When it comes to telling the public the truth about vaccines, you simply cannot trust doctors on the government payroll anymore than you can many of the doctors who make cushy bonuses from Big Harma for pimping their products. That seems to be just as true in my home state of South Carolina.
In a recent post at Paletto State Watch, the state’s top doc seems to have lied under oath about the MMR vaccine.
Last Wednesday on March 4th, I, along with thousands of South Carolinians, witnessed both in person and online, what appeared to be perjury take place during a State Senate Medical Affairs Subcommittee hearing. Dr. Linda Bell, who serves as the State Epidemiologist and Director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) within the South Carolina Department of Public Health, gave a presentation and took questions from different senators at the meeting. State Senator Josh Kimbrell, who represents the Spartanburg district, questioned Dr. Bell about whether the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine currently administered to children was developed from fetal cell tissue. Dr. Bell stated under oath that fetal cell tissue was not used during the development of the MMR vaccine.
Senator Josh Kimbrell at the Senate Medical Affairs Subcommittee hearing on March 4th, 2026 [Alaina Moore/PSW]
Here is a transcript of that discourse:
- Senator Kimbrell: “I am going to ask you on the record, you may chuckle a little bit when I say it, but the number one objection I get from anybody is that the MMR vaccine is, that you cannot be pro-life and be for it. I am pro-life from conception and on but I still support MMR vaccines. I continually am told, and I mean you could read my inbox, that this is a vaccine that is grown off of fetal tissue or even adult somatic stem cells. Everybody that I’ve talked to who is a manufacturer of this, and even doctors, we got VCOM in my district. This is not grown off of fetal or adult somatic stem cells — am I correct?”
- Dr. Linda Bell: “That is correct.”
- Senator Kimbrell: “So where does that start, where does that information come from?”
- Dr. Linda Bell: “So maybe to go to your original question and my answer that we have seen a variety of reasons for vaccine resistance, vaccine hesitancy, that have to do with um, you mentioned mistrust of government in Europe, in Eastern Europe, so there is historical reasons for that. In our outreach work in talking with community members we are also hearing from the faith leaders saying that… it is not necessarily a demographic thing but it is people looking at misinformation and being influenced by what’s on social media.”
It is baffling that what appears to be a blatant lie, or misleading statement at best, would be so confidently pronounced since the vaccine insert to Merck’s M-M-R II vaccine, the one commonly administered to U.S. children today, clearly states in its description section that their rubella vaccine was derived from a “strain of live attenuated rubella virus propagated in WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts.”
GlaxoSmithKline’s MMR vaccine called PRIORIX, which is also licensed for usage, similarly states in its vaccine insert a different human fetal cell line MRC-5 for growing the rubella virus, instead of WI-38.
Further damning evidence comes from a 2018 court deposition where Dr. Stanley Plotkin, a prominent developer of the rubella vaccine and considered the “godfather of vaccines”, gave testimony about the use of aborted fetal tissue in the development of the rubella vaccine. He confirmed that during experimentation, at least 35 electively aborted fetuses with a gestation age of 3 months or older, were used to develop human cell lines for the rubella virus. Thus, even though only a couple of the human cell lines were used to create the rubella vaccine, it took dozens of elective abortions of healthy human fetuses to get there.
Related Post: Fast-Tracked and Funded or Political Theater? Following the Money and Politics Behind the MMR Bill
The reported reason for using human cell lines to grow viruses is to prevent animal virus contaminants. Dr. Plotkin gave the following comment about modern use of the MMR vaccine: “There is a lot of misunderstanding about the use of fetal cells to make vaccines… the only fetal cells that are used are the descendants of cells that were obtained way back in the 1960s… So, we no longer need new fetuses to provide life-saving vaccines made in fetal cells.” Dr. Plotkin is referring to the immortalization of cells which are cells that have been genetically altered to bypass normal aging, allowing them to divide indefinitely in culture. The rubella vaccine is produced using specific immortalized cell lines that originated from human fetal tissue. But Senator Kimbrell was not specifically asking Dr. Bell about the use of immortalized cell lines; their use wouldn’t excuse the dark history concerning the origins of the rubella vaccine anyway.
Rather, Senator Kimbrell claimed that the MMR vaccine was not developed with the use of human fetal cells. Dr. Bell agreed and confirmed his statement while being sworn in under oath. However, the fact is that if we did not have the human fetal cell lines WI-38 or MRC-5, which only existed because of the elective abortion of healthy human fetuses, the former one in this case being female and the latter one male, then we would not have Merck’s current MMR II vaccine nor GlaxoSmithKline’s Priorix that are on the market and being administered to children and adults in our country today. I imagine that the pharmaceutical giants Merck & GlaxoSmithKline understand the legal repercussions of not being transparent about their products’ development, which is why they have human cell lines WI-38 and MRC-5 and their usages clearly listed in their respective vaccine inserts.
The question is — does Dr. Bell or Senator Kimbrell understand the repercussions of lying to and/or misleading the general public?
And my last question is directed to the general public— are we going to let them get away with it?
