GMO flu vaccine derived from insect virus ok’ed by FDA

GMO flu vaccine containing GMO proteins derived from insects as well as dog kidney cells have been approved. Vaccines containing bits of caterpillar cells will be coming soon. The jury is still way out on whether GMO crops are safe, yet the FDA says it’s safe to be injected with GMO bits from other species. Really? But then, the FDA is a mostly captured entity of Big Pharma and these “advances” in vaccines were made possible by a $1 billion grant from HHS. How cozy is that?

Neither my wife Sue or I will take these Dr. Strangelove vaccines either. She explains why:

I will not take the GMO insect-protein enhanced influenza vaccine.

I have several allergies. Reactions range from headache and a mild immune response (corn, onions, pollen) to anaphylaxis (fish & shellfish). I’m careful but not paranoid. Bob will tell you I just deal with it and get on with my day.

Influenza vaccine is manufactured using fertilized eggs. It is preserved with thimerosal, which contains mercury. I have had unpleasant reactions to flu vaccines, most the common fever & aches, but once a strange couple of hours of shooting pains every few minutes. It felt like mild electrical shocks. Was it the egg, or something else in the vaccine, perhaps the mercury? It went away, so it wasn’t Guillain Barre.

Balance this against a bad case of influenza, which I don’t care to repeat, and yes, I get the flu shot every year. But I get the flu shot carefully, on a day when I’m feeling great. I take antihistamines and ibuprofen before receiving the vaccine, and avoid the usual allergens.

So now GMO insect proteins must be considered. What the hell will caterpillar proteins, injected into my body, do to me? & the purpose of these proteins is to make my body more quickly uptake the vaccine? What will quicker uptake do? No, I’m not a scientist. But I’m a rational, intelligent well-read person. I understand how the politics of pharma work. Many well-intentioned scientists suffer from a a sense of superiority and a surfeit of overconfidence. There is a long list of drugs that have been approved by the FDA and then withdrawn. Some of them have hurt people that I know.

One must steer in order to avoid being a statistic. And this is why I will not take the GMO insect-protein enhanced influenza vaccine.

In case you think this is some crank fringe thing from the net, NYT confirms it.

Flublok [the vaccine], by contrast, consists only of a protein — hemagglutinin — from the virus. The protein is made by putting the gene for hemagglutinin into a virus that infects insect cells. Those cells, from the fall armyworm, are grown in culture and churn out the protein.