Are Experimental Vaccines Growing in a GMO Corn Field Near You?

Health Impact News | Sep 8, 2014

© Health Impact News

Health Impact News Editor Comments

With more and more people waking up to the dangers and false claims being made for vaccines today, it is becoming more difficult for the pharmaceutical lobbyists to enact mandatory vaccination laws at the local level. A recent bill in Colorado was defeated when citizens turned out to oppose legislation that would have prohibited vaccine exemptions.

Are pharmaceutical companies now looking for new ways to market their vaccines that bypass the freedom to choose completely without the consumer even realizing they are consuming their products? The chemical industry, after all, has been successful for years in getting municipalities to put fluoride in public water supplies completely bypassing consumer choice.

Recently obtained information through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that pharmaceutical companies and biotech are teaming up to produce genetically modified corn that will contain vaccines like hepatitis B. If successful, “mandatory vaccines” could take on a whole new meaning in the United States.

Bill Lambrecht of the San Francisco Gate is reporting today that there are secret locations along California’s Central Coast where plots of experimental genetically engineered corn are producing proteins for industrial and pharmaceutical uses, including an experimental vaccine for hepatitis B.

The GMO test plots are part of a trial conducted by Applied Biotechnology. Lambrecht reports that details of Applied Biotechnology’s inspections and hundreds of other secret GMO field trials were obtained by Hearst Newspapers under Freedom of Information laws. The Hearst Family has several thousands of acres of land in central California, including the Hearst Castle, which is a museum today. Much of the land is used for grazing grass-fed beef, as central California is well-known for its sustainable organic agriculture.
Lambrecht’s report is quite concerning, as it shows the experimental GMO corn is growing with federal approval 100 feet from a steelhead stream in San Luis Obispo County, and in a designated critical habitat for wildlife such as the threatened California red-legged frog. He reports that the Agriculture Department inspectors have reported two “incidents” at the site, including conventional corn sprouting in a 50-foot fallow zone, but that the findings did not even result in a fine or warning for Applied Biotechnology Institute Inc.

The report also shows that the founder and president of Applied Biotechnology has had a troubled past in experimental GMO corn field trials:

The founder and president of Applied Biotechnology, John A. Howard, previously founded another company that was permanently banned from trials of genetically modified organisms – GMOs – after creating such contaminated messes in the Midwest that a half-million bushels of soybeans and more than 150 acres of corn had to be destroyed.

Before starting Applied Biotechnology Institute in California, Howard set up ProdiGene Inc. of College Station, Texas, in the late 1990s and carried the title of chief scientific officer.

But that company encountered such contamination problems with its APHIS-approved field trials that the Agriculture Department eventually forced it out of the business of growing pharmaceutical plants.

In 2002 – the year Howard says he parted ways with ProdiGene – APHIS disclosed that corn plants from ProdiGene’s field test a year earlier in Nebraska were sprouting in a field of soybeans planted at the site. But before the corn could be removed, the potentially contaminated soybeans were harvested. All 500,000 bushels had to be destroyed.

Also in 2002, ProdiGene was forced to burn 155 acres of corn near the site of a field trial in Iowa after pharmaceutical plants were found growing illegally. ProdiGene was fined $250,000.

In addition, the Agriculture Department purchased, hauled and destroyed the adulterated soybeans at a cost of $3.5 million, and gave ProdiGene two years interest-free to pay the government back.

ProdiGene’s problems persisted. In 2004, an inspector found that oats growing alongside one of the company’s test corn sites in Nebraska had been baled for animal feed. In addition, engineered corn was sprouting in a nearby sorghum field.

It took three years, but this time, APHIS came down hard. In 2007, ProdiGene received a modest $3,500 fine but agreed that neither it nor “its successors in interest” would ever again apply to the Agriculture Department for permission to introduce GMOs into the environment. (Source.)

So why is this guy allowed to continue to experiment with GMO corn? Apparently, he believes that because he is involved in vaccine research, it shields him from much of the current criticism surrounding GMO technology. Lambrecht writes:

He believes that his quest to produce a hepatitis B vaccine insulates him from some of the opposition to genetically modified foods.

“It’s harder to make up some Frankenstein scenario where this is terrible when the outcome of not doing it is that people die,” he said.

So once again, we see “science” replaced with blind faith, in this case faith in the religion of vaccines, trumping the freedom to choose: freedom to choose one’s own faith, one’s own health choices, and one’s own food choices.

Read the full article here, which contains quite a bit more information about how the federal government has very little oversight over these GMO field trials.