Republican Suggests Vaccines May Be Getting Injected Into Lettuce

A Tennessee state lawmaker said during a recent legislative session that various companies and medical entities are capable of injecting vaccines into lettuce, tomatoes and tobacco.

Republican state Representative Scott Cepicky said during a House Health Committee hearing on Wednesday that the public should be wary about vaccines being intentionally put into foods commonly found at grocery stores, much to the chagrin of Democratic chairman John Ray Clemmons.

Cepicky said that the University of California, Riverside, has "perfected" vaccinating lettuce, adding that the University of California, Berkeley, has conducted similar tests on tomatoes and that the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company has mimicked that with tobacco products.

Clemmons asked Cepicky if it is legal, to which Cepicky replied, "I'm not arguing that point"—adding that no current law exists deeming that a head of lettuce at a grocery store includes vaccines. He said such vaccinated plants should be listed as pharmaceuticals "so people can get the proper dosage."

Newsweek reached out to Cepicky via email for comment on Friday.

In September 2021, UC Riverside published an article about school scientists studying whether they can turn edible plants like lettuce into mRNA "vaccine factories" in a similar fashion to how COVID-19 vaccines employed messenger RNA or mRNA technology to battle infectious disease.

The project was conducted via $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, with the goal of displaying whether DNA containing mRNA vaccines can be successfully delivered into the part of plant cells where it will replicate, "demonstrating the plants can produce enough mRNA to rival a traditional shot, and finally, determining the right dosage."

Research was conducted with scientists from UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University.

"Ideally, a single plant would produce enough mRNA to vaccinate a single person," Juan Pablo Giraldo, associate professor at UC Riverside and lead project researcher, said at the time. "We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens. Farmers could also eventually grow entire fields of it."

"The ability to reproduce mRNA vaccines in plants is a technology that has not been successfully demonstrated, either at lab or commercial scale," a university spokesperson told Newsweek via email on Friday. "Its feasibility is still being tested and the technology does not yet exist."

Clemmons again asked Cepicky whether vaccinated lettuce is available in any Tennessee grocery store under state law, wondering if his request could lead to "Walgreens pharmacists with a refrigerated section."

"I mean, how's this going to play out?" Clemmons asked.

Cepicky responded that it's more of a consumer protection bill, providing the example of someone going to buy tomatoes and being aware of the fruit containing a polio vaccine.

"The problem you have is if it's not treated as a pharmaceutical, being the size and difference between you and me, how many tomatoes do I have to eat to get the proper dosage versus how many tomatoes you have to eat, and if you eat too many, you get an overdose," Cepicky said.

"If you eat too less, like we had in the cattle industry with Aureomycin—we weren't dosing our cattle properly and the horn flies were developing an immunity to it. If we don't have the proper dosage of the vaccine, it could lead to the efficacy of that drug not working anymore," he continued.

R.J. Reynolds began exploring such research one year earlier, in the infancy of the coronavirus pandemic.

James Figlar, executive vice president for research and development for the nearly 150-year-old company, told NPR in October 2020 that his company, Kentucky BioProcessing, was one of two using the tobacco plant to attempt to produce a key protein from the coronavirus that can be used in a vaccine.

Other tobacco companies, including Canadian biotech company Medicago, were working on similar research and among the first to begin testing in humans. Medicago used plant-based virus-like particles as part of its widespread COVID-19 vaccine available in Canada.