The Shingrix vaccine uses a recombinant protein produced in genetically modified Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells. The expression of this protein is controlled by the human cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoter, NOT the Simian Virus 40 (SV40) promoter, and there is no evidence that Shingrix causes cancer.
Amazing story behind the CHO cells. Produced in Peking University in 1919. After WWII and during the civil war in China the hamsters were smuggled out to the US:
In 1948, under the shadow of the Chinese Civil War, and weeks before the fall of Beijing, Dr. Hu Zhengxiang sent 20 Chinese hamsters, 10 male and 10 female, to Dr. Robert Briggs Watson, an American studying malaria in Nanjing, who took an 11 hour drive through blinding rain, narrowly avoiding roving bands of Communist troops, to deliver the animals to Shanghai and onto one of the last Pan-Am flights to the United States.
The hamsters were shipped to Victor Schwentker, a skilled rodent breeder in upstate New York, from whom a Harvard graduate student, George Yerganian, purchased several animals and began his own breeding program and determined the correct number of chromosomes (2n=22).
All modern CHO cells are descended from the 20 individuals provided by Dr. Hu in 1948; for his cooperation with American scientists, he was persecuted as a “reactionary academic authority” for aiding American germ warfare in the Korean War, and sentenced to a reeducation camp for six months. Decades later, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in August 1966, these accusations resurfaced, leading to a vicious beating in his home at the hands of the Red Guard, shortly after which he and his wife committed suicide.