What was in the vaccine – and why nobody asked about it

Phillip Buckhaults is no fringe figure. He's a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of South Carolina, an expert in cancer genomics—and known for developing the COVID saliva test during the pandemic. A man, then, who was trusted to do useful science. Until he started doing inconvenient science. On September 12, 2023, he testified before the South Carolina Senate's Medical Affairs Ad-Hoc Committee. His testimony was strikingly clear: The Pfizer vaccine is contaminated with plasmid DNA. It's not just mRNA. It contains DNA fragments—and he knows this because he sequenced it in his own lab. Let that sink in for a moment.

What plasmid DNA means – and what it shouldn't be.
mRNA vaccines work on a simple principle: messenger RNA is injected, provides instructions for building a protein, is broken down, and that's it. That was the promise. That was the basis for their approval. That was the difference from traditional vaccines, which was sold to the public as a revolutionary advantage.
What Buckhaults found was something else entirely: plasmid DNA – that is, circular DNA fragments used in the production of the mRNA template, which should actually be completely removed. Not in trace amounts, but in quantities exceeding the limits set by the EMA and FDA.
DNA is more stable than mRNA. DNA can penetrate the cell nucleus. The question of whether and how injected DNA fragments can interact with the human genome is not esoteric speculation—it is a legitimate molecular biological question that would need to be answered before administering a vaccine billions of times. It hasn't been answered. It hasn't been asked. At least not publicly.

The licensing authorities and their blind spots
This is where the real story begins. Pfizer knew about the DNA contamination. This is not speculation – it emerged from documents released in response to FOIA requests. The question is whether the regulatory authorities – FDA, EMA, Swissmedic – paid sufficient attention during their quality control review.
The answer that emerges from Buckhaults' testimony is sobering: apparently not thorough enough. Or the thresholds were set in such a way that the result appeared acceptable from the outset. This is no small detail. Quality control for vaccines doesn't exist as a bureaucratic formality—it exists because injected substances enter the human body and can do things there that cannot be fully predicted. DNA contamination exceeding thresholds in a mass-produced vaccine is a regulatory failure. Period.

The reaction – silence, distraction, carrying on.
Buckhaults' testimony before the South Carolina Senate has been publicly available since September 2023. The major media outlets have covered it with the kind of thoroughness that has become their trademark in science reporting: barely at all. No Spiegel cover story. No ARD special report. No urgent inquiries to Pfizer, the EMA, or the RKI.
Instead, the usual refrain: The man is not representative. The findings are controversial. There's no need to panic. Controversial among whom? Refuted by whom? With what data? These are questions that science journalism should be asking – and isn't, because the answers might be uncomfortable.

Conclusion without a bow
Buckhaults is not an anti-vaxxer. He explicitly emphasized this in his statement. He is a scientist who has identified a problem – and who is describing the institutional response to it: silence, ignoring, carrying on as before.
That's the real scandal. Not the contamination alone – manufacturing problems can happen. But the fact that a recognized expert testifies before a parliamentary committee that he examined an approved mass vaccine for DNA contamination and found it – and the responsible authorities react with the enthusiasm of a city council to a parking lot redesign proposal.

What was in the vaccine - and why nobody asked about it