McGill University Evidently Needs to Hire an Immunologist and a Bioethicist - and Work on Their Academic Hegemony

The "Office for Science and Society" published an embarrassing, inaccurate, and condescending opinion blog article that really should have been reviewed by an immunologist and a bioethicist.

I would have expected more from McGill University. First-world down-your-nosism aimed at Kenyan doctors and scientists AND immunology gaffes, all in one opinion blog article? What discomfiture.

In July 2022, McGill University published an opinion blog webpage article with the viewpoints of someone who claims to have found two problems with the undisputed fact that women in Kenya were being experimented on using a tetanus vaccine that was altered to be conjugated with human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG).

First: The Author is Unfamiliar with Basic Immunology

The article takes the bombastic position that because anti-hCG antibody levels in women returned to “practically zero” after 300-500 days following the injections, the documentary “Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda” presented nothing more than a “bogeyman” to “stir up distrust of modern vaccines”.

The gaffe the author makes is to reveal their ignorance of immunology; they imply by their article that they believe that when someone is immune to a particular antigen source, their antibody levels remain high throughout their lifetime. Mirroring the author’s tone, anyone who has had my introductory biology course, or, better yet, my course on The Biology of Immunology would know, or anyone who has watched The Highwire with Del Bigtree would know: the exposure to an antigen source causes the development and production antibodies, yes, but it also primes our immune memory, not just antibodies. We rely on memory T-cells and memory B-cells to recall which antigen sources we then mount a new antibody response.

The opinion blog article then claims that “(a)ny biomedical scientist worth their salt” would have picked up the problem that Dr. Wakefield used animations showing antibodies attacking a coronavirus instead of antibodies attacking hCG.

The animation point is trivial compared to the logical flaw the author committed regarding antibody levels. Wakefield included video about COVID-19 to connect the whole argument about hCG and tetanus toxoid with what is going on today; it is hardly a flaw. Viewers only need to see the discussion follow up by CHD commentators, including Wakefield, to see that it was not a flaw in the documentary at all. However, the error the McGill critic makes about antibodies is major - and provides a good example of the logical fallacy of creating an argument on from ignorance.

Three hundred to 500 days of sterility is a long time for women to be infertile. Further, if women are vaccinated repeatedly against combined pertussis/tetanus vaccines, as is the norm in rich western countries like the US and Canada, or if they are vaccinated against tetanus every pregnancy, every time, what are the chances that antibody levels would forever remain low? A third consideration is that the generation of self-antibodies - by definition autoimmunity - might lead to permanent tissue damage and scarring to organs that produce the targeted protein.

The primary concern, however, is that these vaccines would have induced autoimmune attacks against the placenta: hCG is produced primarily by syncytiotrophoblastic cells of the placenta during pregnancy. The hCG hormone stimulates the corpus luteum to produce progesterone to maintain pregnancies. Women do not have placental tissue between pregnancies, and so every time they become pregnant, the antigen source would be regenerated - and antibody production would begin anew, derived from memory T- and memory B-cells.

Second: Does McGill University Think Kenyan Scientists are Incompetent?

The McGill article offers an admission that rich countries in the west decided to experiment on people in developing nations to allow “research institutions to skirt stricter guidelines and to eventually release contraceptives in these countries with much shorter printed lists of side effects and precautions than in the United States”.

The author reminds us that his own critique of ethics violations that occurred during malaria vaccine trials in some African countries is real, though, and that

“Colonial science is real and contraceptive research is not immune to it.”

So if he recognizes the issue, it’s real, but of course, if it involves Andrew Wakefield or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. bringing the information forward, it cannot possibly be a legitimate concern, right?

The article then goes on to falsely claim that Kenyan scientists studying the vials used pregnancy tests to detect hCG, which is only partly true. They also used the gold standard of HPLC (high-pressure liquid chromatography) to study the contents of the vials. The author makes it seem as if the Kenyan doctors just dumped the contents of the vaccine vials onto commercial pregnancy tests and stopped there. Even if that was all they had done, there should have been zero hCG in the fluids from vaccine vials tested with pregnancy kits. But that is not all that was done.

A little effort on the part of the author would have revealed this fact, reported by Dr. Karanja and Ngare with co-authors:

“Those laboratory results were systematically compared with analyses of samples provided later by WHO officials allegedly from supplies maintained in Nairobi. Two sources were tested: a) vials of the vaccine obtained by the KCDA from among those being administered by the WHO in March and October of 2014, and b) 52 additional vials handed over by the WHO from supplies in Nairobi to the “Joint Committee of Experts”. Of the samples that co-authors Karanja and Ngare were personally responsible for handling, over half were found to contain βhCG by multiple laboratories and in multiple distinct tests. The KCDA has also provided access to the public domain reports and the technical data published for wider accessibility here for the first time in a professional academic forum. Of the 52 samples provided by the WHO to the “Joint Committee” none were found to contain βhCG, and of those, 40 vials delivered after a lapse of 58 days (November 11, 2014 to January 9, 2015) by the WHO, allegedly containing the Kenya TT vaccine, tested negative for βhCG, but had exactly the same designator labels as the 3 vials obtained by the KCDA during vaccinations taking place in October of 2014 that tested positive for βhCG.”

The “multiple distinct tests” included the gold standard HPLC tests by the best laboratory in Nairobi.

These facts disprove the author’s (naive assumption or willful misdirection) that the Kenyan doctor’s assays will test positive if you test “anything” (“It turns out you can get a positive result for hCG from just about anything if you misuse testing equipment”) and then he cites research completely unrelated to the question of why hCG was detected in tetanus vaccines in Kenya in the first place (argument by abduction & non-sequitur).

The discrepancies between the fieldvials and those provided by WHO imply deceit by WHO to cover up the fact that hCG conjugated with tetanus toxoid (as in the widely touted WHO “birth control” vaccine developed by Talwar and colleagues was included in tetanus vaccines in Kenya. A Google Scholar search today for the terms “Talwar ‘birth control’” yields 10,800 results.

The negative results from the vials debunk this idea, especially if WHO provided the Kenyan researchers with a collection of vials into which hCG was not included. At a minimum, WHO provided a set of technical negative controls; the results provide that one would not have seen a positive result from “anything”; the discrepancies between the field vials and those provided by WHO imply deceit by WHO to cover up the fact that hCG was included in tetanus vaccines in Kenya.

The authors of the first academic report presenting five lines of evidence in a rebuttal to anonymous critics of their paper (see IJVTPR), which includes the following facts about the Kenyan scientist involved in detecting and reporting the presence of hCG (Dr. Stephen Karanja and Dr. Wahome Ngare).

“The MDs were directly involved in the “cold chain of custody” of vaccine vials obtained during the WHO campaign, as detailed in our hCG-paper. Those vials, as described by us in our 2017 paper were delivered to several laboratories for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)tests on the vaccine samples. All of those laboratories were accredited by Kenya Accreditation Service (KENAS) established in 2009. (emphasis mine). In 2019 KENAS became the “sole national accreditation body for Kenya” (see https://kenas.go.ke/about-us/last visited June 20, 2020). That organization is recognized by the “International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC)” which, according to their own current website “means that test reports or certificates issued by KENAS accredited laboratories, inspection bodies and certification bodies are now accepted worldwide”. KENAS is an ILAC “Mutual Recognition Agreement signatory” with authority for “Calibration: ISO/IEC 17025; Testing: ISO/IEC 17025; Medical testing: ISO 15189; [and] Inspection: ISO/IEC 17020” (https://kenas.go.ke/about-us/)."

It seems that McGill University believes - and would want the world to believe - that poor, stupid, incompetent Kenyan doctors used simple pregnancy tests, despite ample evidence otherwise.

They should read the report “The final scientific report of the tetanus vaccine used in mass vaccination campaigns in March and October 2014” which clearly states that multiple laboratories provided independent results.

The more detailed report of Oller et al. (2017) is also available; they reported that

“Three independent Nairobi accredited biochemistry laboratories tested samples from vials of the WHO tetanus vaccine being used in March 2014 and found hCG where none should be present. In October 2014, 6 additional vials were obtained by Catholic doctors and were tested in 6 accredited laboratories. Again, hCG was found in half the samples. Subsequently, Nairobi’s AgriQ Quest laboratory, in two sets of analyses, again found hCG in the same vaccine vials that tested positive earlier but found no hCG in 52 samples alleged by the WHO to be vials of the vaccine used in the Kenya campaign 40 with the same identifying batch numbers as the vials that tested positive for hCG.”

These events have been reviewed also by an immunologist, who wrote

“The Catholic Church in Kenya called for an(sic) halt to tetanus immunization programs after the church’s own consultants found 30% of the tetanus vaccine vials contained HCG [37]. This fact lead many to believe that the immunization program was an(sic) deliberate attempt to make the recipients infertile. It is hard to explain how an(sic) human hormone, HCG, would end up in a tetanus vaccine created from bacteria in a process devoid of human cell products.” (Classen, 2021).

What About the Violation of Human Rights?

The violation of human rights included the assault on both the fertility, health and personal dignity of the women injected - and those who would have been injected at the population scale if the Kenyan scientists had not been so diligent in their screening. But they also violated the sacred creed of informed consent. My readers should be aware that we have a course “Medical Freedom, Informed Consent and Human Rights” - and are also referred to the Todd Harris documentary “Uninformed Consent”. I also invite the Trudeau administration to consider these issues as salient to humanity, and also refer them to Provost et al., (2022) who chronicled the abuses of informed consent to COVID-19 vaccines.

An important question that we as a society must address: Why do we keep allowing people to violate the ethical codes of conduct of research without holding those who violate them accountable?

The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly reminded the world in 2015 with this mild understatement: “(S)afeguarding of informed consent may prove problematic if contraception is integrated with established vaccine programs.”

The article, published by McGill University’s “Office for Science and Society”, is an utter embarrassment that will not age well. The byline of the OSS office at McGill University is "Separating sense from nonsense" which does not seem to apply to their own work.

What You Can Do To Help

Contact the Office of the Principal and Vice-Chancellor at McGill University and let them know what you think about the colonialist bigotry and intellectual hegemony supported by the denialist article on their website.

Email:mcgill.principal@mcgill.ca

Contact OSS and demand that they remove this misleading and bigoted article.

https://www.facebook.com/McGillOSS

Email: oss.science@mcgill.ca

Watch: Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda

Resources and References

Classen JB. 2021. Review of COVID-19 vaccines and the risk of chronic adverse events including neurological degeneration. J of Med-Clinic Res&Review 5(3):1-7. https://scivisionpub.com/pdfs/review-of-covid19-vaccines-and-the-risk-of-chronic-adverse-events-including-neurological-degeneration-1616.pdf

Oller et al. (2017) HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccine in Kenya Raises Concern in the Developing World Open Access Library Journal 4(10) https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=81838 https://doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1103937https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2665354/

Oller et al. (2021) Addendum to “HCG Found in Tetanus Vaccine”: Examination of Alleged “Ethical Concerns” Based on False Claims by Certain of Our Critics https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/3

Njiru PK. The final scientific report of the tetanus vaccine used in mass vaccination campaigns in March and October 2014. Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops Catholic Health Commission of Kenya. 2015.

Provost, P., Derome, N., Linard, C., Massie, B., & Caron, J. (2022). Potential Conscientious Objection to mRNA Technology as Preventive Treatment for COVID-19. International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, 2(2), 445–454. https://doi.org/10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.41

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A Chinese dissertation reports:

Objective: Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is the preferred antigen for the development of immunocontraceptive vaccines in the past 30 years. The contraceptive vaccine developed with the whole β subunit of hCG as the immunogen and the 37 amino acid peptides of C-terminal 109~145 as the immunogen has passed the preclinical toxicity and safety test, and completed the first phase, the first phase, and the third phase. Phase II clinical trial. This article introduces the international clinical research of the hCG contraceptive vaccine and the general situation of preclinical preliminary trials in my country. (Translation courtesy Google Translate)