Welcome to www.aidsorigins.com, the site hosted by Ed Hooper that seeks to provide impartial and uncensored information about the origins of the AIDS pandemic. For a brief introduction to the origins of AIDS debate, see below:

There would be no need for this site to exist, were it not for the fact that it is increasingly obvious that a small group of eminent and influential mainstream scientists are willing to countenance only one version of events about how AIDS began - a version which is scientifically and historically flawed, but which serves the interests of certain powerful political groupings, and a large portion of the "vaccination fraternity".

I believe that this official version of events is wrong.

In 1999 I wrote a book, The River, which proposed the hypothesis that AIDS might be iatrogenic (caused by physicians), and that scientists might have unwittingly started the pandemic through an experimental oral polio vaccine (OPV) administered in central Africa in the 1950s. That book touched more buttons than I had anticipated, for it sparked a major cover-up among those who had been involved with making the vaccine, and among powerful interest groups within the medical community.

The attempted whitewash persuaded me to continue my researches. I have now been exclusively researching AIDS for 20 years, and its origins for 16. And whereas I was 95% persuaded of the merits of the vaccine theory when The River was published in 1999, I am now (in 2006) 99.9% persuaded that this is how AIDS began.

Background

By the end of 2006 AIDS will have killed some 40 million people, making it the worst outbreak of infectious disease in recorded history. (That, by the way, is 7 million more than the current population of Canada.) A further 50 million or more (equivalent to the current population of England) are infected with the causative virus, HIV-1.

THE AIR-BRUSHING OF HISTORY

Two new books about the origins of AIDS tell it like it wasn't

In recent months (October 2011 and March 2012) two new books about the origins of AIDS have been released: The Origins of AIDS by Jacques Pepin, and Tinderbox by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin. Both books have enjoyed generally positive reviews in the scientific and lay press.

Both volumes start off with the assumption that the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory of AIDS origin has been disproved and that the bushmeat origin theory is now proven.

The Origins of the AIDS Pandemic

A Quick Guide to The Principal Theories and the Alleged Refutations

PREAMBLE: The oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory of origin of AIDS proposes that an experimental OPV made in a unique manner was administered to nearly one million Africans in the 1957-1960 period, leading to the infection of perhaps 10 to 500 people from the former Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi with the pandemic strain of HIV-1, thus initiating the AIDS pandemic. (UNAIDS has proposed that by 2010 over 80 million people had been infected with HIV-1, of whom some 46 million had died from AIDS. Even if some statisticians claim that the true figures are nearer to two thirds of these, AIDS still represents the most disastrous infectious disease epidemic that our species has ever experienced.)

Review of The Origins of AIDS by Jacques Pepin [C.U.P. 2011]

"The Origins of AIDS" by Jacques Pepin [Cambridge University Press], which came out in October 2011, has received a fair amount of attention in the press, almost all of which has been complimentary. I have a rather different take on the book.

I believe that the book is pleasantly and fluently written and is mostly well-researched. It contains a wealth of valuable information about how unsterilised needles and syringes may have helped spread HIV in Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century, in the early days after the origin of the pandemic, in other words after the ancestral simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) crossed from chimpanzees to humans.

This makes it all the more surprising that the two chapters (out of fifteen) that deal directly with the alleged subject of the book, the origins of AIDS, are so poorly researched and executed.

Review of Tinderbox by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin [Penguin USA; 2012]

This is powder puff reporting, as a ten-minute glance at the forward matter and the origins chapters (the Prologue and chapters 2 to 8 inclusive) quickly reveals. In the Acknowledgements, the authors thank several of the usual suspects, notably Beatrice Hahn and Michael Worobey, for "historical, cultural and epidemiological information" and "vital perspectives". Perhaps it is not surprising that these are the very same scientists who are most feted (embarrassingly so, in the view of many) in the text of the book.

This is the book that Worobey and Hahn themselves might have produced, were they writers.