From Polio to Smallpox and HIV to AIDS: Historical Obfuscation

If the WHO's smallpox vaccination campaign triggered an AIDS epidemic in Africa, how did so many people get infected with HIV in the first place?

 

SV40 was just one of many simian viruses known to have contaminated polio vaccines.

Hilary Koprowski, who is about to be featured heavily in this story, wrote a letter to the Congressional Health and Safety Subcommittee in 1961 saying:

As monkey kidney culture is host to innumerable simian viruses, the number found varying in relation to the amount of work expended to find them, the problem presented to the manufacturer is considerable, if not insuperable. As our technical methods improve we may find fewer and fewer lots of vaccine which can be called free from simian virus.

According to Ronald Desrosier, a professor at Harvard Medical School, growing polio vaccine in monkey kidneys is “a ticking time bomb.”

Desrosier acknowledges that you can test monkeys before using their tissue and screen out those carrying harmful viruses. But he warns that you can test only for those viruses you know about—and that our knowledge is limited to perhaps “2% of existing monkey viruses.”

During the 1950s-70s, virus detection techniques were crude and unreliable. It wasn't until the 1980s that more sophisticated testing procedures were developed.

That was when researchers discovered that about 50% of all African green monkeys—the primate of choice for making polio vaccines—were infected with simian immunodeficieny virus (SIV), a virus closely related to human immunodeficieny virus (HIV), the infectious agent thought to precede AIDS.

Essex, M., et al. “The origin of the AIDS virus” Scientific American 1988;259:64-71.

Karpas, A. “Origin and spread of AIDS.” Nature 1990;348:578

Kyle, WS. “Simian retroviruses, poliovaccine, and origin of AIDS.” Lancet 1992;339:600-1.

Elswood, BF., Stricker, RB. “Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS.” Medical Hypothesis 1994:42:347-54

From the last study: “We hypothesize that the AIDS pandemic may have originated with a contaminated polio vaccine that was administered to inhabitants of Equatorial Africa from 1957 to 1959.”

This has caused some researchers to wonder if HIV may simply be SIV “residing in and adapting to a human host.” This led others to wonder if SIV mutated into HIV once introduced into the human population by way of contaminated polio vaccines.

Martin, B. “Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS: the career of a threatening idea.” Townsend Letter for Doctors (January 1994):97-100.

Curtis, T. “The origin of AIDS: A startling new theory attempts to answer the question 'Was it an act of God or an act of man?'” Rolling Stone (March 19, 1992):57.

“Workshop on simian virus-40 (SV-40): A possible human polyomavirus.” NVIC (Jan 27-28, 1997).

Curtis, T. “Did polio vaccine experiment unleash AIDS in Africa?” The Washington Post (April 5, 1992):C3+.

Vaccine authorities were so concerned about the possibility that SIV was a precursor to HIV, and that polio vaccines were the means of transmission from monkey to human, that the World Health Organization convened two meetings of experts in 1985 to explore the data and consider their options. After all, SIV was very similar to HIV and occurred naturally in the monkey species predominantly used by vaccine manufacturers.

However, WHO concluded the vaccines were safe enough and insisted the mass vaccination campaigns continue. By 1989, they recommended not making the polio vaccine using monkeys infected with SIV.

The following year, wild chimpanzees in Africa were found to be infected with a strain of SIV that was almost identical to HIV. Some researchers even referred to it as the “missing link” to the origins of HIV.

Since chimpanzees were used to test viruses for potential use in vaccines, and were kept in captivity by research laboratories, they could have been a source of vaccine contamination.

Scientific concerns were also heightened when researchers found some West Africans who were infected with an SIV-like virus that was a fundamental twin to HIV. They called it HIV-2, and like the initial HIV subtype, it was implicated in the development of AIDS.

According to Robert Gallo: “The monkey virus is the human virus. There are monkey viruses as close to isolates of HIV-2 as HIV-2 isolates are to each others.”

By 1991, as the result of improvements in virus-detection techniques, researchers found SIV DNA in the kidneys of infected monkeys. Minced monkey kidneys were, and still are, used to produce the live polio vaccine.

SIV was also found in the cancer cells of an AIDS victim, and in other people as well. To many researchers, this trail of evidence had become too persuasive to deny. Apparently, millions of people were infected with monkey viruses capable of causing AIDS, and this cross-species transfer very likely occurred by way of SIV-contaminated polio vaccines.

Giunta, S., et al. “The primate trade and the origin of AIDS virus.” Nature 1987;329:22.

Seale, J. “Crossing the species barrier—viruses and the origins of AIDS in perspective.” J R Soc Med 1989;82:519-23.

Lecatsas, G. “Origin of AIDS.” Nature 1991;351:179.

Gilks, C. “AIDS, monkeys and malaria” Nature 1991;354:262.

   

Since most historians agree that AIDS originated in Africa, how could it be linked to the polio vaccine if Salk and Sabin's trials were conducted in the U.S., the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe?

In March 1951, several years before Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin would scuffle over whose vaccine was the true prophylactic, Dr. Hilary Koprowski announced at a medical conference that he had become the first doctor in history to test polio vaccine on humans. His “volunteers” included several institutionalized children with mental handicaps. They drank the vaccine in chocolate milk.

From 1957 to 1960, after years of tinkering with monkey kidneys and polio germs, Koprowski tested his own experimental polio vaccine on 325,000 equatorial Africans, including 75,000 citizens of Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Zaire).

Called by drums, rural natives traveled to local villages where they had a liquid vaccines squirted into their mouths. 98% of the vaccine recipients were infants and toddlers. The youngest children received 15 times the adult dosage. Though Koprowski claimed he had the backing of the World Health Organization, WHO denied sanctioning the large-scale trials.

In 1959, Albert Sabin published a study that claimed that Koprowski's polio vaccine used in the African trials contained un “unidentified” and “unstable” cell-killing virus. Although he was quick to point out the flaws in the vaccine of Koprowski, his professional rival, unfortunately his ability to detect viruses in the polio vaccine fell short when it came to mass contamination of Sabin's own polio vaccine with SV-40.

In response to Sabin's claims of contamination, Koprowski simply scoffed at him and said he was just trying to discredit his work (as he would do again and again to anyone making this accusation). The virus allegedly detected by Sabin was never identified.

Until recently, the earliest known blood sample containing antibodies against HIV was traced back to 1959. The serum came from a patient visiting a clinic in Leopoldville, one of the epicenters of the AIDS epidemic that would occur a decade later.

Gerald Myers, a genetic sequencing expert with Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, tracked the evolution of HIV and confirmed that today's major subtypes of the AIDS virus in humans appear to have arisen as recently as 1960.

Although this time period is widely accepted by medical researchers, more recent conflicting reports suggest that the first HIV infection may have occurred years earlier.

Regardless of when the first HIV infection occurred, it would seem to be premature to dismiss the OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine) AIDS hypothesis on this basis alone. The timing of the first HIV infection is irrelevant to the question of whether or not some doses of the experimental polio vaccine used in Africa in the late 1950s were contaminated, thus precipitating a future outbreak.

Koprowski's vaccine was not approved for human use, so it was discontinued in 1960 following the African trials. Thus, it was only administered to inhabitants of the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi—the precise area where high levels of HIV infection were identified by researcher 30 years later.

Furthermore, the AIDS virus is known to infect mucous cells, prevalent in the mouth. The African vaccines were squirted into people's mouths.

Could squirting an HIV-contaminated polio vaccine into people's mouths cause AIDS? According to Tom Folks, chief retrovirologist at the CDC, “Any time a person has a lesion in his mouth, then there could be transmission” of the virus.

Dr. Robert Bohannon of Baylor College of Medicine asserts that squiring polio vaccines into one's mouth would tend to aerosolize some of the liquid. Small drops could then go into the lungs, and from there to the blood cells susceptible to infection. This could be an efficient mode of HIV transmission.

Experts believe that the average time between HIV infection and the development of AIDS is approximately 8-10 years.

If the African polio vaccine was indeed contaminated with SIV/HIV, initial outbreaks of AIDS would have occurred from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. This period accurately coincides with the emergence of AIDS in equatorial Africa.

Understandably, authorities are very reluctant to admit that there's even a possibility that scientists may have contributed to the AIDS pandemic by growing polio vaccines in virus-laden monkey kidneys.

In 1992, Tom Curtis published a story for Rolling Stone that created quite a stir.

Although dismissed by most experts, “a few scientists, notably the biologist W.D. Hamilton, thought the hypothesis required serious investigation, but they received little support from the scientific community.”

William Haseltine, a professor at Harvard, believes that hypothesizing about the origin of AIDS is distracting and nonproductive, saying, “It's not relevant...I'm not interested in discussing it.” Dr. David Heymann, head of the WHO's Global Program of AIDS, stated that “the origin of the AIDS virus is of no importance to science today.”

Jonas Salk wouldn't comment on the possibility, as apparently he was too busy working on an AIDS vaccine, and Sabin's response was “you can't hang Koprowski with that.” Koprowski himself initially dismissed the idea with a laugh, and then later said that “this is a highly theoretical situation.”

His amusement must not have lasted long, because Koprowski sued Curtis and Rolling Stone for “...the destruction of (his) professional and personal reputation, for mental and emotional suffering, and for...humiliation and embarrassment.” As a result the magazine was ordered to pay $1 in damages. [See The Seeds of Doom by Christian Biasco]

However, both Tom Folks of the CDC and Robert Gallo thought testing the seed stocks of polio might be a good idea. According to Folks, “any time we can learn more about the natural history [of AIDS], it helps us understand the pathogenesis and...the transmission.”

Gallo believes that questions like this “are of more than academic interest because answering them may help avoid future zoonitic catastrophes—that is, transmission of disease from lower animals to humans.”

Responding to these concerns, some AIDS researchers formally requested samples of the original polio vaccine seed stocks. But the government would neither release nor test them because there are “only a small number of vials” of the material, and tests “might use it all up.”

Inspired by Curtis' investigative report, a British writer named Edward Hooper traveled in Africa, Europe, and the United States for seven years. As a result of his research, he published a book in 1999 called The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS.

Although the scientific community generally rejects the OPV AIDS hypothesis, Hooper “criticizes the research and conduct of many of the scientists involved in the investigation and alleges a 'very substantial cover-up' took place to silence the hypothesis.”

One of the several arguments against the hypothesis was that Koprowski was not using chimpanzees in his experiments, and therefore HIV contamination didn't occur. However, eyewitness testimony suggests otherwise.

In 2004, The Origins of AIDS, a French TV documentary strongly supportive of the OPV hypothesis, appeared on several television stations around the world.

The film offers a convincing case for the hypothesis, and seriously challenges the questionable nature of the categorical denials by Koprowski and others that no chimpanzees were used in the development of his experimental vaccine.

     

The Koprowski vaccines were tested and found not to contain SIV or HIV genetic material: http://aidscience.org/Science/Cohen289(5486)1850.html