This article appears in “Narrow Roads of Gene Land – The Collected Papers of W. D. Hamilton, Volume 3 – Last Words”, edited by Mark Ridley, ISBN 0-19-856690-5 (OUP, Oxford, 2005).

[Much new scientific evidence about the origins of AIDS has emerged during the last year. The following essay is based on one that was posted on Brian Martin’s web-page in February 2004. This new version of January 2005 is considerably enlarged and updated. E.H.]

Continue reading “The Latest Scientific Evidence Strongly Supports the OPV Theory”

The following e-mail was received from Dr John P. Moore on November 24^th, 2004. Entitled “Your recent diatribe”, it is a response to my essay entitled “Plotkin’s Chums (1)“.It reads as follows:

Dear Mr Hooper,  

I have been forwarded your recent posting:

"Plotkin's chums (1): Eminent scientists sign their names to falsehoods, in a bid
 to protect Stanley Plotkin and Hilary  Koprowski".   

I'm not going to spend much time on a matter  I regard as of little importance,
 but I will make a few points:  

1) I'm mortified by having signed my name to a letter that contains errors of 
punctuation and grammar and I concede that,  on this issue at least, you are 
in the right. I'll take the  appropriate measures to ensure there is no repetition, 
such  as enrolling in a remedial English class.    

2) While I may be guilty of the above mistakes, I am most  certainly not politically 
naive. I assumed that a letter of  this nature would be leaked to you, and frankly I 
couldn't  care less that it has been. It was not intended to be a secret,  at least 
not from my perspective.    

3) It is perfectly normal and acceptable behavior to assent  
to the contents of a letter drafted by someone else; there  is nothing "conspiratorial" 
about such an action.    

4) It is entirely possible to enter into a controversy situation  
as a neutral and to become polarized in one's views by the balance  of evidence. When I 
reviewed your book for Nature, I read it with  an open mind and wrote my review 
accordingly. You may not like my  opinion about your book (if you re-read my review 
you will see  that it was both flattering and not), but you should not assume that 
it was written by or for other scientists. Since then, I have  become convinced that 
you are wrong and that, worse, you are  misleading the public.    

5) I did not sign the aforementioned letter to "protect  Stanley Plotkin and Hilary 
Koprowski". These gentlemen are  eminently capable of looking after themselves, and 
they certainly  don't need my protection. Instead, I signed the letter because  I 
consider you to be a menace to public health. The public is  easily confused on 
scientific issues, and it is the responsibility  of professional scientists to minimize 
that confusion. A film as  biased as the one in dispute here stands to persuade members 
of the  public that your claims have merit, when I don't believe they do.  Although a 
letter to a film festival is unlikely to be decisive, o r any influential, it is 
something that I felt should be done.    

John Moore   
--  
John P. Moore, Ph.D. Professor of Microbiology and Immunology  
Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University  
Department of Microbiology and Immunology  
1300 York Avenue, W-805 New York, NY 10021   
phone: 212-746-4462  fax 212-746-8340  
email: jpm2003@med.cornell.edu

There are several interesting aspects to John P. Moore’s letter. Many of them were brought out by a friend of mine, a scientist at the University of London, to whom I forwarded Moore’s response, requesting his thoughts on it. His response, entitled “Moore – ad hominem, ad nauseam”, read as follows:

"Regarding Moore's email, I can't say I find it surprising. Most notably of course he 
fails to address any of the falsehoods that you pointed out in the original letter to 
which he was signatory. He totally ignores every single one. As to the abuse, I guess 
you're getting rather used to all that, but "a menace to public health" is rather 
damning and so very far from the truth! As is "misleading the public". Even if the 
OPV/AIDS theory is wrong (and I don't think it is) the way you have approached this 
is examplary and has opened everyone's eyes to what has been and is still going on 
in the medical and scientific arenas.  It's odd that he attaches "little importance" 
to the subject, yet is willing to write to a film festival regarding it. His sarcasm 
about the bad spelling/punctuation is mis-placed. You were only ever pointing out 
that this was a common factor between the different letters, rather than taking the 
individual writers to task on this (trivial) issue.  As to there being "nothing 
conspiratorial" about the letters, I would be inclined to disagree. Surely by 
coming together to achieve the same (misleading) end, they must by definition be 
"conspiring".  His reasons for signing do not sound very truthful. If he really wanted 
to "minimize that confusion" he could do it in a much more straightforward and honest 
fashion.  It does clearly show what you're up against! Nothing else to do but keep up 
the fight.  
Best wishes...."

In addition to these very welcome comments, I would like to add the following thoughts of my own.

Despite welcoming the more civil tone of this letter (a marked contrast to the blind rage of John Moore’s two previous e-mails to me), I find that I disagree with almost every aspect of his letter, from the false modesty of his point (1) to the unpleasant and inappropriate accusations (“a menace to public health”) that he is unable to resist inserting towards the end.

One subject, however,on which I do agree with Moore is that there is nothing innately wrong in signing one’s name to the contents of a letter drafted by someone else. That said, there clearly is something wrong with doing this if the letter in question contains distortions and untruths, which, as I have made clear in the essay, this one does. Furthermore, Moore knows that it does. His protestations of innocence are therefore evasive and disingenuous.

I do not believe that Moore had an open mind when he wrote the Nature review. What I know is that one of the scientists with whom Moore spoke about The River during his drafting of his Nature review felt that even at that stage he was gunning for the book. I think that this innate bias is revealed in the published review, a bias that is even more frankly revealed in statements he made soon after this, for instance in the review which he posted anonymously on [see below].

Moore’s claims that he attaches “little importance” to the subject echo the claims he made in letters to newspapers in the year 2000, shortly before the Royal Society meeting, in which he slammed The River, belittled the origins debate, and loudly asserted that he was not going to appear at the meeting because he had better things to do with his time. (He neglected to mention that he had not even been invited as a full speaker.) In the end, when he discovered that all the major scientists in the field were going, Moore did after all attend the meeting and, while there, apparently provided support and sustenance to the Plotkin camp. Furthermore, during the months preceding and following the meeting he made repeated attempts, both public and private, to influence others against the OPV hypothesis. These are not the actions of a man who attaches “little importance” to the subject. They are the actions of a frank propagandist for Plotkin, and of a man who’s a bit of a hypocrite, too.

The central plank of Moore’s e-mail seems to be his attempt to argue that he has acted, and is acting, in this matter in good faith. I would question that. It may be, of course, that Moore genuinely believes that he must be right simply because he is a “professional scientist”, and I am not. However, I don’t think he is that naive. A man who is intelligent (as Moore undoubtedly is) and wise would most certainly take the trouble to educate himself in his subject before making public pronouncements about it. Yet, though he is very well-educated in the field of AIDS vaccines, John Moore is manifestly not well-educated in the origins-of-AIDS debate.

The scientific “evidence” against the OPV theory on which he relies is creaky at best, and at worst non-existent. (He is undoubtedly aware of at least some of the flaws and shortcomings in that evidence, but he ignores anything that doesn’t fit with his position.) The testimonial evidence that he has already seen in the “Origins of AIDS” film is overwhelmingly against Koprowski and Plotkin – and there is a great deal more of it besides. His only counter-argument is to attempt, rather weakly, to discredit that testimony.

For whatever reason, John Moore is fighting on the wrong side in this debate.

With his assertion that “I am most certainly not politically naive”, I believe that Moore goes some way towards admitting that he acts knowingly in this debate – and that his manipulation and distortion of facts are part of a conscious attempt to achieve certain political ends. What are those ends? I think Moore’s position is that the OPV theory must be opposed, come what may, because if widely accepted it would innately harm people’s faith in vaccines in general. Thus Moore is able to rationalise that his actions are “for the greater good”, meaning that (whatever new evidence is presented to support the OPV theory) he will continue to oppose it by fair means or foul.

One of the repeated tactics used by Plotkin and Koprowski (a tactic which is then parroted by acolytes such as Moore), has been to claim that there is evidence that The River has deterred people, in recent times, from taking polio vaccines. I have investigated every example of their so-called evidence on this subject. Certain of the so-called supporting articles are incorrectly referenced (a ploy that is a favourite of Dr Koprowski who, when he doesn’t have a reference to support a certain argument, seems to have no scruples about fabricating one. I now have several examples of his doing this.) But not one of these referenced articles actually states what Plotkin and Koprowski claim. In reality, there is not a single piece of evidence to link rejection of modern polio vaccines in places like Kenya and Nigeria to the OPV theory – a theory which raises questions about the safety only of one particular vaccine, an experimental polio vaccine given to a million Africans in the 1950s. As I have repeated at every opportunity for the last five years: as far as is known, modern polio vaccines are safe. What Plotkin, Koprowski, Moore and the others are engaged in is a smear campaign.

A clue to what Professor John P. Moore is really after can be found in his Amazon review of The River, copied below. In it, he writes that: “Great damage could easily be caused to ongoing efforts to make AIDS vaccines for use in Africa if a climate of mistrust with western medicine is created by this book.” Moore apparently likes to think of himself as a bit of an iconoclast, a plain-speaking free-thinker, but this reveals him rather as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, determined to protect the hegemony at all costs. He fails properly to address the question of whether the OPV theory has merit. His bottom line is a much simpler one: that theories which might encourage the general public to question the wisdom and integrity of scientists and vaccine-makers are not things to be welcomed. What, it seems, is vital from his perspective is that the apple-cart not be upset, and that Joe and Joanna Public should not be encouraged to question the safety of the next vaccine on the horizon.

John Moore spends most (but sadly not all) of his time working on AIDS vaccines, and his research in that field is valuable and welcome. (That said, it should be borne in mind that not only persons vulnerable to HIV would benefit from a successful AIDS vaccine, but also the doctors and pharmaceutical companies who develop it.) However, Moore’s interventions in the OPV debate are very different, and they only encourage the perception that all too many modern-day scientists lack a basic sense of integrity.

My main objection to John Moore is that he likes to present himself as an educated neutral in this debate. He is not. He is ignorant of (or is it just ignoring?) most of the salient information in this debate, be it historical or scientific. In reality, he is something quite different. He is a belligerent propagandist for those who planned and carried out the tests and trials in central Africa in the 1950s, most notably Hilary Koprowski and Stanley Plotkin.

In summary, John Moore’s latest e-mail to me fails to address any of the charges of inaccuracy and misrepresentation that I have made against him. Stripped of its spin, his response is merely an attempt to justify the dubious and partisan role that he has played in this debate over the last five years.

Ed Hooper. December 17^th, 2004.

---

An review of “The River” by “a reader”.

39 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

Don’t believe the central idea in this book, November 15, 1999

Reviewer: A reader

“I write as a professional AIDS researcher and retrovirologist. While “The River” is a wonderful read on the earliest stages of the AIDS epidemic that continues to devestate Africa, I urge readers not to believe the central idea that the author promulgates. HIV did not enter the human population from contaminated polio vaccines, and to argue that it did is irresponsible, based on the scientific evidence available. Great damage could easily be caused to ongoing efforts to make AIDS vaccines for use in Africa if a climate of mistrust with western medicine is created by this book. One should never confuse speculation with real, hard facts, but while “The River” is long on the former, it is very, very short of the latter. The chain of events proposed by the author is improbable, to say the least; only one link has to break before the edifice falls, and none of the links is strong. The author would have us believe that chimp kidneys were used to prepare poliovirus vaccines, but he can’t prove his point, only theorize. He argues that the kidneys were contaminated with chimp viruses that were precursors of HIV. But where’s the evidence? And kidney cultures are very, very poor (at best) ways to grow HIV and its simian cousins. The timing of the cross-over of HIV from animals into humans is also wrong; this occurred decades prior to the poliovaccine experiments of the late 1950’s, as will become clear in scientific publications early next year. And there was no “cover-up” in the scientific community. This makes no sense; what would have been the motivation in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s for polio vaccine researchers to disguise what they did? Nobody knew about HIV then. So, read this book by all means; if it awakens your conscience to the appalling situation that Africa faces over the AIDS epidemic then it will have done some good. But please don’t believe that the epidemic was started by polio vaccination campaigns. That part of the book is on a par with “scientific investigations” of the Loch Ness Monster or the existence of human faces on Mars in terms of its overall credibility within the community of professional AIDS researchers.”

---

[Hooper’s response to the foregoing review.]

This review was posted by “a reader” on the web-site just two months after the Nature review was published. The reviewer chose to remain anonymous, though he rather gave the game away by announcing that he was “a professional AIDS researcher and retrovirologist”, and by using exactly the same devices and phrases which Moore has employed in his other published comments about the book.

I believe that much of this review is innately prejudiced. It claims categorically that various aspects of the book are “wrong”, when in fact what it means is that the reviewer surmises that they are wrong. It raises four specific scientific objections to the theory – and in each instance, amusingly, it is Moore’s argument, not mine, which is now revealed as flawed. A good illustration of this is the sentence in which Moore claims that “kidney cultures are very, very poor (at best) ways to grow HIV and its simian cousins”, an assertion that was completely refuted by research published just one year later, which found that HIV replicates very nicely in kidney epithelial cells. (Moore himself reviewed that research in an accompanying editorial, and concluded that it didn’t really matter with respect to the OPV theory, because – as he claimed, again wrongly – chimp kidneys had not been used to make the Congo vaccine anyway. By adopting circular arguments such as these, Moore avoids ever having to confront his own errors and false assumptions.)

It is my belief that John Moore’s Nature review of The River was balanced and fair in certain places, but that its underlying drift was clearly biased. His Amazon review, however, was a blatant attempt to prejudice others, including potential readers, against the book: an attempt that was based on false and misleading evidence. I believe that despite his claims to the contrary, John Moore has been innately opposed to The River, and to the OPV/AIDS theory, from the off.

EH December 17^th, 2004.

The annexing of the Stanleyville samples: potential “fossil evidence” of ancient HIV-1 falls into the wrong hands

Background

In July 2003 and February 2004, I posted essays on the Web which featured warnings that scientists associated with the Catholic University of Leuven (known as KUL in Belgium), and with Hilary Koprowski’s aide-de-camp, Stanley Plotkin, had been attempting to annexe 1950s biopsy and autopsy samples found in the basement of the old Laboratoire Medicale de Stanleyville (LMS), in what is now Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo.[1]

On May 1^st, 2004 I posted a further essay on this site which confirmed the worst. This article ended with a section entitled: “Concern about possible faking of an ancient HIV-1 sample”[2], which confirmed that a team led by Stanley Plotkin had indeed managed to obtain some of the Stanleyville samples.

I recently received a package of documents from an anonymous source which revealed further worrying details about how these doctors went about obtaining these samples.

What the new documents reveal

At this stage, I am not prepared to reveal all the significant details that emerge from these papers.

However, some of this information does need to be placed promptly in the public domain.

1. The papers include details about a meeting that took place in Jan Desmyter’s office at the Virology Department of KUL in April 2001, soon after the agronomist, Professor Hugo Gevaerts, returned from a 3-week visit to Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Professor Gevaerts, who was born in Stanleyville, visits Kisangani annually, and is the major conduit for Belgian government assistance to such institutions as the University of Kisangani. He is therefore an extremely influential man in that city.
2. The meeting featured Desmyter, Gevaerts, Dirk Teuwen and Dudu Akaibe, Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Kisangani. (Desmyter and Teuwen are two of the three members of Stanley Plotkin’s defence team against the OPV theory, while Gevaerts and Akaibe are their main collaborators in the DRC. One of the documents describes Akaibe as follows: “Second to Gevaerts, he is our best man in Kisangani.”)
3. In addition, Simon Wain-Hobson was invited to attend the meeting, but was unable to do so. Instead, Desmyter raised the possibility that Wain-Hobson might be able to link in to the meeting by phone; we do not know if this actually happened. What is clear from the documents, however, is that Wain-Hobson had been fully briefed about the Stanleyville samples, and was collaborating with the Plotkin/Desmyter team, presumably through having offered to test the samples for the presence of HIV (and perhaps other viruses too). This collaboration is not entirely surprising, for it is increasingly apparent that Wain-Hobson (one of the co-organisers of the Royal Society meeting in September 2000) has been “close” with the Plotkin group for some time. The only significant question is when that process began, but there are several strands of evidence which suggest that it started even before the Royal Society meeting.
4. The key paper in the report is marked as being confidential to Desmyter, Gevaerts, Teuwen, Wain-Hobson, and Plotkin. This reveals that those present at the meeting were effectively reporting directly to Stanley Plotkin.
5. The papers reveal that ongoing attempts to obtain the Stanleyville samples were to be funded by Aventis Pasteur, as was the participation of Dudu Akaibe in the project. Aventis Pasteur is the name for the Pasteur Institute’s vaccine-related business, which was previously known as Pasteur Merieux Connaught Vaccines, and Dirk Teuwen is an Aventis employee who was apparently put on paid sabbatical by that company, in order to assist Stanley Plotkin oppose the OPV theory. Professor Plotkin was Medical and Scientific Director of Pasteur Merieux Connaught Vaccines until that organisation was merged with Aventis in 2001. At that stage, it seems, he stepped down from the directorship to assume the more honorary title of “medical and scientific advisor”.
6. In the years since 2001, Plotkin has continued to describe himself as a member of Aventis Pasteur when he attends conferences on such issues as the bioterrorist threat. Intriguingly, however, in matters to do with the origins of AIDS (such as the Royal Society proceedings, published in July 2001), he tends to describe himself only as a member of the Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania. The timing of Plotkin’s ceasing to be director of the company is interesting, in that it seems to tie in rather well with his decision to focus on attempts to disprove and/or discredit the OPV/AIDS hypothesis. To date, such attempts have been based on distortion, misinformation and untruth. Put in crude terms, by distancing himself from Aventis Pasteur, Plotkin may feel that he has freed himself up to “fight dirty”. What these latest documents reveal, however, is important – that Aventis Pasteur is actively helping to fund the battle to “disprove” the OPV hypothesis by any means, fair or foul.
7. The papers make clear just what a remarkable discovery the Dean of Medicine of the University of Kisangani, Dr Kayembe, had made in the basement of the old Laboratoire Medicale de Stanleyville [LMS] building. According to the documents, these archival materials featured (a) glass slides of human biopsies numbered from 1 to 30,000, and covering the years from 1939 to 1960; it is unclear how many are still extant; (b) a chest three metres long and two metres high, containing paraffin blocks taken at biopsy (and presumably autopsy); apparently labels featuring year and biopsy number were “partially preserved”; (c) three large registers from 1955 and 1956, cross-referencing all biopsy samples taken in Stanleyville during that period. Apparently no other registers could be found.
8. The papers state that, “with full permission”, Hugo Gevaerts selected 200 of the slides and an unknown number of the paraffin blocks to take with him from Kisangani to Belgium, and that only later did the Rector of the University, Professor Mango Adibi, backtrack, and order Gevaerts “to empty his bag” and leave the archival materials behind in Kisangani. The document ascribes this sudden change of heart to my unexpected arrival in Kisangani, accompanied by two journalists; (this was in fact the MFP film crew).
9. Yet the version of events that I heard (supported by two different witnesses) was significantly different. This was that, a day or two before my arrival, the Rector of the University accompanied Gevaerts to the office of the Dean of the Medical Faculty, Dr Kayembe, who was “up-country” for a few days, and ordered that a locked cupboard containing some of the samples should be opened, so that Gevaerts could take what he wanted. Gevaerts took blocks and slides, and recorded what he had taken. When Kayembe returned, he objected strongly to the seizing, without his permission, of the material that he himself had located in the basement. The Rector convened a meeting of deans of science and medicine, and senior professors, at which Kayembe continued to object, and so the Rector concluded that on this occasion Gevaerts should take nothing with him: the materials would be returned to Kayembe, and placed under lock and key once more. At the same time, however, a wave of anti-Hooper, anti-River feeling had been whipped up at the meeting (apparently by the professors of the Faculty of Science, perhaps with the Rector’s acquiescence), and so the Rector closed by making a clear undertaking that he would not in any way help or collaborate with me.
10. Accompanied by the co-director of the film, Peter Chappell (who speaks fluent French), I had a meeting with the Rector and three of his senior professors (including two from the science faculty) a day or two after this. With varying degrees of finesse and rudeness, they made it clear that they would not help our researches in any way. As I recall, much of the reasoning was circuitous and even illogical: we got the clear impression that (for whatever reason) they were determined to block our research in any way possible. The Rector even refused permission for us to set foot inside the old Laboratoire Medicale de Stanleyville building (which is now part of University property). I was taken aback by this, not least because I had met and spoken cordially with one of these professors two years earlier, when I was with Bill Hamilton. The response now was: “Hamilton is dead. If you want us to collaborate with you, come back here in the company of a living scientist.”
11. The documents go a long way towards explaining why we encountered such implacable opposition. They reveal that in “1999/2000”, there were two significant developments with regard to foreign aid to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and specifically to the University of Kisangani. First, a team of Belgian professors visited the DRC to allocate Belgian government money (AGCD funds) for African cooperation, and ended up giving three times more to the Faculty of Sciences in Kisangani than to any other project in the country; by contrast, the Faculty of Medicine in that city apparently got nothing. Second, the WHO decided to establish two WHO Public Health and Reference labs in the DRC, and (rather strangely) allocated part of the money to the Faculty of Sciences (not Medicine) in Kisangani. [The other recipient was the INRB, the Institut National de Recherches Biologiques, a lab started by the French in the 1990s in the capital, Kinshasa, which is staffed by French military doctors.]
12. What this account neglects to mention is that Gevaerts was the leading figure in the team of Belgian professors that allocated the AGCD funds, and that the funds for the Science faculty were lavish, and included money for computers and bicycles. The Rector and some of the science deans were apparently among those who benefited personally. So although one of the documents claims that Gevaerts had nothing to do with our exclusion from the old LMS building, what is very clear is that these men knew which side their bread was buttered.
13. The documents also reveal that at the April 2001 meeting in Leuven, a follow-up plan was devised to gain access to the archival materials that Gevaerts had selected, but had had to leave behind. Once Akaibe (now funded by Aventis Pasteur money) had returned to Kisangani, he would check whether the Dean of Medicine, Kayembe, still had the materials in question, and then he would fax this information back to Desmyter. Then Desmyter would arrange with the Dean of Medicine at the University of Leuven, Professor J. Janssens, to invite Kayembe to Leuven for two to three weeks of discussions with the Leuven deans, with Desmyter, and possibly with the Rector of KUL, about future cooperation. It would be made clear that the invitation depended on Kayembe bringing with him the specimens which Gevaerts had selected for testing. Desmyter goes on to say that Janssens would never approve this plan if it involved faculty money. However, Desmyter makes it clear that “the Aventis Pasteur dollars” should take care of this, apart from which he knows of certain other funds that are available. (This latter may possibly be a reference to private funds from Koprowski and/or Plotkin.)
14. One additional comment about Hugo Gevaerts. In a phone interview with me in 2003, Gevaerts insisted that he had never had any of the blocks and slides in his possession. Similarly, Gevaerts told a researcher from MFP in 2001 that he was not directly involved with the attempt to obtain blocks and slides, but had only been trying to help out other scientists. These papers make it clear that he is, in fact, an active collaborator with the other scientists in the Plotkin/Desmyter group. Such contradictions confirm that Professor Gevaerts does not always tell the truth. I suspect that a further example of such behaviour may have been Gevaerts’s indignant denial on the phone to me that he had ever visited the site of Lindi camp – a denial that is contradicted by several other witnesses. These witnesses indicate that about a week before my own visit to Lindi in April 2001, Gevaerts and two African colleagues visited the site of the camp, in order to interview some of those who had taken part in the chimpanzee research. These and other sources say that a day or two after Gevaerts’s visit, one of his African colleagues returned, and spoke privately with the local village chief, after which a large sign which had been positioned on top of a sealed sewage outfall from Lindi camp was cut from its bolts and removed. The sign apparently featured a lot of words in a “foreign language” (which could be either French or English, more probably the former).
15. Jan Desmyter is not unaware of the importance of these samples. In the key document, he describes the subject of the April 2001 meeting as follows: “Archives of ‘Origins of AIDS’ interest at the Laboratoire Medicale, Kisangani.” He knows that these archival materials represent unprecedented access to the “primary rock face” which, in this instance, means body tissues from the Belgian Congo from the mid-1950s, and not just from the Congo, but specifically from Stanleyville, the headquarters of the Koprowski vaccine trials. I believe Jan Desmyter is well aware that the rock layers may include important fossils, including fossil evidence of ancient HIV-1.
16. One last point. In my discussions in Kisangani (Stanleyville) in 2001, the impression I was given was that all the biopsy samples dated from 1955 onwards. Now this documentary evidence seems to indicate that some of them date from as early as 1939. I have, therefore, to acknowledge the possibility that these documents might conceivably have been leaked to me deliberately, in order to validate the claim that they include materials from the thirties and forties. I believe this to be unlikely, but worthy of mention none the less.

Why Plotkin, Desmyter and Wain-Hobson should not have been involved with testing the Stanleyville samples

The archival Stanleyville samples represent a potential gold mine, but they should undoubtedly have been tested for the presence of HIV and other viruses by neutral scientists.

I now have evidence (which will be published in due course) that Hilary Koprowski was testing his polio vaccines in Stanleyville from (at the latest) 1955 onwards, not 1957 as previously assumed. 300 persons (at the least) received versions of Koprowski vaccines in Stanleyville before the formal start of the CHAT vaccine trials in February 1957.

Should any early isolates of HIV-1 be found among the samples pre-dating, or post-dating, the start of the Stanleyville OPV trials (which I believe to have been in 1955), this could throw significant light on the origins of the AIDS pandemic.

For instance, if an HIV-1 isolate dating from before 1955 was detected in the Stanleyville samples, this might indicate that HIV and AIDS existed before the OPV trials. However, in the current situation, extreme caution would be required, because of the possibility of one of these samples being “transposed” to an earlier period in time [see below].

However, if genuine isolates of HIV-1 were not detected in Stanleyville between 1939 and 1954, but were only detected from 1955 onwards, this would strongly suggest that the virus had been introduced by a new factor – such as the Koprowski vaccines.

Unfortunately, the very last people that should have been testing these samples are doctors Plotkin, Desmyter and Wain-Hobson, all of whom have been revealed (on this site, and elsewhere) as being active collaborators in the attempt to suppress the OPV/AIDS theory through fair means or foul. The fact that they have obtained these samples in a furtive and clandestine manner only raises further concerns about their intentions.

In the past, several of these scientists have grievously misrepresented the truth in their attempts to prove that the activities of Koprowski and Plotkin in Africa in the 1950s were not linked to the birth of AIDS.

I believe that these are men with strong vested interests in the origins-of-AIDS debate, and there is no way that they can be considered as independent or neutral investigators. Their method of obtaining and subsequent treatment of the Stanleyville samples can only be viewed within the context of an attempted cover-up.

Given this background, if one of them did discover an early HIV-1 among the Stanleyville samples that post-date the OPV trials, would we expect that individual to report the discovery? Or suppress it?

Indeed, there is an even more worrying scenario. Might not one of these scientists be tempted to insert an HIV-positive sample from Stanleyville from (say) 1957 into a series that pre-dated the OPV trials – for instance by presenting it as one of the Stanleyville samples from (say) 1941, or 1952? Or, indeed, a sample from Franceville, or Brazzaville, from the same time period?

A series containing such a mislabelled sample could then be tested (in good faith) by an entirely independent scientist, and used in an attempt to prove that AIDS predated the Koprowski vaccine trials.

Given that the stakes are so very high, and might involve not just the ruination of reputations but also billion-dollar law-suits, the latter possibility may be less far-fetched than it might at first seem.

What honest scientists would have done

Since it first became clear to me (in April 2001) that the Plotkin/Desmyter group was trying to obtain these samples, and since it also became clear that they had collaborators acting for them among the senior hierarchy at the University of Kisanagani, I have regarded it as almost inevitable that they would eventually succeed in obtaining at least some of the samples.

The fact that they have done so was confirmed to me a Belgian professor, Paul Gigase, earlier this year [2004], and he made it clear that the Plotkin/Desmyter group had already had the samples for some time. It is not known whether they were obtained through Professor Kayembe or not, but certain evidence suggests to me that he may not have been involved, at least directly. During our conversation, Professor Gigase expressed surprise and concern that the Desmyter group had not yet announced anything about the samples; the manner in which he spoke suggested that he too was concerned about possible foul play.

My personal guess is that the Plotkin/Desmyter group has been in possession of these samples since 2002 at latest – in other words, for at least two years. During that time, they must have had substantial opportunity to test the samples for HIV.

If they had had an interest in conducting (and being seen to conduct) these tests in an independent and impartial fashion, then immediately after obtaining the samples (or even before), one of their number could have contacted either Brian Martin or myself, and invited us to nominate another scientist to test aliquots of the samples in tandem with Desmyter and/or Wain-Hobson. If this had happened, and if (in broad terms) both pro-OPV and anti-OPV scientists had been involved in the testing, then the testing process would then have stood a good chance of being widely viewed as “free and fair”.

Instead of this, these scientists obtained their samples in clandestine fashion, and since then have announced nothing. This means that the integrity of the samples, as items of historical record, may well have been compromised. Any amount of tampering or relabelling could have taken place, and we would be none the wiser.

Some questions that need to be asked about the bushmeat theory

Those scientists (like Plotkin, Desmyter and Wain-Hobson) who insist that the OPV theory must be wrong all subscribe to some version of the “bushmeat” or “cut hunter” theory, which proposes that pandemic AIDS began as a result of a single transfer of chimpanzee SIV to a human – perhaps a bushmeat-hunter or bushmeat-seller with cuts on his or her hands. However, this theory contains rather a large number of logical flaws.

Evidence derived from the genetic analysis of different HIV-1 strains indicates that recombination between different HIV-1 subtypes occurred early in the history of HIV-1.[3] Bushmeat proponents suggest that this might have happened when people infected with different HIV-1 subtypes met and had sex in the early days of the epidemic,[4] (perhaps in or around the 1950s). This strikes me as extremely far-fetched, for at the start of the epidemic, the chances of any two different subtypes of HIV-1 meeting in that way (let alone several, which is what this theory requires) would have been infinitesimally small.

And there is another hitch. From the perspective of the bushmeat theory (which assumes a single chimp-to-human transfer giving birth to pandemic HIV-1), how would such different subtypes have evolved from the index infectee in the first place, especially when (according to bushmeat theory logic) this must have happened in the space of perhaps 25 years, at most?

Add to these a third leap of faith required by bushmeat advocates – that the initial transfer occurred (as they claim) in Gabon, Cameroon or Congo Brazzaville, and yet the pandemic (as is now universally acknowledged) had its epicentre in the Belgian Congo/DRC – and it becomes apparent that the bushmeat theory is built on sand.

What the bushmeat advocates actually require for their theory to be viable are three extraordinary (and almost inexplicable) coincidences.

To my mind, the only credible explanation for the recombination of viruses at, or very near, the start of the AIDS pandemic would have been via a tissue culture derived from several different chimps, at least two of which were infected with different variants of SIV.

Apparently that’s all it would have required to engender the different subtypes of HIV-1, and the global epidemic witnessed today.[3]

A final word of warning

Even if a genuine isolate of “early HIV-1”, or chimpanzee SIV, is ever found in human sera or tissues dating from before 1955, this would not in itself represent hard evidence that the “birth of AIDS” predated the OPV trials. This is because casual transfer of SIVs from chimps to humans probably has occurred on several occasions during the last couple of million years, but that prior to the twentieth century it apparently never resulted in a human epidemic. It is certainly theoretically possible that a person such as a hunter or a bushmeat-seller could become transiently infected with a chimpanzee SIV. What is important, however, is whether that person passed it on to others as a human-adapted virus: a virus that was both infectious and pathogenic (i.e. could cause AIDS).

An example of HIV-1, apparently dating from 1959, was discovered in 1985, but since then nobody has managed to locate an earlier sample. If a more ancient variant of HIV-1 is ever found, its genetic sequence must therefore be carefully compared to modern strains to see whether it could conceivably have been ancestral to the present-day pandemic. The alternative is that it might have been a chimpanzee SIV that transiently infected one individual – a virus that was planted, but failed to grow, in Homo sapiens. Whether or not it caused any disease, such a virus would have ceased its brief existence as a “human virus” when its human host died.

Conclusion

Trials of Koprowski vaccines were already taking place in Stanleyville in 1955.

It is a matter of public record (reported in a paper by Paul Osterrieth, head of virology at the LMS) that there were several fatal Klebsiella pneumoniae cases in Stanleyville in the second half of the 1950s; this outbreak can only have occurred after Osterrieth arrived in that city, in July 1956. There was also, according to Pierre Doupagne, a sudden dramatic rise in Candida albicans infections in Stanleyville in the late fifties. Both of these are among the small group of infections that are typical opportunistic infections of AIDS.

I personally believe that some of the samples obtained at the Laboratoire Medicale de Stanleyville from 1955 onwards (at least some of which are now in the possession of the Desmyter/Plotkin/Wain-Hobson group) may contain examples of the earliest HIV-1 infections in the world. The donors of such tissues would, I believe, have been infected with the immediate ancestral viruses, namely chimpanzee SIVs, probably in recombinant form.

Such recombinant chimp SIVs were afforded a short-term window of opportunity for transfer to Homo sapiens by a unique event that occurred in Stanleyville between 1955 and 1960. This unique event was the human testing of live polio vaccines that had been grown in chimp tissue cultures in the Stanleyville lab.

However, thanks to doctors Plotkin, Desmyter, Wain-Hobson, Teuwen, Gevaerts and Akaibe, it now seems possible that we will now never know for sure. For it may well be that these scientists are in the process of destroying, or compromising (or have already destroyed or compromised), the only true fossil evidence available.

A lot depends on how much of the material (if any) still remains in Kisangani. If there is still some there, then I believe some independent scientists should also try to procure some of this material, so that they too can conduct tests upon it.

If any scientist out there is genuinely interested in helping to test these samples, then I would be happy to provide background information. Any offers?

Edward Hooper. November 29^th, 2004

Footnotes

[1](a) E. Hooper, “Dephlogistication“, completed on January 1st, 2003; published by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and posted on Brian Martin’s site in July 2003; see page 124 of the Web version of the essay; and (b) E. Hooper, “Could an ancient sample of HIV-1 be faked?” [posted on Brian Martin’s site in February 2004.]

[2] E. Hooper, “Why the Worobey/Hahn ‘refutation’ of OPV/AIDS theory is wrong, and a warning about dishonest tactics used by opponents of the theory”, posted on on May 1^st, 2004. The final section, entitled “Concern about possible faking of an ancient HIV-1 sample”, is copied below.

[3] M.H. Schierup and R. Forsberg, “Recombination and Phylogenetic Analysis of HIV-1“, Atti dei Convegni Lincei; 2003; 187; 231-245. [Also available on this site.]

[4] See, for instance, Jon Cohen, “The Hunt for the Origin of AIDS”; Atlantic Monthly; October 2000; 88-104. See page 102 for the thoughts of Donald Burke, former head of the US military’s AIDS research programme.

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Extract from reference [2], above.

Concern about possible faking of an ancient HIV-1 sample

Of particular concern is the recent confirmation that ancient autopsy samples (slides and paraffin blocks from the years 1955-1958) from the basement of the old medical laboratory in Stanleyville (where the OPV experiments were based), were obtained about a year ago by a team of senior Belgian and American scientists led by Dr Stanley Plotkin.

In the late fifties, Plotkin was principal assistant to Dr Hilary Koprowski on the development and testing of CHAT vaccine, including the experimental programme in the Belgian Congo/DRC.

More recently, his support team of scientists has been active in persuading some of those witnesses who had earlier given significant testimony to me to either retract or modify their statements. In several instances, I have evidence of inappropriate pressures being placed on witnesses by members of Plotkin’s team, including attempts to badger a witness into signing a pre-typed statement that was untrue in several respects.

It is known that the Plotkin group has put considerable time, effort and money into obtaining the 1950s Stanleyville samples. Indeed, on one occasion in 2001, an unsuccessful attempt was made by a Belgian collaborator to misappropriate several hundred of the slides.

The news that they have been successful is worrying, because in no respect can the Plotkin group be considered “independent testers” of these important biomedical materials.

The Plotkins have kept their acquisition of these samples a secret. I only came to learn that they had acquired them because I recently met a Belgian professor who had played some role in helping the Plotkins in their early research. He expressed surprise and some concern that they had reported nothing of their findings.

It is believed that some of these samples (from after the start of the OPV trials) may well contain genuine evidence of early HIV-1.

The concern here is not just that an early HIV-positive sample from this era might end up unreported.

It is that an HIV-positive sample from Stanleyville in 1957 might somehow end up misfiled with another group of samples from, say, Brazzaville in 1951, ie from before the time of the OPV trials.

If such a sample were subsequently to be tested in good faith by an independent researcher, then it might subsequently be proclaimed as yet another “disproof” (indeed, as “a final and incontrovertible disproof”) of the OPV/AIDS theory.

Edward Hooper. May 1^st, 2004

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Extract from reference [4], above:

“Donald Burke, formerly the head of the US military’s AIDS research programme….questions the validity of every model that has estimated the epidemic’s time of origin, because none has yet allowed for a process called recombination – essentially, the splicing of genes from two sources. A person may become infected with two distinct subtypes of HIV, and they may recombine and form a new strain. Burke believes that HIV may well have relied on recombination to create a strain that could readily spread from person to person. The urbanization of Africa and the imposition by colonialists of a common language, Burke argues, brought together groups – and HIV subtypes – that had previously had little contact with one another, providing opportunities for the development of recombinants and for the spread of viable strains. It is as if someone poured all the various viral strains into one container and then shook it, Burke says.”

Plotkin’s chums (1): Eminent scientists sign their names to falsehoods, in a bid to protect Stanley Plotkin and Hilary Koprowski

Summary

The secret is out. Seven eminent scientists who have long been prominently involved in the “origins of AIDS” debate, allegedly as “honest neutrals” (Robin Weiss, Simon Wain-Hobson, Beatrice Hahn, Bette Korber, Steve Wolinsky, John P. Moore, and Robert Gallo), are actually part and parcel of a cover-up.

Continue reading “Plotkin’s Chums (1): Eminent Scientists Sign their Names to Falsehoods”