Monsanto just dropped an important clue in its decades-long court battle with two groups of parents, bringing in fresh testimony from pro-vaccine experts who claim that it’s just a matter of time before anti-vaccine parents realize vaccines work.
The company had been in the midst of presenting its case at a 2013 trial in Merck v. Geertson et al. that had contended that the plaintiffs’ children had been harmed by a strain of the anti-vaccine strain called adenovirus, which is found in droplets of a common respiratory virus. The Supreme Court of Washington, D.C., ruled 2-1 against the plaintiffs in February and reinstated the lower court’s 2015 decision in favor of Monsanto, in what was essentially the company’s best hope of vindicating the use of its genetically engineered Roundup Roundup weedkiller.
But on Tuesday, Monsanto launched the Omicron and showed the case to a scientific panel, who concluded that the threat posed by a person eating a genetically engineered meal contaminated with adenovirus remains very real – not just theoretical, in other words – and requires prudent scientific research.
Dr. Elizabeth Jane Kinsman, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, said the Omicron and its variations are spread by tiny droplets on food from the digestive tract. By 2014, the FDA had been able to rule out the exposure of a wide range of foods, such as eggs, to the germ, but questions remained over how to combat the risk, she said.
T. William Bailey, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, estimated that the risk of infection through an unvaccinated person could be as high as 1 in 1,000. “Given that the human is a tiny bacterium, each individual only has 0.00001 strand, it’s not surprising that they can get around in a multiplicity,” he said.
Later on Tuesday, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Academy of Sciences offered their competing views of the risk. The AAP says there’s no scientifically warranted concern over the Omicron or Omicron variants and several other strains of adenovirus, claiming that the “risks remain low and even virtually nonexistent.”
“We are concerned,” the organizations wrote, “that the public has been mislead by others who are concerned about whether to vaccinate, believing that, by virtue of the adenovirus component of the vaccine, or an attenuated virus component of a vaccine, or both, children’s lives are at risk of adverse reactions even in cases where a child’s underlying medical conditions are believed to be remediable.”
Still, medical professionals and vaccine skeptics have already raised questions about the possibility of delayed or subtle effects from the adenovirus. It’s not yet known, for example, how long exposures to the adenovirus might last in the body, or how much of the bug’s toxins might be released into the bloodstream, some scientists say.
“Could it be that there are further increased risks, such as gastric or bowel problems, or inability to move afterward, or reactivation of the disease?” the academy asked. “We are concerned because this risk exists despite the possibility that specific adjuvants of the vaccine that allow adenovirus inactivated viruses to be absorbed into the gastrointestinal tract are not to blame for the person’s condition.”