Bobby's lies cost lives
Jake Scott, MD
More than
4,000
Americans have contracted measles since January 2025. Two children
and one adult have died. Sixteen states have fallen below the vaccination
threshold required to prevent sustained transmission. The United States is at
risk of losing its measles elimination status, which it achieved in 2000.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. has a message for
the communities at the center of these outbreaks: the measles, mumps, and
rubella (MMR) vaccine contains "millions of particles that were created
from aborted fetal tissue, millions of DNA fragments." It does not.
He is the nation's chief public health officer. He is making
this claim during the worst measles outbreak in more than three decades. He is
making it about the one vaccine that could stop that outbreak. And he is
directing it at the religious communities—Mennonite, Orthodox, conservative
Catholic—in which vaccination rates are lowest and where the current cases are
concentrated.
Let’s explore what the manufacturing, regulatory, and
scientific records actually show.
Where the vaccine comes from
Viruses can replicate only inside living cells. To make the
rubella component of the MMR vaccine, manufacturers grow the live weakened
virus in a human cell strain called WI-38.
In 1962, a researcher named Leonard Hayflick isolated cells
from lung tissue obtained from a single elective abortion performed in Sweden.
Those cells were placed in laboratory cell cultures—controlled environments
where cells are grown outside the body—where they have been propagating ever
since. The cell strain used in Merck's MMR-II traces its lineage to that
original culture.
The chickenpox and hepatitis A vaccines use a similar
strain, MRC-5, established in 1966 by J.P.
Jacobs from lung cells obtained from an elective abortion performed in the
United Kingdom.
Both of these facts come directly from the product pages of
the American Type Culture Collection,
the national repository that catalogs and sells biological materials to
researchers—the same database cited by those making these claims.
These cell strains are not immortal. They replicate for
roughly 50 passages, then reach the end of their replicative lifespan.
Manufacturers maintain frozen seed stocks that can be thawed to start fresh
cultures as needed. This finite nature is a safety feature: It distinguishes
these strains from continuous cell lines, which replicate indefinitely and
carry a theoretical cancer risk.
The cells used today are the laboratory descendants of those
original strains, not material from any abortion. The original cells have not
existed for sixty years. No new abortions are performed to manufacture these
vaccines.
Once the virus finishes growing in these cell cultures, it
is extracted and purified. What ends up in the final vaccine is the weakened
virus, stabilizing ingredients, and trace amounts of residual protein and DNA
left over from the production process. There are no intact human cells in the
vaccine.