According to Jeannette Richard for CNSNews.com, the astonishing report found that in nearly 100 years of research, fetal tissue has not been directly linked to a single medical cure.
“Fetal tissue has been used in biomedical research for over 90 years. In this time, not a single medical cure has resulted from this research,” the report states. “While it is commonly claimed that fetal tissue was used to produce the polio vaccine, this is largely false. The polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in 1955 using a monkey cell line, and is still produced using monkey cells.”
It continued: “Some might object that while fetal tissue research has not directly resulted in medical cures, it has helped advance the overall body of scientific knowledge and thereby assisted in producing cures. It is impossible to determine whether this claim is true, and if so to what extent. Yet the fact is that no one can point to a single medical advancement that critically depended on the use of fetal tissue.
“In fact, vaccines against eight diseases (Rabies, Diphtheria, Typhoid, Cholera, Plague, Tetanus, Pertussis and Bacille-Calmette-Guerin disease) were all developed in the 1800s and early 1900s, well before the first use of fetal tissue in research,” according to the report.
As CNS reports, the panel examined the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) list of approved vaccines used to prevent 26 different diseases and found only three – Varicella, Hepatitis A, and Zoster – for which vaccines were developed using fetal tissue. However, these vaccines rely on fetal cell lines only for “economic, not scientific” reasons.
“Almost 75 specific vaccine formulations have been approved by the FDA for use in the United States and not a single one has been produced using freshly isolated human fetal tissue. Eleven of these vaccines rely on fetal cell lines for historic reasons, yet all of them could be produced using animal cells,” the panel noted in the report.
Because gaining FDA approval for a new vaccine is so costly, once it has been procured for a particular method of producing the vaccine, pharmaceutical companies tend to stick with that method to avoid the costs involved in having to seek approval all over again.
Therefore, pharmaceutical companies continue to use vaccines produced from fetal cell lines simply to avoid having to have the FDA reapprove them, the panel explained, but “today other pharmaceutical companies use existing viable alternatives.”
These findings fly in the face of testimony given in March by Dr. Lawrence Goldstein from the University of California/San Diego, who uses fetal tissue in his research, who says the tissue “plays a vital role in modern cutting edge medical research.”
The Select Investigative Panel pointed out that only 160 (or less than 1 percent) of a total of 76,081 research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2014 funded research which involved the use of fetal tissue, including only two of 1,304 grants for research on Alzheimer’s disease.
“The fact that fetal research is such a tiny fraction of all scientific research calls into serious question the claim that fetal research is vital and that science will not advance without it. In reality, use of human fetal tissue is increasingly an outdated and unnecessary scientific technology, used only by a handful of scientists,” the panel report said.
In fact, the most successful research to date on a cure for Zika and Cytomegalovirus (CMV), two diseases which cause severe birth defects including microcephaly, have not involved fetal tissue.
“In short, human fetal tissue is outdated technology that is not necessary for modern vaccine research,” the report stated.
The congressional panel was convened last October to investigate fetal tissue procurement practices after videos released by the Center for Medical Progress raised serious questions about the legalities of the current methods of procurement and sale of fetal body parts.
A complete report is expected by the end of the year.
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