In 1957 Stewart and Eddy discovered the polyoma virus, which produced several types of cancer in a variety, of small mammals. Polyoma proved that some cancers-were indeed caused by viruses. Her discovery officially threw open the doors of cancer virology. As Rabson phrased it: “Suddenly the whole place just exploded after Sarah found polyoma.” It was the beginning of a new era of hope. But it raised some dark questions . about earlier deeds. Before long Yale’s laboratory discovered that the polyoma virus that had produced the cancer in Stewart’s mice and hamsters turned out to act like Simian Virus #40 (SV-40), a monkey virus that caused cancer.13
In June 1959 Bernice Eddy, who was still officially assigned to the flu vaccine project, began thinking about the polio vaccine again. This time she was worried about something much deeper than polio. The vaccine’s manufacturers had grown their polio viruses on the kidneys of monkeys. And when they removed the polio virus from the monkeys’ kidneys, they also removed an unknown number of other monkey viruses. The more they looked, the more they found. The medical science of the day knew little about the behavior or consequences of these monkey viruses. But times were changing. Confronted with mounting evidence that some monkey viruses caused cancer, Eddy grew suspicious of the polio vaccine and asked an excruciating question: Had they inoculated an entire generation of Americans with cancer-causing monkey viruses? She conducted her research quietly, without alerting her NIH supervisors.
In October 1960, one month before the Kennedy/ Nixon presidential debate, Eddy gave a talk to the New York Cancer Society and, without warning NIH in advance, announced that she had examined monkey kidney cells in which the polio virus was grown, and had found they were infected with cancer-causing viruses.14 Her implication was clear: There were cancer-causing monkey viruses in the polio vaccine! This was tantamount to forecasting an epidemic of cancer in America. When the word got back to her NIH bosses, they exploded. No suggestion of cancer-causing monkey viruses in the polio vaccine was welcomed at NIH. When the cussing stopped, they crushed Bernice Eddy professionally.
They took away her lab, destroyed her animals, put her under a gag order, prevented her from attending professional meetings, and delayed publication of her scientific papers. In the words of Edward Shorter, author of The Health Century: “Her treatment became a scandal within the scientific community.” Later it became the subject of a Congressional inquiry.15 In the words of Dr. Lawrence Kilham, a fellow NIH researcher who wrote a letter of protest to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office: “Te presence of a cancer virus in the polio virus vaccine is the matter demanding full investigation.”16 And further: “Dr Eddy’s case, to many of us, represents a somewhat Prussian-like attempt to hinder an outstanding scientist.”17
Eddy, however, was not the only one who investigated the issue. A viral specialist named Laurella McClelland, working for vaccine developer Maurice Hilleman in Philadelphia, found similar problems in the polio vaccine. The essence of the problem was that SV-40 did not cause cancer in its natural host, an Asian monkey. But what would it do in another primate that had never been exposed to it? One whose immune system had not been sensitized to SV-40?
Like Stewart and Eddy, Hilleman knew that the population of laboratory animals was hopelessly cross-infected with all sorts of viruses. Monkeys from different continents were frequently caged together. It would be impossible to guarantee that any monkey in the American laboratory population had not been exposed to SV-40 at some point in the past. Hilleman needed clean monkeys caught in the wild. To avoid any last minute contamination, he completely by-passed the commercial animal importing network. He arranged to have a group of Green Monkeys caught in Africa and sent to Philadelphia via Madrid, an airport which normally did not handle any animal traffic. His own drivers picked up the clean monkeys at the Philadelphia airport and brought them straight to his lab.
When injected with SV-40, these clean African Green Monkeys developed cancer. Hilleman announced these findings at a medical conference in Copenhagen. But it was not news to the NIH staffers in the audience. The insiders already knew there was a cancer-causing virus in the polio vaccine,18 but they had not announced it. It was the public that did not know. Should the public have been told?
It is difficult for us who have seen the enormous press coverage of AIDS to understand the indolent response of the 1960s press on this subject. Was it really their job to prevent public panic? Did they cower in the face of scientific authority? Were they lazy? Or stupid? Or arrogant? Or were they told not to run the story by political forces? It is hard to say. But there is evidence that the word leaked out anyway.
In the spring of 1961, one of Eddy’s co-workers published a medical article which said there was live SV-40 in the polio vaccine. Eddy herself confirmed that the SV-40 monkey virus was causing cancer in hamsters as well as monkeys, proving that it was capable of crossing the species barrier. But she was not allowed to release the information until a year later. NIH notified the U.S. Surgeon General that “future polio vaccines would be free of SV-40.”19 On July 26, 1961, the New York Times reported two vaccine manufacturers were withdrawing their polio vaccines “until they can eliminate a monkey virus.” The article ran on page 33, with no mention of cancer. Seven months later, a second article in the New York Times mentioned the possibility of cancer in the polio vaccine. Tat article ran on page 27.20 There the story died, and the specter of an approaching epidemic of cancer silently rose on the horizon.
On the heels of the polio fiasco, the medical hierarchy feared the judgment of the masses. Their ability to destroy a painstakingly constructed scientific career overnight had been clearly proved. Another spate of bad news might shatter the public’s confidence in vaccines altogether. Where would the world be then? Where would the public health establishment be then? As SV-40 discoverer Maurice Hilleman put it, the government kept the contamination of the polio vaccine secret to “avoid public hysteria.”21
We are reminded of the scene in Frankenstein when a crowd of superstitious villagers gathered at the castle gate, angrily waving their pitchforks and torches in the air, demanding to know what evil was going on inside the doctor’s laboratory. To quote the words of polio vaccine developer Albert Sabin: “I think to release certain information prematurely is not a public service. There’s too much scaring the public unnecessarily. Oh, your children were injected with a cancer virus and all that. Tat’s not very good!”22
“Prematurely”? Hadn’t the mass inoculation already taken place? Hadn’t several top scientists using carefully controlled experiments established that the problem was real? Hadn’t they announced the results to their professional peers?
“Unnecessarily”? Wasn’t there still time to try and do something about it? Shouldn’t someone at least try? Sabin might as well have said, “I prefer my tombstone read, ‘Te Vanquisher of Polio,’ and not, ‘Te Father of the Great Cancer Epidemic.’” His attempt to hide behind the apron of “public service” is no more than an attempt to avoid both responsibility and the unpleasant experience of facing the angry public. I am sure we would all prefer not to be held accountable for our blunders.
IS THIS DR. EDDY’S FORECASTED EPIDEMIC?
The more important question: Was Eddy’s prediction of a cancer epidemic accurate? Did the epidemic ever happen? If it did, wouldn’t it show up in the cancer statistics? Wouldn’t the great wizards of medicine tell us if there was really an epidemic? Wouldn’t the press jump all over it? Given the times, I decided to check the numbers myself. A real epidemic should be easy to spot due to its size. So I dug out the cancer statistics published by the National Cancer Institute in 1989 and started reading related literature. Two things became clear:
1. We were losing the War on Cancer, and
2. We were in the midst of an ongoing cancer epidemic. Despite the improvements in cancer treatment which had decreased the age-adjusted, per capita death rate slightly, the hard fact remained: Americans were getting cancer faster than ever! Reporting on a 1994 article p
ublished in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the front page of USA Today stated, “Baby boomers are much more likely to get cancer than their grandparents were at the same age.”23 And further, “Men born between 1948 and 1957 have three times as much cancer not related to smoking as men born in the late 1800s.” Why? Per USA Today: “Te study’s researchers insist the increase cannot be fully explained by smoking, better diagnosis, or an aging population.” In the words of U.S. Public Health Service official Devra Lee Davis: “There’s something else going on.”24
I am not a biostatistician, but John Bailar III was when he worked for the National Cancer Institute. When he told these sad facts to Congress in 1991, NCI’s response was “absolute rage.”25 His subsequent tenure there was brief. Tat “something else going on” may also help explain why the summary cancer data we have available to us ends in 1988 (Document B, p. 353).
Despite the $22,000,000,000 spent on research during the twenty-year-old War on Cancer, little progress had been made in prevention and some areas had gotten dramatically worse. The bottom line for the cancer establishment was that the NCI’s initial lofty goal of a 50% reduction in the cancer rate by the end of the century had to be abandoned.26 The “war” may have stimulated additional billions of dollars of funding in its day, but well before the end of the century, it became indefensible.
The reality is that 1988 saw a 20% total increase in cancers versus 1973! But as is true with most averages, the 20% increase does not tell the whole story. The vast majority of cancers remained relatively stable versus 1973. The 20% increase is the result of five cancers which increased dramatically: lung, breast, prostate, lymphoma, and melanoma of the skin. The rest of the cancers did not increase significantly during the same period.
Remember the dreaded polio epidemic of the 1950s with its 33,000 cases of polio each year. Compare that to these numbers from 1994: 182,000 new cases of breast cancer diagnosed; 200,000 new cases of prostate cancer diagnosed; 500,000 new cases of lung cancer diagnosed. The increase in any one of these diseases in the years since 1985 was greater than the entire polio epidemic at its peak!
Since 1985? Yes, 1955 + 30 years is 1985. A ten-year-old who received the polio vaccine in 1955 turned 40 in 1985! The graph entitled “Te Cancer Epidemic” shows the situation clearly. It depicts the percentage increase in the incidence rate compared to the base year 1973. (The NCI age-adjusted the numbers to keep the aging baby-boomer age wave from inflating the picture.)
The first thing to notice is what didn’t happen. Look at the line entitled “All other sites combined.” 1988 shows a 0% increase over 1973. This includes leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease, and cancers of the brain, colon, bladder, rectum, larynx, pancreas, kidney, stomach, ovary, testes, cervix, uterus, thyroid, esophagus, and liver. For some reason, bone cancers are not mentioned.
Next is the lung cancer line. Lung cancer statistics were terrible for both men and women. Both sexes showed a long, steady increase in both incidence rates and mortality rates over the 16 years from 1973 to 1988. This upward trend had been consistent ever since it began in the 1920s, when lung cancer was a virtually non-existent disease. The general consensus had been that the dramatic, but consistent, rise in lung cancer is a result of cigarette smoking, so we will isolate it from our search for Eddy’s epidemic of viral cancer. But it is sobering to think that the 500,000 annual cases of this one disease consumed approximately $50,000,000,000 worth of our medical insurance premiums each year. That’s twice as much money as was spent on the War on Cancer over those 20 years! If you’re like most of us and have problem thinking in billions, then try this: In the U.S. alone, we were spending $137,000,000 every day on the treatment of one disease.
The line entitled “Four Soft Tissue Cancers shows four cancers that averaged a 50% increase over this sixteen-year period. These four all show dramatic increases in their incidence rate versus 1973:
Skin 70%
Lymphoma 60%
Prostate 60%
Breast 34%
We should note that there is no accepted explanation for what caused this!
Each of the four soft tissue cancers showed a dramatic increase in its incidence rate at the same time.27 Is this not what we would expect to find following a mass inoculation with a virus which caused multiple types of cancers? This would be my candidate for Eddy’s epidemic
Of all the cancers, none receives more press than breast cancer. Talk shows and soft-news TV features share the common burden like a giant group therapy session. Science magazine, which is hardly sensational, said, “The breast cancer statistics are alarming.”28
Publicly, professionals expressed bewilderment over the breast cancer statistics. The explanations they did offer were feeble. The most commonly heard: “early detection.” Early detection certainly helps treatment and the death rate, but it does not significantly affect the incidence rate. All early detection does to the incidence rate is borrow a fraction of cases from the next year or two. That lowers next year’s incidence rate unless it too borrows from the following years with early detection. In other words, it has no long-term effect on the incidence numbers.
The “Breast Cancer” graph shows the incidence of breast cancer per 100,000 women from 1978 to 1987. There was a huge and sudden increase in the breast cancer rate around 1985. Remember: Ten-year-old girls who received the vaccine in 1955 became forty-year-old women in 1985, the age when breast cancer starts showing up in significant numbers. If the contamination of the polio vaccine was going to produce a wave of breast cancer, 1985 would be a logical year for it to show up. (Is it coincidental that 1985 just happened to be the year that my forty-year-old sister got breast cancer, when there was no history of breast cancer in our family?)
The ten year period shown in the above graph reveals an over 30 per cent increase in the rate of breast cancer. What this works out to is breast cancer in American women grew from 130,000 cases per year to over 180,000 cases per year. Is the sudden appearance of 50,000 additional cases of breast cancer per year an epidemic? Polio was considered a major epidemic with only 33,000 total cases per year! Why was breast cancer not considered an epidemic at 180,000 cases per year? These breast cancer numbers alone eclipse the polio numbers of the 1950s.
Then add the 200,000 cases of prostate cancer ... then add lymphoma ... then add skin cancer.... We should ask ourselves the obvious question: Why have we not heard more about this enormous epidemic of soft tissue cancers? Could it be because the billions of dollars which the U.S. government gave to NCI and NIH failed to produce a solution in time?
Despite the fact that the viral nature of several cancers had been proven by government scientists nearly forty years earlier, the 1994 edition of the American Cancer Society’s publication Cancer Facts & Figures did not even mention “virus” among the possible causes of the most alarming increase in cancer ever recorded. Why?
Today, however, there is abundant evidence of a variety of simian viruses found in the human blood supply. Of particular concern is the DNA from SV-40 repeatedly extracted from several types of tumors, including brain, bone, and previously-rare chest cancers.29 In the words of former FDA virologist John Martin, M.D., Ph.D., “ SV-40 infection is now widespread within the human population almost certainly as a result of the polio vaccine.”30
Does “almost certainly” imply some conditionality that a careful reader might object to? Does “former FDA virologist” create even the tiniest crack in seamless credibility? Am I forcing this point? Is this for real?
Did dozens of monkey viruses get into the human blood supply from the polio vaccine? Did they contaminate both the Salk and Sabin vaccines? Were these the same vaccines given to millions of children in both the United States and Europe? Consider this 1997 quote from the U.S. Government’s own Journal of the National Cancer Institute: “In the 1950s, SV-40 was one of several dozen viruses that contaminated the original Salk and Sabin polio vaccines administered to millions of school children in the United States
and Europe.”31 The vaccine contaminated with SV-40 was injected into trusting children until 1963. Forty-one years later, an in-depth investigation by journalists Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher finally documented this same public health disaster in the detail which it deserves, including interviews with many of the scientists involved. The 2004 title speaks for itself, The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed. Enough said.
BERNICE EDDY OBVIOUSLY THOUGHT the possibility of an upcoming epidemic of viral cancer was real. Why else would she have risked her career and her pension by announcing her findings to the medical community without NIH’s knowledge? Did she fear that political interests at NIH would bury her warning, like they did when she sent them photos of the monkeys paralyzed by Salk’s vaccine? Or was she just concerned that the glacially slow gears of bureaucratic science would not move fast enough to produce a solution in time? It may already have been too late. The viral damage to the genetic structure of the cell may take place very early in the infection. In 1959 Eddy explained it this way:
It may be that the virus starts the cancerous process, but by the time we detect the tumor, there is so little virus left, — in an altered form — that we cannot detect it.32
In 1995, it was explained this way: If the growth-controlling ras gene is somehow damaged, it may become stuck in the “on” position.33 Either way, there was no possible political benefit to be gained from telling the public about Eddy’s forecasted epidemic of cancer unless a vaccine could be developed in time to prevent it. The issue was speed.
Dr. Mary’s Monkey Page 20