Original article (in Serbian) was published on 28/10/2021
VK profile user Branimir Nestorovic published a post on October 14 with the following content: “Babies whose kidneys were used to grow the virus for the Pfizer vaccine were delivered alive, and then KILLED to get tissue”, featuring a link to the text published on the website of the Center for Medical Progress. It is a controversial organization best known for trying to prove that Planned Parenthood profits by selling fetal tissue to researchers and eventually had to pay $ 2.2 million in damages to the same organization for violating federal laws.
The University of Pittsburgh has recently been targeted by this organization, so the linked text is actually trying to prove how this university “admitted” in a press statement that it used organs taken from live fetuses to carry out a research (GUDMAP) project.
However, in a press statement referred to in the text, the representatives of the University of Pittsburgh claim that all legally established rules are followed when taking tissues, as well as strict internal regulatory and ethical rules that apply to this type of research at the university. In late September, the University of Pittsburgh hired legal experts to make an independent assessment of their research procedures.
What is an indisputable fact is that in the linked text of the Center for Medical Advancement, not a single word is mentioned about the company Pfizer or the vaccine against Covid-19.
Do Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines have anything to do with “killed babies”?
The answer is NO. In September 2020, a group of scientists working on the development of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 published a scientific paper detailing the preclinical phase of research for this vaccine: how and where this process took place, and what roles individual researchers played. The University of Pittsburgh is not mentioned.
The only point of contact with human embryonic cells is that the HEK293T/17 cell line – a derivative of the HEK293 cell line – was used to test the vaccine’s efficacy at this stage of the study.
Today, all commercially available HEK293 cell lines are derived from the original cell line created by a group of scientists in the Netherlands in 1973, by taking human embryonic kidney cells (HEK) from an aborted human embryo of unknown origin, transformed by exposure to adenovirus 5 DNA fragments (1, 2). It was complicated just as it sounds, but in this way, the process of cell death was disrupted, which practically enabled the “production” of identical cells in laboratory conditions that are today irreplaceable in the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic procedures (3, 4).
It is difficult to estimate how far away are the cell lines used to test the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine
from the original cell of the aborted embryo because almost 50 years have passed. The derivative HEK293T/17 from one of the centers from which it is possible to commercially obtain these cells in the American ATCC is cited in 10,699 scientific papers.
If what VK profile user Branimir Nestorovic meant was the virus used to infect rhesus macaques in the preclinical phase – even that has nothing to do with “killed babies”. The SARS-Cov 2 virus, which originates from the Texas Biomedical Institute, was used, and guinea pigs were used to obtain it.
On March 11 this year, Branimir Nestorovic announced on his Facebook that he would publish “everything related to the current epidemic” on the Russian VK network, “without censorship”.