COLUMBIA — During a marathon Statehouse hearing about South Carolina’s pandemic response last September, a man with long, sandy hair and wearing a lab coat came to the podium.
“For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Phillip Buckhaults,” he told the assembled lawmakers.
“I have a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology,” he went on. “I’m a cancer gene jock.”
Buckhaults, who researches colon and breast cancer at the University of South Carolina’s College of Pharmacy, went on to say he’d found something potentially dangerous while testing used vials of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, something worth telling regulators about.
Buckhaults
His revelation? DNA fragments he claimed could theoretically cause cancer.
Buckhaults’ testimony came during a hearing filled with Statehouse conservatives skeptical that the pandemic was really that bad. Also there were a collection of those from the anti-vax movement — folks who had readily absorbed the myriad theories and wild claims about the pandemic and the vaccines that brought it under control.
To many of them, Buckhaults’ warning was more strong proof vaccines were dangerous or part of a cover-up.
But despite Buckhaults’ graphs, sophisticated tests and lab coat, the claims are scientifically inaccurate, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Pfizer and four independent experts consulted by The Post and Courier.
“I’m going to revert to technical language here: That is complete and utter bullshit,” said John Moore, a microbiologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City who has researched the body’s response to coronavirus mRNA vaccines.
Yet in no time, the USC researcher became a celebrated voice of the anti-vax online world, and he is regularly cited by Statehouse lawmakers to justify legislation to rein in public health authorities or take shots at vaccine safety.
The episode highlights the pitfalls of a post-pandemic world where science and politics are more deeply entangled than ever.
Buckhaults told The Post and Courier he never intended it this way. He regrets that his testimony went viral and that people should not be alarmed about COVID-19 vaccine safety based on what he has found so far.
“It turned into such a public spectacle,” said Buckhaults, who has taken the vaccine.
What’s in the vials?
It is safe and expected that minute amounts of plasmid DNA fragments that were the subject of Buckhaults’ alert will be found in mRNA vaccines because plasmid DNA is used as a template to mass produce the mRNA in the vaccines, according to the FDA and the scientists The Post and Courier consulted.
For a host of reasons, that DNA, most of which is filtered out of the final product, does not pose the risk of cancer, the experts said.
That mattered little to vaccine skeptics on the internet.
The video of Buckhaults’ legislative committee testimony quickly racked up thousands of views on YouTube and made the rounds on social media and anti-vaccine blogs. After the main video was pulled off YouTube for violating its terms of service (another copy remains on the site), it moved over to conservative social media sites, including former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and the video site Rumble.
“Scientist testifies before Senate: mRNA vaccines are contaminated and deadly to humans,” blares the Bosnian-language title of one copy of the video on Rumble with 1,450 views.
“It killed. It kills. It still kills,” reads a French language post with a snippet of the video on Facebook.
South Carolina lawmakers are using Buckhaults’ testimony to push legislation that would rein in powers of the state Department of Health during health emergencies and would effectively ban private business from mandating their employees receive new vaccines.
Protesters gathered outside of Charleston City Hall during a council meeting on Jan. 11, 2022. They opposed both the racial conciliation commission and the city’s policy for meeting attendees to show proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 test.
“It’s particularly needed now since it has come to light that the vaccines are indeed and without question contaminated with plasmid DNA, which could potentially cause a lot of health concerns,” state Sen. Tom Corbin, a Travelers Rest Republican, told a Senate subcommittee considering the legislation in February.
Corbin chaired the original panel where Buckhaults testified.
At a committee meeting March 7, Corbin again brought up Buckhault’s name, saying his testimony was the “whole reason” he and others are pushing the bill banning novel vaccine mandates for private businesses.
Claims challenged
Since Buckhaults’ testimony, strong criticism has emerged to his interpretation of his results. Medical giant Pfizer wrote the S.C. Senate’s Medical Affairs Committee a letter dated Oct. 16, 2023, rebutting his testimony.
“There is no evidence to support these claims, and they provide the risk of being misconstrued by either Committee members and/or the public at large,” the company wrote.
While vaccines frequently contain residual DNA, every batch of Pfizer’s vaccines are tested to ensure they meet World Health Organization and FDA standards, and no cases of vaccine-induced cancer have been detected, the letter stated.
Corbin has only briefly alluded to the letter during his public comments about Buckhaults’ testimony.
The FDA, too, released a letter Dec. 14, 2023, refuting the claim that residual DNA in the vaccines could cause cancer.
The four scientists consulted by The Post and Courier cited myriad reasons why Buckhaults’ results are not cause for concern.
Though Buckhaults said he found “200 billion” copies of DNA fragments, that likely translates to less than 50 nanograms of material if the results are correct, said Dr. David Gorski, an oncologist at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.
A nanogram is one billionth of a gram, which is like dividing a sugar cube in four and then dividing one of those pieces by a billion.
Additionally, when the residual DNA fragments enter the cell with the mRNA contained in the vaccine, cells have multiple mechanisms that destroy foreign DNA fragments in the cytoplasm, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.
Even if some of the DNA fragments are not destroyed in the cytoplasm, the fragments have no way of entering the nucleus where the genome is stored, he said.
“The nucleus has a membrane that would keep anything else out of it, and it’s really been clearly shown that nothing in the vaccine gets into the nucleus of cells,” Schaffner said.
Even if some of the DNA fragments got into the nucleus, the plasmids that companies use to manufacture mRNA vaccines don’t contain cancer-causing genes, and most of the fragments are too small to do any serious damage, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, said in an email.
People watching
By his own admission, Buckhaults’ testimony in September was less alarming than the spin it would take online. “I don’t think the amounts there actually exceed the regulation limits. In some batches it may,” Buckhaults said.
At the hearing, he also testified that the risk of cancer was theoretical and further research is needed to investigate whether it’s actually causing harm.
Other scientists say no potential risk exists. Regulators and scientists are constantly testing and monitoring vaccines for potential side effects — that’s how researchers identified thrombosis, or blood clots, as a rare side effect of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — but they need to go about it in a responsible way, Vanderbilt’s Schaffner said.
Testimony to a legislative panel before publishing results in a peer-reviewed journal is not the path to do it, he said.
In an interview in his office in late March, Buckhaults said he wishes things had not gone as they did.
“I would have preferred that testimony not get such a wide exposure to the public. I would’ve preferred that regulators and scientists quietly got busy testing and only reported to the public if it’s found there’s damage to the genome,” he told The Post and Courier. “Now that it’s out there, the public just needs to know that people are checking.”
Nick Prohaska (right) administers a COVID-19 vaccine to Gabrielle VanCopeland during a joint vaccination clinic held at the Gaillard Center with Closing the Gap in Healthcare and the Lowcountry Jazz Festival on Aug. 27, 2021, in Charleston.
State lawmakers invited him to the panel in September, and he did not know the hearing was going to be recorded and posted on the internet, he said. Buckhaults said he was the one who asked YouTube to pull the original video of his testimony off the web.
“It’s been a real lesson in how to serve the public responsibly when more people are watching me than I thought,” he said.
But Buckhaults, whose long hair, black denim jacket and guitars in the corner of his office gave him the air of an 1980s rocker, stood by his results. He disagreed with the FDA’s residual DNA standards and said a “tremendous amount” of his lab’s time has been turned over to researching the coronavirus vaccines with university money.
Officials with USC’s College of Pharmacy declined to comment.
Buckhaults was something of a pandemic hero for working with a team of other USC scientists to set up a highly accurate coronavirus testing operation that used saliva rather than the uncomfortable nose swabs in 2020. Those tests provided South Carolina health authorities and patients crucial information during the height of the pandemic.
Buckhaults told The Post and Courier that he was motivated to do the research because he convinced many friends, family and church members who were skeptical of the vaccine to take it. He felt he had a duty to make sure it’s safe, he said. He testified that he has taken the vaccine multiple times.
Gorski, who watched Buckhaults’ full testimony, said that while Buckhaults’ interpretation of his results is not correct and he played into some classic anti-vaccine tropes, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s a sincere scientist getting his facts wrong or an ideologue giving lab-coat credibility to anti-vaccine movement. Or, something in between.
“It was never my intent for it to become a cause for public alarm,” Buckhaults said.
When Buckhaults testified in September, he suggested the residual DNA “slipped” past Pfizer and the FDA (something the company and regulators said isn’t true in their letters) and referenced an adage called “Hanlon’s razor.”
“That is, never attribute malice to that which can be better explained by incompetence,” Buckhaults told the panel.
