Defying Science And Common Sense, New York Bill Would Ban GMOs In Vaccines
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Viruses are one thing you’d think people would not prefer in their natural form.
In the unlikely event this bill passed, it would set back vaccine technology a half century and would do away completely with some important vaccines. Abinanti has proposed several other bills that would require disclosure of information about GMOs in vaccines.
Paul Offit, who is chief of the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said that genetic modification is at the heart of vaccine technology. Vaccines against viral diseases use a version of the virus that’s been killed or altered – “attenuated” in the medical language. The modification is what prevents the vaccines from making people sick.
The bill defines a GMO as an organism that has been “altered at the molecular or cellular level by means that are not possible under natural conditions or processes, including recombinant DNA and RNA techniques, cell fusion, microencapsulation, macroencapsulation, gene deletion and doubling, introduction of a foreign gene and a process that changes the positions of genes…”
The technologies that would be banned are exactly the ones that allows scientists to make vaccines safe, said Offit. In the early 20th century, vaccine scientists made genetic modifications with cruder techniques – altering viruses by infecting eggs, embryos or animal organs, allowing viruses to proliferate and using trial and error to find versions that protected people with relative safety. Now we have precision techniques for eliminating dangerous parts of viruses and including those that prompt protective immunity.
Combining
genes from different organisms was what allowed Offit and his colleague
to develop a vaccine against rotavirus – a disease that kills thousands
of children in the developing world. Genetic technology of the type
that apparently concerns Mr. Abinanti has also been critical in the rush
to create vaccines against Ebola.
Abinanti’s office hasn’t yet returned a request for some kind of explanation for the bill.
So-called GMOs have
improved human health in drugs since the 1970s, when Genentech
introduced human insulin made with a GMO bacteria. Before that, medical
insulin came from pigs.
The bill, said Offit, takes GMO and vaccine fear “To its illogical end.”
The bill, said Offit, takes GMO and vaccine fear “To its illogical end.”
