HPV vaccines have been linked to over 100,000 reported adverse events globally, including disabling autoimmune conditions and deaths, but officials seem unconcerned. Merck set the tone for the truth-stretching claim that HPV vaccine risks are “negligible” when it conducted its initial clinical trials for Gardasil and dismissed as irrelevant the serious medical conditions that arose—within seven months—in half of all participants who received the vaccine.
With the accumulation of studies since those early trials, it is getting harder to deny the existence of a disabling post-HPV vaccination syndrome. Although researchers admit that they do not yet fully understand the mechanisms whereby HPV vaccines wreak their autoimmune havoc, the phenomenon of immune cross-reactivity offers one highly plausible explanation. In a new study in Pathobiology, two of the most-published researchers on this topic report on the overlap between human proteins and HPV antigens. The authors consider their results indicative of “a cross-reactivity potential capable of triggering an extremely wide and complex spectrum of autoimmune diseases.”
Molecular mimicry
Scientists view autoimmunity as the prolonged and pathological response that arises when the immune system gets confused between “self” and “non-self” due to molecular similarities between an environmental agent and the host. The specific hypothesis—called molecular mimicry—is that “either a virus or bacteria…initiate and exacerbate an autoimmune response through sequence or structural similarities with self-antigens.”
Although the molecular mimicry concept has been floating around for at least three decades, relatively few researchers have been willing to make the conceptual leap to inquire whether the viral or bacterial antigens in vaccines provoke the same pathological response. In their Pathobiology study, however, the two authors—Drs. Darja Kanduc (Italy) and Yehuda Shoenfeld (Israel)—do just that, looking at HPV through the lens of both HPV infection and “active immunization.” Using cutting-edge molecular biology techniques to look at matching peptide sequences in HPV “epitopes” and human proteins, Kanduc and Shoenfeld examine epitopes from 15 different HPV types, including eight of the nine types included in Gardasil 9. (An epitope is the portion of an antigen capable of stimulating an immune response.)
Confirming that there is an “impressively high extent” of peptide sharing between HPV epitopes and human proteins, the two authors then outline numerous pathological implications of their results, giving examples of “human proteins that—when hit by cross-reactions generated by HPV infection/active immunization—may associate with diseases and autoimmune manifestations.” The latter include:
- Reproductive abnormalities, including “ovarian dysgenesis, anovulation and male infertility, altered gene expression during oogenesis, premature ovarian failure, diminished ovarian reserve, accelerated primordial follicle loss, oocyte DNA damage, as well as susceptibility to breast/ovarian cancer” and “disorders in spermatogenesis, sperm-egg fusion, or spermatid maturation and male infertility”
- Neuropsychiatric diseases, including “epilepsy, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and brain cancer”
- Lupus manifestations
- Circulatory effects, including “altered control of the vascular dynamics, pain, fevers associated with the menstrual cycle, depression, hypotension, and dysregulation of blood pressure”
- Cardiac effects, including “cardiac autoimmunity and sudden unexplained death”
As Kanduc and Schoenfeld state, the HPV-human protein overlap documented in their study is not unique to HPV; many other microbial sequences share significant commonalities with human proteins as well. Because the overlap is so widespread, some researchers are skeptical of cross-reactivity and dismiss it as more “fantasy” than “fact.” To explain why cross-reactivity is plausible in the context of vaccination, the two authors describe, in other publications, another important piece of the puzzle: vaccine adjuvants and comparable environmental “stimuli.” In fact, they argue, the “sole purpose” of a vaccine adjuvant is to gin up an immune response that otherwise would be unlikely to occur—and when the adjuvant is paired with foreign peptides that are similar to human peptides, a “reasonable outcome may be the development of crossreactivity and autoimmunity.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/11/no_author/new-study-explains-how-the-hpv-vaccine-can-trigger-an-extremely-wide-spectrum-of-autoimmune-diseases/
[Posted at the SpookyWeather blog, November 9th, 2019.]
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