Gene-edited Mosquito Vaccines Could Lead to Mass Vaccination Without Consent, Kim Iversen Warns
In a recent episode of “The Kim Iversen Show,” Iversen criticized a government-funded study using genetically modified mosquitoes to vaccinate humans against malaria — and the researchers’ claims that the mosquitoes would never be used to vaccinate people without their consent.
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In a recent episode of “The Kim Iversen Show,” Iversen discussed a National Institutes of Health-funded vaccine trial study on using genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes to vaccinate humans against malaria.
Iversen told viewers she doubted the researcher’s claims that the mosquitoes wouldn’t be used to vaccinate people against their consent.
A University of Washington team of researchers, led by Sean Murphy, M.D., Ph.D., conducted the study, which was published in the Science Translational Medicine journal.
The researchers genetically altered the malaria-causing Plasmodium falciparum parasite, removing several genes to create a “minor version of malaria” incapable of causing sickness in humans. Mosquitoes were exposed to the parasite before as many as 200 were allowed to bite each participant, three to five times over a 30-day period — enough to create antibodies lasting up to six months.
Murphy and his co-authors said they used mosquitoes — rather than syringes — to save cost and that they were not planning to use the technology to mass vaccinate millions of people without their consent.
“Yeah, right,” Iversen responded, adding:
“Bull. If anybody is going to call bull on this, it’s you and me because this is bull. They intend to use the science for something.”
According to Iversen, the “big question” about the study is, “What are you going to do with this science, with this research?”
“Essentially,” she said, “a government, I could imagine, would buy the batch of genetically modified mosquitoes and release it to its population.”
She continued:
“Then what happens to the mosquitoes? They get inside of crates. They get shipped around the world [and] they go with people places. … So now you’re going to vaccinate the entire world without the world’s consent by using this science.”
“What is the purpose of this science if it’s not for that?” she added.
Iversen pointed out that Dr. Kirsten Lyke, a vaccine researcher and professor of medicine at the University of Maryland, commended using a genetically modified live parasite as “a total game changer” for vaccine development.
Lyke led the Phase 1 trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and also served as co-investigator for Moderna’s and Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine trials.
“So there you go,” Iversen said. “You’ve got COVID-19 researchers saying, ‘This is great.’”
Iversen said she hoped the GM mosquitoes did not escape from the study into the wild — “but how do they know?” she asked.
“Did they account for every single mosquito? Did any of them escape from the lab by chance?” she asked, adding, “This is like the [COVID-19] lab leak.”
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children's Health Defense.
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