Dr. Phillip J. Buckhaults, a Professor in the Department of Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences at the University of South Carolina, carried out the experiment in response to scepticism about earlier findings about DNA contamination and posted the results on X.
Concerns about DNA contamination in mRNA vaccines - a byproduct of their manufacture that should have been removed before use - emerged in early 2023 due to the work of Dr. Kevin McKernan of Medicinal Genomics, a medical research company.
The worries, which have been corroborated and amplified by a number of experts, led Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo to call for a halt to the Covid mRNA vaccine programme last December, noting the risks of genomic integration and cancer formation. Last month, Port Hedland council in Australia voted to notify all of the country's 537 local councils of the evidence of the DNA contamination in the vaccines and associated risks. However, most regulators have dismissed the concerns, claiming the DNA is not dangerous.
Prof. Buckhaults disagrees, saying the risks must not be dismissed so easily. His own results are hardly reassuring, with the latest confirming that the DNA contamination is certainly capable of integrating into the genome of human cells, where it could change their function. He writes:
The plasmid DNA that is contained within mRNA vaccines can integrate into the genome of normal cells.
I knew this could happen, but some were unconvinced, so we took the time to prove this in the lab.
We grow normal human epithelial stem cells in my lab. It's part of our normal job (cancer research). They are called organoids. These are not cancer cells, they are just the normal stem cells that make up the human colon.
We 'vaccinated' some of these normal cells and grew them for a month and saw pieces of the plasmid DNA persisting in the genomic DNA of the 'vaccinated' cells. We detected the plasmid DNA with our qPCR protocol that was posted to X several months ago.
This experiments was done mainly for the people who were paid to publicly ridicule this idea (and slander my reputation). Most of these people are mutually blocked now, so pass around to anyone who needs to see it. Maybe Dr. Paul Offit or that rude Gorsky dude would like to see it. I don't know.
This does not mean that the integration is happening in real vaccinated humans (those experiments are ongoing) but it does prove that the DNA can get into normal cells just fine, as I told everyone a year ago.
Other scientists have shown that the mRNA in the vaccines (i.e., the active ingredient rather than the DNA contamination) also has the capacity to integrate into the human genome. Last year, a team from Italy found vaccine spike protein being produced in the blood of Long Covid patients two months after vaccination and an accompanying change in their DNA that could only have come from the vaccine, which they argued could be the source of the persisting spike protein and the Long Covid symptoms.
Professor Buckhaults is among scientists investigating whether similar problems may arise from the DNA contamination in the mRNA vaccines.
One question, is the plasmid DNA a contaminant or is it intended to do exactly what it is doing?