Vaccines for everything - The quest for a smoking jab continues

Tuesday, September 10, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: smoking vaccine, nicotine, addiction

(NaturalNews) If you are a smoker struggling to kick the habit, the vaccine industry wants to see you inoculated with one of several new anti-smoking vaccines coming down the immunization pipeline. A recent study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine explains the industry's latest idea for helping smokers quit -- inject them with a genetically-modified (GM) virus strain that causes their livers to unnaturally produce antibodies that target the nicotine compound.

When patches, gums, and pure willpower are not enough to make smoking unappealing enough to quit, some scientists believe injecting GMOs into the body for the purpose of inducing a type of allergic reaction to nicotine is a viable solution. And if enough clinical trials can be conducted to make the case that such vaccines actually work in this way, anti-smoking vaccines could soon appear at a pharmacy or health clinic near you.

Professor Ronald Crystal and his colleagues from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City decided to create what they call a "gene-therapy" vaccine that, when injected, infects the liver and teaches it to artificially produce nicotine-targeting antibodies. Their theory purports that if the body successfully produces such antibodies at the appropriate levels, the pleasure associated with smoking will diminish to the point that smokers will no longer even desire to smoke.

After producing the GM virus, Crystal and his colleagues injected it into test mice to see how their bodies would react. They claim that, compared to normal mice, nicotine levels in the jabbed mice's brains were 85 percent less, which they believe is indicative of success. Most of the nicotine that would have otherwise traveled to the mice's brains, in other words, appears to have been eradicated among the mice that received the vaccine.

By definition, GM virus anti-smoking vaccine not even a vaccine

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), vaccines work by imparting the same antigens or parts of antigens associated with a particular disease into the body for the purpose of training the body's immune system to fight off that disease. These antigens are recognized by the body as foreign invaders, which prompts an immune response in which antibodies are sent out to fight them -- and should the real disease ever come along, the body will be better prepared to fight it off.

But the concept behind the new gene-therapy vaccine for smoking does not follow this vaccine pattern at all. In the mad rush to create a vaccine for literally every known condition, which now includes "smoking addiction," vaccine scientists have literally abandoned the very principles behind what makes a vaccine a vaccine, and created a whole new type of drug injection that modifies the body's natural response to nicotine.

Since nicotine is neither a virus nor an infection, the body would not, and does not, naturally produce any antibodies to fight against it. So a so-called "vaccine" that teaches the liver to fight back against nicotine by sending out anti-nicotine antibodies is not really a vaccine at all, by definition, but rather some type of hybridized, genetically-modified drug that induces an artificial allergic response to an outside substance.

The immune system is meant to fight off diseases, not natural substances like nicotine. A natural alkaloid of the tobacco plant, nicotine may even possess certain therapeutic benefits when consumed rather than smoked, which makes the prospect of training the body to reject it via a "vaccine" all the more concerning.

Sources for this article include:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18608666

https://www.naturalnews.com/033071_smoking_vaccine_clinical_trials.html

https://www.naturalnews.com/035058_vaccines_salmonella_pathogens.html