with sheep disease but this was nothing he could easily diagnose. He began testing to rule out the usual culprits: pathogens like viruses, bacteria and parasites. He wondered about an environmental toxin, too, so he tested the animals’ water, their food, the soil they grazed on. In the meantime, he did what he could to alleviate the symptoms. He changed their diets and some management practises and had them vaccinated again. The test results were unrevealing.

A veterinarian from the government administration was called to the farm and he rang Luján. “Lluís, I’ve just been to the sheep Auschwitz,” he said wryly. “What do you make of it?”

Luján recommended that the animals be put down as a precautionary measure. The government would compensate the farmer and give him new sheep.

The epidemic

About two years later in 2009, Lujan was in his office when the fax machine hummed and a government animal health authority bulletin announced a round of bluetongue vaccination for the region. There was nothing remarkable in this. Bluetongue is a noncontagious, viral disease transmitted by midges to ruminants. It causes fever and swelling of the mouth and gums as well as a tell-tale protruding cyanotic tongue. A virulent strain can kill a third of a flock and it had re-emerged in northern Europe in 2006 and spread throughout Belgium, Germany, the UK and Spain by 2007 and 2008. The European Union was responding with the widest vaccination campaign in ovine history, targeting about 90 million animals throughout the continent with a total of four vaccines and boosters against two strains of the virus in less than a month.

Over the next few weeks, Luján’s phone began to ring. Farmers from all over the region were reporting outbreaks and bizarre disease symptoms that he had seen before.  Some of them were linking it directly to the recent bluetongue vaccines.

The mystery illness was sweeping across Spain. Initially, just a few sheep were ill. They became agitated and nervous. They were wool biting. Some clenched their teeth. Some became lethargic and reluctant to move. It was easy to see involuntary tremors of their great brown eyeballs.  A few were transiently blind. They were disoriented and unresponsive. After a few days, most of the animals recovered but the most severely affected of the flock collapsed in seizures and died.

When the weather turned cold, a second wave of the illness affected thousands of sheep, sometimes wiping out entire flocks. These animals lost weight and looked emaciated. They had muscle tremors and weakness. Some had a light but constant tilt to their heads. Farmers reported pregnant ewes aborting spontaneously. Thousands of animals were stuporous. Many became unresponsive, dropped to their front quarters, become comatose and died.

‘Oh my god, it can’t be the vaccine’

Veterinarians began vigorously investigating the baffling disease that was decimating the Spanish sheep industry. Luján was not surprised that, despite their tremendous efforts, their tests were coming up empty-handed. He had done them all before himself, on the sheep “Auschwitz” farm.

He was reeling, however. Asked how the idea that a vaccine could be causing this disease impacted him at the time, Lujan gripped a stone ledge beside him as if to brace himself. In other words, it was earth shaking. “Oh, my God. It can’t be the vaccine,” he recalls thinking. “I couldn’t believe it. But it was just too much coincidence.”

He began poring over journals on Pubmed and one evening, he found a description of what he was seeing in the sheep in a human immunology journal describing a condition called ASIA – Autoimmune/Inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants. Aluminum adjuvants used in human vaccines — and like that used in the bluetongue sheep vaccine — were known to elicit a hyperactive immune response in some people, and to set off immune system cascades that could later manifest as overt autoimmune disease. The aluminum ingredient in vaccines was connected to diseases such as encephalitis, macrophagic myofasciitis and Gulf War Illness.  The Spanish sheep disease sounded very similar to this post-vaccination disease described in humans. It was after 1 am and Luján shot an email off to the author, immunologist Yehuda Shoenfeld, director of the Zabludowicz Center for Autoimmune Diseases associated with Tel Aviv University, a giant in the field of autoimmune disease with more than 1,500 published papers in immunology, and he hoped he might hear from him eventually. The next morning, to his surprise, Shoenfeld had already replied.

Inducing disease experimentally

Luján’s team published a paper in 2013 describing the mystery illness that they now called “Ovine ASIA” and the post mortem findings of 64 affected sheep from the Zaragoza region of Spain. The wasted corpses of the animals had markedly thickened nerves that were easily visible, protruding on their abdomens and backs and down their legs.  Dissection revealed that they had meningoencephalitis-like disease, their brains were inflamed and there was evidence of  “severe neuron necrosis.” Special techniques revealed aluminum in their nerve tissue.

More crucially, the researchers were able to induce the disease in a small number of sheep by giving them repeated aluminum-containing vaccinations.  These vaccinated sheep lost on average 8.5% of their body fat compared to controls, they showed nervous behaviour changes – depressed, lethargic behaviour alternating with skittishness – they had light fluid around their hearts, and aluminum was detected in their nervous tissue at the late study stage. The veterinarians concluded: “A huge research effort is needed in this field to help understand this process, something that will be of great benefit for both human and animals.”

A study like should have sent shock waves through public health agencies worldwide and triggered a storm of research on the aluminum additive given in ever-increasing doses in animal — and  childhood — vaccines. A year later, however, Luján was presenting the findings to researchers at the 2014 Autoimmune Congress in Nice, France. “We are supposed to balance the benefits of vaccines against the adverse events,” he concluded in a somewhat frustrated tone of urgency. “What is sold is [the message] that vaccines have only beneficial effects, and the rest is forgotten or ignored, or nobody wants to hear about it.” He had no idea how prescient those words were.

Three troubling discoveries

Luján’s team of veterinarians undertook to expand the research themselves in the meantime and recently they published three studies based on their findings:

Granulomas

One study, published in Veterinary Pathology, describes how 84 lambs were divided into three treatment groups of 28 animals each: the first got 19 aluminum-containing vaccines injections over 15 months, the second, got shots of the aluminum adjuvant ingredient alone, and the third, a control group, received saline. Post mortem studies revealed that all of the vaccinated sheep and 92.3% of the lambs who got adjuvant-only injections, but none of the control animals, developed “granulomas” – cyst-like nodules of white blood cells loaded with the neurotoxic metal aluminum. These granulomas were at the injection site and in nearby lymph nodes – evidence that aluminum used in vaccines is not inert or excreted rapidly from the body as public health officials have maintained since they began using it in vaccines in the 1920s. It is swallowed up by macrophages and transported to lymph nodes. Other studies have shown that from the lymph nodes, aluminum slowly translocates to distant sites around the body and accumulates in the brain.  The vaccinated sheep had more of these granulomas than the aluminum-only group.



Genetic changes. A second study from the Spanish research was published about the same time in the journal, Frontiers in Immunology. This examined changes that the vaccines and adjuvants alone induced and concluded that “it seems that aluminum-containing adjuvants are not simple delivery vehicles for antigens, but also induce endogenous danger signals that can stimulate the immune system.”

Bizarre behavioural changes. The third and final study, the one which Elsevier suddenly withdrew after publication from Pharmacological Research, described the behavioural changes observed in the vaccinated and aluminum-only animals compared to the controls. After just seven inoculations, the vaccinated and aluminum -adjuvant targeted animals only, began compulsive wool biting – the behaviour that has perplexed and annoyed farmers but was also very apparent in the ovine ASIA syndrome. None of the adjuvant-only or controls, housed in identical conditions, exhibited the bizarre behaviour.

The breed of sheep used, Rasa Aragonesa, is a particularly gregarious breed not inclined to solitude, so when animals began seeking isolation it was readily noticed by the researchers. So were bizarre behaviours like rubbing repeatedly against fences and biting flock mates.

The anonymous letter-writer

It was this study that some “concerned reader” with apparent connections to Elsevier – wanted out of the journal.  In all his correspondences, Pharmacological Research’s editor-in-chief Clementi refused to identify who wrote it. This is bizarre departure from publishing protocol. The most obvious reason someone would want anonymity is to hide a conflict of interest. If they are a lackey of the aluminum-adjuvanted vaccine industry, for example, their letter would be on par with a letter from the tobacco industry criticizing research on smoking and cancer. Rubbish.

At one point, Luján inquired if the writer wasn’t David Hawkes himself, the small-fry virologist from Australia whose paper was cited by Biganzoli. Hawkes is a self-described “passionate advocate of vaccination”; he administrates an Australian group whose mission is to “relegate anti-vaccination campaigners to irrelevance.”  He also works for a company whose stated mission is to promote and expand uptake of the HPV vaccine in Australia. The HPV vaccine has the highest load of aluminum adjuvants of any vaccine on the market.  VCS, whose research is financed by Merck, would hardly want word getting out on aluminum vaccines creating granulomas and weird behaviour in sheep just when their government-supported product to test HPV vaccinated women is taking off.

Conflicts of interest

In 2018, Hawkes published – in one of Elsevier’s journals, no less – a paper calling ASIA syndrome, as recorded in hundreds of cases, a “twenty first century equivalent to the boy who cried ‘wolf’ in Aesop’s fable.” Hawkes’ paper notes that “three publications by the advocates of ASIA were recently retracted from peer-reviewed journals” and calls for “an immediate moratorium on animal experiments of ASIA until an independent inquiry has been conducted to determine the existence of a clinically relevant syndrome, identifiable as ASIA in humans.”

It’s interesting that the “withdrawal” of the three other ASIA studies were just as baffling as the current sheep study saga. It’s also interesting that Hawkes’ co-author, Rohan Ameratunga was himself commissioned by the New Zealand government to “review the existence of ASIA” for payment. Was this the kind of “independent” review they wanted? Ameratunga declared his conflict of interest on the paper as a practising allergy specialist who prescribes aluminium-containing injections – themselves suspect in literature for inducing ASIA syndrome.

Ironically, on this Elsevier paper, Hawkes didn’t disclose his own conflicts of interest as a vaccine advocacy group administrator or as an employee of a company that promotes an aluminum-loaded vaccine – an ethical breach in scientific publishing if ever there was one.



Ghost Ship Media emailed David Hawkes to ask him if he wrote the letter as was suggested in the correspondence between the editors and researcher. He didn’t reply. Pordon and Clementi declined to comment as well. Of course, given its past financial dealings with the company, maybe the letter was from a friend at Merck .

‘Boycott Elsevier’

Other scientists are observing the sheep study saga. Colleagues of Luján wrote  Elsevier to protest. Christopher Exley, a professor of bioinorganic chemistry at Keele University, UK, and a leading authority on aluminum in disease is not at all surprised. “The same happened for a paper published in Vaccine and a Letter published in Toxicology, both Elsevier journals,” he says. “A recent attempt was made to do the same on a paper published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry.”

Exley refers to pro-vaccine activists like Hawkes and the publishers at Elsevier as “perpetrators of these crimes against science” and says “editors giving in to pressures of this ilk from Elsevier should be ashamed.”

“Scientists should boycott Elsevier,” he says.

The cat cancer example

“It’s a very tough moment for all of us,” Luján remarks. “Elsevier has thousands of journals and this shows that some of them have no scientific integrity. They are not independent.”

“This is a very simple study,” adds Luján, who will seek to republish his findings elsewhere. “This is experimental research that can be done again and can be done very cheap. Just repeat it.”

The fact that public health isn’t interested in repeating the study is baffling to him. The danger of aluminum in animal vaccines is already well-documented, he says, pointing to the phenomenon of cancer at the injection site in cats . Veterinary researchers saw the problem and removed aluminum from cat vaccines. A recent study from Switzerland revealed that while aluminum-containing vaccines were in use there, related feline cancers increased steadily but since the aluminum-adjuvanted shots were abandoned in 2008, injection site cancers have all but disappeared. Vet pharmaceuticals advertise vaccines as “aluminum-free.”

“You have the proof it can be done,” says Luján. “In a few years, all vaccines can be clean of aluminum. It questions why this material keeps being used.”

Already he adds, veterinarians he knows have simply stopped vaccinating sheep with aluminum-containing vaccines to avoid health problems.  One colleague told him that every time he reported ASIA symptoms to oversight agencies, his complaints were ignored. “I don’t have the problem anymore because I don’t vaccinate anymore,” he told Luján. “I just assumed the risk.”

“I think this why they are afraid of this,” Luján says, “because in this business we have to look at the risks, and this a very big one.”

‘Work on something else’

There appears to be a problem admitting there is a problem, however. Luján’s research documents the dangers to animals of a toxin that is given in increasing quantities to children.  Neurotoxic aluminum is used in numerous human vaccines – against HPV, hepatitis, pneumococcal disease, meningitis and many more in the pike.  The trials of these vaccines use aluminum adjuvant or other vaccines containing aluminum as  ‘placebos’, rendering them useless for detecting a problem.  Vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies are not done. Aluminum vaccines have never been tested for their combined effects in children. Long-term studies are scant – and they are published by scientists who work for the vaccine industry in the journals we know have had a financial relationship with the vaccine industry. A big problem in sheep should signal, at the very least, concern about a potential problem in humans.

“There are dogmas,” Luján says. The biggest dogma in the 21^st century is that vaccines are totally safe. That nothing can go wrong, ever. “That’s why we are being targeted. They want to send a message: don’t get into this business. Work on something else. They just want the thing to disappear.”

If only it were so easy.