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Press Conference Statement by Stanley Plotkin MD

Embargoed until 9/11/00 15:45 BST

Mr. Hooper has presented the hypothesis that CHAT, a type 1 polio vaccine developed in the US by Dr. Koprowski, and tested there, in Europe and in the former Belgian Congo in the late 50s, was contaminated with HIV. He is not the first to present that hypothesis, and many scientists, including myself, (as I was involved in those tests) have spent a great deal of time researching the origin of the HIV viruses. During the last year, I have studied Mr. Hooper’s book and have done an extensive reconstruction of what actually happened 40 years ago, based on documents and testimony. I also did everything possible to facilitate the PCR tests on the vaccine samples conducted by Wistar.

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Scientists to Debate Whether Polio Trial Triggered AIDS Epidemic

By Huntly Collins, The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 10, 2000

© 2000 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

Was a monumental effort to conquer polio, once the leading cause of physical disability, responsible for unleashing the world AIDS pandemic, which has stricken 53 million people, most of them in Africa?

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Book on AIDS Raises Tempest

SCIENTISTS GATHER, CONSIDER IF A POLIO RESEARCHER BROUGHT THE DISEASE TO HUMANS IN THE 1950S WITH VACCINE HE MADE FROM INFECTED CHIMP TISSUE

Huntly Collins, Contra Costa Times (California), September 10, 2000

© 2000 Contra Costa Times

Was a monumental effort to conquer polio, once the leading cause of physical disability, responsible for unleashing the world AIDS pandemic, which has stricken 53 million people, most of them in Africa?

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The Accused

THE CHARGE: That what became the Aids virus was passed from chimp to man during experiments in the Congo to find a cure for polio. THE JURY: The world’s leading Aids scientists, gathering in London next week to hear evidence at the Royal Society. THE VERDICT: will once and for all clear up one of medicine’s greatest mysteries.

By Steve Connor

The Independent (London), 8 September 2000, Friday Review p. 1.

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The Origin of AIDS

A posh London conference tackles the Polio vaccine controversy.

Newsweek, September 6, 2000, Newsweek Web Exclusive © 2000 Newsweek

Medical conferences are fairly predictable affairs: a lot of hypotheses, an onslaught of data and, for the most part, congeniality-at least outwardly. But last week’s gathering on the origin of AIDS at London’s posh Royal Society-complete with afternoon tea-took on the excited and at times contentious tenor of a courtroom trial. On one side, Edward Hooper, author of “The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS,” who believes that the virus was most likely introduced into humans through an experimental polio vaccine given in Africa in the late 1950s. On the other, scientists Hilary Koprowski and Stanley Plotkin who created the vaccine at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute. Hooper’s presence as a non-scientist amidst hundreds of medical experts was remarkable, but the gravest implication of the theory is impossible to ignore: scientific culpability for a plague that has killed 18 million worldwide. “He deserves,” says one of the conference organizers, “a hearing.”

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AIDS: A Man-Made Disaster?

Article concerning The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS

The Scotsman, 24 June 2000, Magazine pp. 16-21.

WHEN THE BLOOD LEFT Bill Hamilton it drained away as fast as a reputation, starving his great mind of oxygen and leaving his body in a coma. Hailed as the “most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin”, Hamilton had just returned to the UK from the Congo where he had been seeking evidence that another great scientist had inadvertently triggered the deaths of 16 million people.

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The Origin of AIDS

Prospect (UK), June 2000, pp. 31-35; reprinted as “The true origin of AIDS” in Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg), 7-13 July 2000, pp. 22-23, 31.

Most scientists believe that Aids was “naturally” transferred from primates to human beings via a hunter who ate a chimpanzee. But a competing theory claims that Aids was caused in the 1950s when thousands of Africans were given a live polio vaccine derived from chimp kidneys. The stakes are getting higher.

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River of Tears

Why is Aids an epidemic? Edward Hooper spent years looking for the source, and his book has sparked controversy over claims of human error in the vaccination programmes

Published in The Guardian, Wednesday 5 April 2000

In June 1981, two unusual events occurred in very different parts of the world. In Los Angeles, five gay men fell sick with rare symptoms suggestive of immunological problems, which prompted two local doctors to write a paper for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Meanwhile, in Mugana, northern Tanzania, a German missionary doctor saw five women from the Ugandan border region, all suffering from untreatable anaerobic ulcers of the groin and anus. Some new pathogen was abroad, and these doctors were among the first to recognise that fact.

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