Category: News & Comment

I have greatly enjoyed the feedback and comment which this site has engendered since it first opened three years ago.

During those three years I have received thousands of messages and enquiries, and I have replied to the great majority. Occasionally one slips through the net, and to those persons I have failed to respond to, I do apologise.

Incredibly, whenever there has been comment from my readers, it has been positive. Sometimes people have debated with me about this or that aspect of the work, but all the feedback (where there has been feedback) has been extremely kind, and has encouraged me to continue my work. By chance, the first exception to this arrived this past week, but it was a letter couched in reassuringly childish terms of personal abuse, and not one to cause too many sleepless nights!

Of particular value have been the occasional contributions from whistle-blowers, most of which have required courage in one form or another. Some of these have been quite remarkable. A few whistle-blowers have provided valuable information from fifty years ago, while others have given important first-hand information about various of the scientists who are so determined to “refute” the OPV/AIDS hypothesis by fair means or foul….and usually the latter!

Other responders have been kind enough to offer financial contributions which, up to now, I have always declined. However, in the future I may possibly set up a facility whereby people can donate money via this site if they wish to do so. (The only rider would be that I would not accept donations from persons who wished to influence the content or editorial independence of the site in any way. In the past, two people have offered me large sums, but with a proviso – for instance if I was to front a class action suit against some of the vaccine experimenters. I don’t feel that such a course of action is appropriate. I’m the one who does the research, and it would compromise the process if I were also to get involved with related legal actions.) If I do decide to instal a Donations button it will be purely because, like everyone else, I have to pay my own way, and (with the exception of a $1,000 donation from a friend in 1990, and the £2,000 lent me, and later given me, by Professor Bill Hamilton in 1993) I have been 100% financially independent throughout the 17 years I have been researching this subject.

As an aside, I have twice in the last four years engendered income by buying a barn and a house and by renovating and reselling them. However, because I put a lot of myself into these activities (and of course enjoy them as they unfold), I have found such work to be far more time-consuming than I would have liked. In any case, property developing (even the way I have done it, which is on a confirmedly amateur basis) is not a lifestyle that sits very happily with my politics.

Before closing, I’d like to offer a couple of words of thanks. I’d like to thank the Webmaster of this site, a university professor who has a very full professional and personal life, and yet who still manages to run this site in his free time – and free of charge, too. Secondly, I’d like to thank all of you who have visited the site, and who have been interested enough to get in touch to offer comment and feedback. All of you have played a part.

Thanks especially to those of you who have recognised that there is more to the story of how AIDS began than meets the eye, and who have realised that (given the available evidence) it is highly unlikely that the four recognised epidemics and outbreaks of AIDS began because, at some time in the early decades of the twentieth century, four different African hunters or bushmeat-sellers got infected with SIV while killing or butchering chimpanzees or sooty mangabeys, and thus started four different AIDS outbreaks. I’m also impressed by the number of people who get in touch and who recognise something that still shocks me – namely that a significant proportion of scientists practice misleading science, or even corrupt science, mainly for political ends or personal gain. All of you clearly believe that the world is a better place when the activities of such persons are exposed – and I find this massively reassuring.

Finally, I’d like to announce that I will be relatively silent for the next few months, which will probably mean that I am less able (or even unable) to respond to e-mail enquiries and the like. But please be assured: I am not asleep. Instead, I am busy with my next project. Sometimes, in order to really concentrate, you have to shut yourself away for a while. As for the project….sorry, no clues for now, but it will be interesting, I promise you that.

So…..back in ten minutes. I’ll be in touch.

Ed Hooper July 1st, 2007.

Professor Paul Osterrieth’s long struggle is over. The man who worked at the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville (LMS) between 1956 and 1960 (for the last three years as head of the virology lab) died shortly before Christmas, and he was buried on December 22nd, 2006 at his village in the Ardennes. I am reliably informed that there was a large congregation at his funeral, including fellow-professors from his last place of work, the University of Liege, at least one of whom spoke warmly about him at the service. Although I cannot confirm this, I believe that he was about 81 years of age.

I came across Dr Osterrieth only three times, but I have vivid memories of each occasion. I had two formal interviews with him, in 1993 and 1994, and I saw him again at the Royal Society meeting on “Origins of HIV and the AIDS epidemic” in Sepember 2000.

The first interview was a day-long affair, which began after he picked me up at the local station early in the morning. I was invited to join him and his wife for breakfast, during which his wife asked me if I intended to question her husband about the theory that CHAT vaccine, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) that had been subjected to tests and field-trials at the LMS in the 1950s, had somehow been involved in the origin of the AIDS epidemic. I answered that this was indeed one of several things I wanted to ask Dr Osterrieth about, and almost immediately he disappeared from the room. When he returned five or ten minutes later, he was looking grey with concern. During the remainder of the day Dr Osterrieth was courteous and kind, and he answered most of my questions, but it was clear that at several junctures he was distinctly uneasy.

Some of the easiest questions that I put to him (such as how many chimpanzees had been used in the course of the polio research at the LMS, and what had eventually happened to those animals) stumped him completely, while others caused him to ponder for lengthy periods before answering. The question that caused him most difficulty was which primate he had been using to make tissue culture in the laboratory, in order to grow his viruses. There was a long pause, and he eventually said that he couldn’t remember. I started to prompt him: had he perhaps been using the kidneys of African green monkeys, or chimpanzees? His response to the latter was unexpectedly rapid: “No, no – not chimpanzees.”

Later on, after I happened to mention that another virologist, Pierre Lepine, had been using baboons from Africa to make tissue culture during the late fifties, Osterrieth volunteered that “if Pierre Lepine would use [baboon tissue], it’s probably likely we did” at the LMS. But his statement was far from convincing.

My question about the chimps had been legitimate, for between 1956 and 1960 over 500 chimps had been utilised at Lindi camp, an experimental chimpanzee holding centre which Osterrieth’s boss, the LMS director, Ghislain Courtois, had set up in the rain forest just outside Stanleyville. The avowed reason for establishing this camp had been that it would permit the testing of the experimental OPVs of Polish-American virologist, Hilary Koprowski, and some 400 chimps were used specifically on this polio research. The camp had originally been called the “Mission Courtois-Koprowski”; the local Congolese called it “Camp Polio”.

At another point in the interview, I explained to Dr Osterrieth that I had found records indicating that he had extracted kidneys from some of the Lindi chimps, and sent them to the US (where, incidentally, they had later been used to make tissue culture, which was reportedly used in an attempt to grow hepatitis viruses). After some intitial hesitation, he wryly acknowledged that if this was recorded on paper, then he must have done it. But he insisted that they had only made “a little” tissue culture (type unspecified) at the LMS itself. This seemed very strange, given that making tissue culture was the primary purpose of a virology laboratory, and given that (as he himself told me) he had been invited to train at the Wistar Institute in 1957 “for maybe one or two weeks”. He added that he had had “a very funny time at that lab, because I never knew exactly why I was there”. What he forgot, however, was that near the beginning of the interview he had told me that Koprowski had invited him to the Wistar specifically because of “the polio work”, and in order to study tissue culture techniques. (Interestingly, in a later publication, he wrote that he had actually trained at the Wistar for “a month”.)

Towards the end of the day, once Dr Osterrieth had rediscovered his equilibrium, I discussed the OPV/AIDS theory with him. He said that he didn’t think it was plausible, mainly for three reasons. Firstly, although he admitted that lymphocytes (which theoretically could have contained simian immunodeficiency viruses, SIVs, the ancestors of the HIVs) would have been present in the tissue cultures used to make CHAT vaccine, he did not think that any SIV could have survived through to the final vaccine; secondly, he said that the oral route was not an effective route of infection for SIVs and HIVs; and thirdly, he said he thought that the vaccine had in any case only been given to about 2,000 people in the Congo. (All of these arguments were later revealed as flawed, or spurious: most especially the last, for nearly one million Africans received the experimental OPVs between 1957 and 1960.)

Before I left, he stressed that the OPV theory was “a political time-bomb”, adding: “And there is no evidence – I mean hard facts. The only good way would be to prove that there is [an SIV] in CHAT vaccine. All the rest is coincidental, and is very dangerous…..I would say that if you’re not 100% sure, then don’t publish.” At the time, this sounded like sensibly cautious advice.

Looking back at the transcript of this interview from the perspective of 2007, I can see that it was characterised by two major elements. Dr Osterrieth failed to give any specific details about what he actually did do at the LMS and Lindi with the polio vaccines and chimpanzees, and at all times he tried to minimise the importance of this work, and his own involvement with it. Over the last few years, I have acquired documentary and testimonial evidence which proves beyond doubt that many of the careful (and sometimes laboured) statements he made during that interview were untrue. But back in 1993 all I had was the gut feeling that not all that he had told me added up.

Almost a year later, I returned to Dr Osterrieth’s pretty farm in the Ardennes for a second interview, only to find that his previously kindly attitude had changed. This time he was brusque from the outset, and became even more irritable when he learnt that I still believed the OPV theory to be viable. Now he denied several of the statements he had made a year earlier, such as the fact that he had sent chimp kidneys to the States. Presently I showed him a copy of the 1959 LMS annual report, which revealed that 250,000 doses of CHAT vaccine had been “conditioned” in the laboratory. Did this mean that a batch of CHAT had been prepared in the LMS?, I asked. “CHAT certainly wasn’t prepared in the lab. Transferred from one bottle to another, maybe, but not prepared”, he answered briskly. “Of that I’m 100% sure, because I was making the tissue culture.” By contrast, his answers to many of my other questions were once again extremely hesitant. It became increasingly clear to me that he had decided before the interview to stick to the line that he himself had been hardly involved with the polio research, or with the chimpanzees. I was quite shocked by his manner and by his denials, and before I had asked even half of my questions, I decided to thank him and to abandon the interview.

(As it turns out, Osterrieth’s explanation for the “conditioning” of a quarter of a million doses of CHAT, which took place at the very end of 1959, was probably correct. It was what had happened to the vaccine in the years before then that was crucial. But by a happy chance, my question did elicit the clear statement that he himself had been the one making the tissue culture at the LMS.)

That was 1994. Five years later, my book The River was published, in which I carefully outlined the reasons why I believed that OPV/AIDS remained a viable, and indeed a compelling theory. The increasingly favourable reviews that the book engendered forced the scientific community to acknowledge that the theory deserved to be examined properly, and to that end a two-day discussion meeting on “Origins of HIV and the AIDS epidemic” was organised at the Royal Society for the month of September 2000. Dr Osterrieth was invited to deliver a short address to the meeting.

For reasons beyond my control I was not present during his five-minute speech, but I heard about it afterwards, and subsequently listened to a tape recording. Although Osterrieth admitted that he had sent “six minced chimpanzee kidneys” to the States, he made no mention of any other work involving chimpanzees, and he now even denied that the CHAT vaccines from the US had ever been handled in his lab. He said that the only success that he had enjoyed making tissue culture had been with baboon kidneys, implied that this had not happened until mid-1958, and added that even then he had succeeded in making only 200 tubes and ten bottles. “There is no possibility that chimpanzee cells could have contaminated the vaccine”, he concluded.

His brief paper was entitled “Vaccine could not have been prepared in Stanleyville”, though apart from assertion, there was nothing in his paper to support this sweeping statement.

Indeed, within weeks of the meeting I discovered that it was the norm in the 1950s for polio vaccine to be amplified in locally available primate cells upon arrival at a recipient laboratory in Africa. Part of the reason was to keep the vaccine virus alive, though such amplification also served to boost the quantity and concentration (or titre) of the vaccine, which allowed greater numbers to be vaccinated. Significantly, before 1960 there was no specification about the species of primates that could and could not be used for polio vaccine preparation in this manner. Vaccine had merely to be prepared in tissues which originated from healthy animals, and which showed no evidence of contamination. One suspects that, not for the first time the world of science, the totals on balance sheets may have played a major role.

As an aside, there was another interesting event that occurred during the course of the Royal Society meeting. A French photographer asked Dr Osterrieth is he could take a photo of him. Osterrieth refused, and apparently added that if the photographer snapped a photo without permission, he would “break [his] camera”. The young photographer, having never been threatened like this before, was quite shocked.

One of the co-organisers of the meeting, retrovirologist Robin Weiss, summed up at the end of the conference, and described Osterrieth’s speech as “resonant”. However, in an e-mail sent the following year to a jourmalist who asked specifically about Osterrieth’s testimony, he put it rather differently. “Either Osterrieth is lying through his teeth or [Hooper] has got it wrong”, he wrote; the remainder of the e-mail made it clear that he firmly subscribed to the latter scenario. [I should perhaps add that Weiss’s e-mailed reply to the journalist was quite an eye-opener. It was profoundly biased, and he based two of his four answers on shameless misquotations from my latest paper (of which I myself had given him a copy just a week earlier).]

In just one instance, Osterrieth had some evidence to support his claims at the Royal Society meeting. The sole reference to tissue culture in the LMS annual reports occurs in the 1958 report; which clearly states that tissue culture was made “exclusively from baboons”, and that just 200 tubes and ten bottles had been made. Strangely, the quantity described would in fact have been the product of just a single pair (or at most two pairs) of baboon kidneys.

Even at the time of the Royal Society, I already had evidence to suggest that significant parts of what Dr Osterrieth was now stating were incorrect, and soon afterwards a great deal more counter-evidence came to light. In April 2001 I revisited Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) accompanied by a film crew making a documentary (later released as “The Origins of AIDS”), and this time I was able to interview several Congolese workers who had witnessed the procedures at Lindi camp and the LMS with their own eyes. (During my previous visit in July 1999 I had only located one truly significant witness; apparently someone did track down several other witnesses on my behalf, but unfortunately he arrived at the hotel with his exciting news just after our departure.)

But back to 2001. Two former caretakers from Lindi camp stated that all but about 60 of the several hundred chimpanzees held there had eventually been sacrificed (killed), and that many of them had been anaesthetised before sacrifice, so that blood and vital organs (including kidneys) could be removed while the animals were still alive. Only after the operation was the coup de grace administered. At the time, this was the standard method of sacrifice employed when collecting tissues for making tissue culture.

A Congolese technician working at the LMS made a simple but stunning statement. He said that most of the tissue culture that had been made in the lab in the late fifties had come from chimpanzees. However, he recalled next to nothing about the methods that had been employed, and I felt that this still fell somewhat short of substantive proof.

However, another technician, Jacques Kanyama, who had been employed in Osterrieth’s own virology lab, where he worked especially on the cleaning and sterilisation of glassware, stated that chimp materials had regularly been brought to the lab, and that furthermore Dr Osterrieth had regularly been making polio vaccines there, vaccines that were later administered to local adults and children. How did Jacques know that Osterrieth had actually been making the vaccines? Well, he undertook this process after hours in his own private lab (which was in fact the sterile room, where tissue cultures were prepared and handled), and he did it every time a new request came in for polio vaccine from another provincial doctor. The quantities of vaccine were always much larger after he had finished. [I address below the question of whether Osterrieth had actually been making the vaccine as Jacques believed (ie amplifying the vaccine that came from the US in local tissue culture), or simply diluting the American vaccine in saline solution.]

It was this final interview that represented the “Eureka moment” when the light-bulb went off, and I finally realised that, despite the insistent denials by the vaccine-makers, at least some of the batches of CHAT vaccine administered to more than 900,000 people in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi between 1957 and 1959 appeared to have been amplified (or regrown) locally in the LMS. On the basis of the first technician’s testimony, it seemed highly probable that this had occurred in chimpanzee tissue, and (on the basis of an internal report about the Lindi chimps published in the US) that the tissue cultures had also employed chimpanzee sera as growth medium.

Nearly 18 months after this, I revisited Pierre Doupagne, who had worked as chief technician at the LMS from 1949 to 1960. I had always respected M. Doupagne, and this time we spoke together for almost an entire day. I told him what I had been told by the African chimp caretakers and lab technicians in Kisangani. About two hours into the interview (which I taped), he suddenly volunteered the fact that he might, on two or three occasions, have prepared tissue cultures from chimps and given them to Paul Osterrieth and the LMS histopathologist, Gaston Ninane, “to do what with, I do not know”. At the very end of the interview, I asked him again how many times he had prepared chimpanzee tissue cultures for Osterrieth and Ninane, and he answered – quietly but perfectly audibly – “for a long time”.

This was a complete bombshell. Osterrieth had insisted that he and only he had been making tissue culture at the LMS (and intriguingly, Ninane had made exactly the same claim for himself).

And now here was Doupagne stating that for a long time it was actually he who had been preparing the lab’s tissue culture, and making it from chimpanzees. Furthermore, he had then given it to Osterrieth and Ninane. Previously, Osterrieth had insisted to me that CHAT couldn’t possibly have been prepared in the LMS because he and only he had been making tissue culture there. The second part of the statement was now revealed as a blatant misrepresentation, which rendered the first part equally questionable.

That batches of the Koprowski vaccines had been amplified locally in chimpanzee tissues was later further confirmed in statements from two further Belgian witnesses who had been directly and indirectly involved with the process in the 1950s. (This evidence remains to be published, but it will appear in good time.) There is other confirming evidence as well.

The significance of these revelations is revealed by the fact that the SIV of the common chimpanzee is generally accepted as the immediate ancestor of the AIDS pandemic virus, HIV-1. SIVs are now known to be found naturally in approximately 13% of wild chimps, and because at Lindi the chimps were routinely co-caged and sometimes group-caged, there was clearly a likelihood that an even higher percentage were SIV-infected at the time of sacrifice. SIVs in the macrophages and lymphocytes of the Lindi chimps would have infected the tissues (and sera) used in vaccine tissue cultures, and, crucially, different strains of chimp SIV would have recombined in these cultures. This process would therefore have engendered different viral variants in each new batch prepared – and one suspects that these viral variants might bear close resemblance to the different subtypes of pandemic HIV-1 that are recognised today.

Osterrieth’s technician stated that new vaccine was prepared for each new trial, which means that different batches of CHAT were used in nearly 30 different vaccination trials in what are now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda.

A paper co-written by a statistician and myself, and which has still to be submitted for publication, finds a “highly significant” correlation between the towns and villages in Africa where CHAT vaccine was fed in 1957-60 and the earliest appearances in the world of HIV-1. (In a separate study, the correlation with the earliest cases of AIDS is found to be “significant”.) This means that the CHAT vaccinations in Africa represent both a viable and highly plausible source of the human AIDS pandemic.

In contrast, the proponents of the “bushmeat hypothesis” of AIDS origin (who believe that humans acquired HIV-1 during the preparation or consumption of chimpanzee bushmeat) have put forward three major arguments which, they claim, “refute” the OPV theory.

Firstly, they have retrospectively tested US-made batches of CHAT vaccine, and found them free of SIV, HIV-1 and chimp DNA. However, they have not tested any of the batches that were prepared in the Congo, for the simple reason that (if any still exist) no such batches have ever been released for testing.

Secondly, they claim that phylogenetic analysis of the various different strains of HIV-1 seen in the world today proves that the index strain, the original virus which, they say, was acquired by a human from chimp bushmeat, must have existed in or around 1931, this being some 25 years before the OPV trials in Africa. This is increasingly recognised as an absurd argument, based on the erroneous concept that HIV-1 has been mutating at a constant rate since the original transfer to man from chimpanzee. It fails to take into account the fact that the major way that HIV-1 (and all retroviruses) evolve is only some 10% by mutation; roughly 90% of the process occurs through recombination. In other words, the geneticists are using a faulty model to arrive at that entirely theoretical date of 1931. The earliest confirmed blood sample containing HIV-1 apparently pertains to 1959, although there is evidence suggesting that the sample in question may be wrongly dated, and may actually have been obtained at some point between 1960 and 1963.

Thirdly, they claim that the imediate ancestor of the pandemic variant of HIV-1 actually comes from a subspecies of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) that is found only in west central Africa, in Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. This claim is unconfirmed, for only a tiny proportion of chimp troops across central Africa have actually been tested for SIV. But in any case I have recently published documentary evidence which proves that at least one Pan troglodytes troglodytes chimp was present among the experimental chimps (which were mainly Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) that were being handled by the LMS scientists.

Apart from this, I have in the last two years found further documentary evidence (not yet released) which strongly suggests that small groups of Pan troglodytes troglodytes (originating from different countries) were present at Lindi camp from a very early stage. Due to co-caging and group caging, any of the other chimpanzees and bonobos at Lindi could have acquired SIV from these Pan troglodytes troglodytes chimps.

In short, I would strongly contend that none of the so-called scientific “refutations” of the OPV theory actually stand up to scrutiny.

After my 2002 interview with Pierre Doupagne, I tried on four further occasions to speak with Paul Osterrieth. Twice I phoned his house, and on the one occasion I got through his wife told me that he was working away from home. On two other occasions I revisited his farmhouse, and although his car was there (and on one occasion I heard someone moving inside) nobody answered the door. On one occasion I returned 30 minutes later to find that the electric bell had been switched off. It seemed that Dr Osterrieth had seen me walking up the drive, and had elected not to answer the door. So it was that I never got to ask him face to face what he had done with those chimp tissue cultures provided by Pierre Doupagne.

And now Dr Osterrieth is dead.

His former colleagues on the CHAT vaccination programme in Africa, Hilary Koprowski and Stanley Plotkin, will very likely lionise him in days to come as one of the fallen heroes of the fight against polio, but I suspect that behind the scenes they may be breathing substantial sighs of relief.

However, they should not get too relaxed.

Although Dr Osterrieth refused to speak with me again, he did agree in 2003 to answer a series of my questions by e-mail. I submitted 30-odd questions, and he replied to them about five weeks later. These answers provided his definitive account of what he did and did not do at the LMS and Lindi camp – but they were far from impressive. In some instances, he simply failed to address the question asked. In other instances, I already had enough information from other sources to be able to demonstrate that his latest answer was partially or wholly untrue. In other instances again, his answer contradicted versions of events that he had given me previously. Nearly all of the errors or contradictions related directly to the key issues: his involvement in the polio vaccine campaign, and the uses to which the Lindi chimpanzees had been put. If one were being generous, one could ascribe some of these errors or contradictions to a patchy or failing memory. But not all of them.

I e-mailed back to thank him for his answers, but I never took it further, mainly because I suspected that by highlighting the discrepancies in his replies, I was only assisting Osterrieth and his collaborators in their attempts to construct a plausible defence.

Osterrieth’s replies were later used as the bare bones of a more comprehensive response, “Oral polio vaccine: fact versus fiction”, an article that was published in 2004 by Stanley Plotkin in Vaccine. (Plotkin sits on the editorial board of this journal.) Osterrieth’s article contains several similar claims to those that featured in his 2003 e-mail to me, but the text is much more fluent, and bears the signs of other people’s hands in addition to his own.

On the basis of documents in my possession and previous statements on these issues made by Paul Osterrieth and others, I can state this. “Oral polio vaccine: fact versus fiction” is accurately titled. It does contain some facts, although on the key issues it is a fictional account – a carefully-constructed “smoke and mirrors” rewriting of history.

I will demonstrate the many inaccuracies and untruths in this account when the time is right. For now, however, let me provide just three examples.

1) In a previous paper, I had reported that Jacques Kanyama stated that he started work in Osterrieth’s virology lab on February 12th, 1958, and that Osterrieth was already making polio vaccine at that time. In “Fact versus fiction”, Osterrieth claims that he officially returned to work at the LMS only on February 23rd, 1958. (He admits in a footnote that he had previously claimed, in a paper published on the Web, that he returned to the lab on February 28th, and ascribes his error to “having mistaken a 3 for an 8”. In fact, the typing in the 1958 LMS annual report that bears this date is quite clear, which renders his excuse rather far-fetched – though it may be related to the fact that polio vaccine was administered at the local army camp on February 27th!) In “Fact versus fiction”, Osterrieth admits that he arrived back in Stanleyville from the US and Belgium “several days” before the 23rd, but claims that he was not working in the lab. However, in 1993 both Osterrieth and his wife told me that they returned to Kisangani “a few days after” the arrival of Dr Fritz Deinhardt (which is elsewhere recorded as having been on February 2nd, 1958) and that he got down to work straight away. This strongly suggests that Osterrieth’s first 18 to 20 days back in the lab are for some reason not recorded in the annual report. In “Fact versus fiction”, Osterrieth expresses doubt that Kanyama was actually working in his lab on February 12th. But in any case, he goes on, how could he, Osterrieth, have been making polio vaccine in his lab on February 12th “when the virus lab was not even yet created”? In reality, the virus lab had its official opening in September 1957, and had opened informally several weeks before that, probably before Osterrieth’s departure on leave (recorded as having been on July 19th, 1957). I have personally seen Kanyama’s employment card bearing the date of February 12th, and the card was filmed in close-up as well. What this means is that Kanyama’s account of the dates is entirely consistent with Osterrieth’s actual date of return to Stanleyville near the start of February; indeed, it was because of Osterrieth’s return that he was hired in the first place. In 2005 I called Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) by cell-phone, and spoke again with Kanyama (first directly, to establish his identity, and then, since he speaks virtually no French or English, via a translator). He told me that in 2004 (soon after the “Origins of AIDS” film was broadcast), he was persuaded on three occasions to meet with certain Congolese professors, on one occasion with three of them together. It became apparent that these professors had tried to pressure him into changing his testimony on certain key issues, notably the date he started working at the lab, the date when he says that Osterrieth was making polio vaccine, and the date when they vaccinated with this polio vaccine at the local army camp Significantly, at least one of the professors he met with was a man who had already played a significant role in this controversy, and who at around this time began to receive substantial financial assistance from Belgium. Shortly after this phone call, I was informed that this same professor was now working in league with Professor Dudu Akaibe, the vice-dean of the faculty of science at the University of Kisangani, who has himself been an active paid collaborator of the Plotkin group since early 2001. At least some of the money channelled to Akaibe has come from Plotkin’s former employers, the vaccine house Aventis Pasteur, though it seems that a significant role has also been played by the University of Leuven in Belgium, an organisation that was already collaborating with Koprowski on the African CHAT trials back in the 1950s.

2) In any case, says Osterrieth, he was preparing many vaccines against different diseases, and he didn’t discuss his work with his junior staff, so “how could [Kanyama] know what vaccines I was making”? As shown in part in the “Origins of AIDS” film, Kanyama recalls that the vaccine that Osterrieth made was then given to him to put into small glass phials, which were labelled with the words “anti-polio vaccine”. Later (apparently on February 27th, 1958), Kanyama took these phials, and helped vaccinate with them at the local army camp.

3) Osterreith also questions how an untrained helper like Kanyama could have known what work he (Osterrieth) was doing in the lab with the vaccines: how could he have differentiated between vaccine preparation (on the one hand) and dilution of the concentrated vaccine stock (on the other)? On this key question, there are three powerful proofs. Both contemporary articles on the Congo vaccinations and the diary of one of the vaccinators confirm that dilution of the CHAT vaccine (in saline solution) was a process which took just moments, and which was done every morning in the field, just before vaccination began. In short, dilution was not a lengthy process that had to be done behind closed doors in the laboratory. In any case, Stanley Plotkin’s first detailed published defence of the CHAT vaccinators (which was published in Clinical Infectious Diseases on April 1st, 2001; Volume 32, pages 1068-1084) quotes both Dr Osterrieth and Dr Ninane (on page 1074) as making identically-worded statements: “I never tried to dilute the polio vaccine that was received.” So here we have Dr Osterrieth (prompted and backed by Dr Plotkin) presenting a signed statement as evidence of innocence in 2001, and then, when it suits his purposes in 2004, proposing the exact opposite.

Stanley Plotkin wrote an accompanying editorial to Paul Osterieth’s article (“Chimpanzees and journalists”, a title which provides some clues about Plotkin’s rather uncertain sense of humour) which once again falsely claimed that the OPV theory had been refuted. This editorial was heavily based on Osterrieth’s article, which Plotkin treated as if it were factually proven, rather than dubious and contested testimony.

Significantly, although he must have seen the testimony by Pierre Doupagne in “The Origins of AIDS” film, which was broadcast several times in Belgium, Paul Osterrieth never made any attempt to deny this account, or to explain what he might have done with the chimpanzee tissue culture with which Doupagne supplied him.

I still retain some sympathy for Dr Osterrieth, even in death, and I wish him peace. I think it’s a tragedy that he chose to take his secrets with him to the grave, but equally I realise that the pressures upon him over the last ten or so years must have been immense. Of course, back in the 1950s he was merely a dutiful (albeit ambitious) subordinate, a young man who did the bidding of Hilary Koprowski and the LMS director, Ghislain Courtois.

It is my belief that Dr Osterrieth bears only a small part of the moral responsibility for these events that is borne by the major players in the 1950s, notably Dr Koprowski, and by those who were junior players in the fifties, but who have master-minded the cover-up of the last decade, notably Dr Plotkin.

Doubtless the doctors who collaborated with Dr Osterrieth in the African CHAT vaccinations will accuse me of speaking ill of the dead. But in reality I have published most of this information before, either in The River, or in previous essays on this web-site.

The reason I am writing this all down now is that I believe that Dr Osterrieth’s passing should be marked not only by sanitised eulogies, but also by an honest attempt to record what he did and did not do in the Belgian Congo, fifty years ago, activity which, tragically, appears to have coincided with the seeding of the AIDS pandemic.

Ed Hooper. January 4th, 2007.

In the past on this site [for instance in “Plotkin’s Chums (1): Eminent scientists sign their names to falsehoods”], I have referred to identical or nearly identical letters written by Stanley Plotkin and his allies to TV executives and film festival organisers, urging them not to show “The Origins of AIDS” documentary. The reason they offer for writing such letters is inherently dishonest, for each letter is based on the false assertion that the OPV theory of AIDS origin has been disproved.

Apart from legal threats delivered through their lawyers, this letter-writing campaign has been one of the major approaches that Dr Plotkin’s group have used in their ongoing attempts to counter, and indeed to suppress, the OPV hypothesis.

I have received copies of many of these letters, which I am holding in reserve for an appropriate moment. However, I have decided that it worth posting details about one such initiative on this web-site, to give readers some idea about how Dr Stanley Plotkin operates.

Plotkin’s latest ploy.

In September 2006 I received an e-mail from Arnie Gelbart, executive producer of Galafilm, the co-producers of “The Origins of AIDS”. He said that following a recent broadcast of the film by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), letters of criticism from Dr Mark Wainberg and Dr Stanley Plotkin had been addressed to the head of news, and the executive vice president of CBC. He asked if I could provide any material to send to CBC to help them respond to these claims.

I realised almost immediately that Dr Wainberg was not only, as he described himself, a co-chair of the 16th International Conference on AIDS (the major world conference on that disease, which had just been held in Toronto).

He was also an active member of Dr Plotkin’s team of “OPV theory refuters”: one of the nine collaborators who, since 2004, have assisted Plotkin by writing identical or nearly identical letters to TV companies and film festivals, urging them not to show a film [“The Origins of AIDS”] which they claimed was “dangerous” and “misleading”. The fact that in this instance the two men had written separately to CBC, as if one was disinterestedly supporting the legitimate concerns of the other, struck me as rather revealing.

However, this latest initiative represents a good example of how Stanley Plotkin has chosen to respond to the OPV theory.

He has never made any sincere attempt to respond to the majority of the points made in, or questions raised by, The River, or in my follow-up articles. And he has never attempted to provide a convincing account of his own involvement, which was significant, in the 1950s OPV trials in the Belgian Congo.

Instead, Dr Plotkin’s approach has been as follows:

a) he has misrepresented certain specific points in the history which he believes cannot be checked; on the basis of these falsehoods he then later asserts that he has “proved Hooper wrong”;

b) he has encouraged and assisted the placing of alleged counter-arguments to the OPV theory (such as the negative testing of vaccine samples; phylogenetic dating; and “wrong sub-species” of chimp) in the medical literature; most of these articles have apparently been written by his allies and collaborators, or else by scientists whose grants, and indeed careers, now seem to depend on their continuing to promulgate such arguments;

c) even though the arguments mentioned in (b) may later be revealed as dubious, flawed or bogus, Plotkin ignores all counter-evidence, and instead points to these published articles in order to assert that “Hooper’s allegations have been refuted”; (a surprising number of people, including scientists who should know better, appear to have been taken in by this approach, perhaps basing their reasoning on the assumption that “if it’s good enough for Nature and Science, it’s good enough for me”);

d) he has provided copies of the articles cited in (b) to TV stations and film companies, and then pressured them not to broadcast a “misleading” film;

e) he and Koprowski have used a combination of letter-writing and legal initiatives in order to chip away at publishers, conference organisers and journal editors, with the intention of discrediting me personally, and/or eliminating The River and the “Origins of AIDS” documentary from the public domain.

[In these five foregoing points alone, I have used quote marks to indicate the spirit of what has been said, rather than direct quotations from Dr Plotkin.]

Dr Plotkin’s response to the OPV/AIDS theory has relied heavily on the fact that he has developed a predominantly favourable reputation among the virology and vaccine communities during a long career. He uses this existing goodwill as a base which places him in a good position to persuade friends that his claims on this issue ought to be believed, or else on occasions, I suspect, to call in favours.

However, his active role in this debate has also relied heavily on clandestine methods. He and his allies have relied on misinformation, obfuscation, and pressuring witnesses into adapting their stories on significant points – or else into silence. This is a “smoke and mirrors” approach. There is no evidence to indicate or suggest that Dr Plotkin himself is a spook, but the methods he has used have been tried and tested over many years by members of the intelligence community.

In addition, he has been able to employ collaborators or assistants to do much of the dirty work for him. This is an approach that requires access to money, of which both Stanley Plotkin and his former boss, Hilary Koprowski, have acquired a great deal in the course of their long careers. (Plotkin was for many years managing director of the Aventis Pasteur (now Sanofi Pasteur) vaccine house, and is still listed as a consultant to the CEO of that company. There is evidence, moreover, that this company has funded some of the Plotkin group’s more dubious activities in Africa. Koprowski is said to be worth more than $30 million, following his patenting of monoclonal antibodies in the US and Japan. This is a technique that was actually developed by Caesar Milstein at the Medical Research Council in the UK, but for which Koprowski managed to acquire some of the more lucrative patents.)

These are among the tactics which doctors Plotkin and Koprowski have used in a bid to persuade others to accept their “modified” versions of events. As a rule, only people who are backed up against a wall, or who are very worried about potential consequences, resort to such tactics.

I now have many examples in which I can prove that Dr Plotkin, Dr Koprowski and their allies have deliberately misrepresented the truth. If they feel they can disprove this, then perhaps they should sue me for libel or defamation. I will gladly see them in court.

In the past, Dr Plotkin has threatened me with legal action once, and Dr Koprowski has threatened either me, or my publishers and myself in tandem, on at least three occasions. On each occasion, either I or my publishers have responded robustly, and no response has been received from the other side….until (in the case of Koprowski) a few years pass, and he once again threatens litigation in a different form or format.

A study of Dr Koprowski’s history reveals that this is a tactic to which he has resorted often during his long scientific career; in fact, he has used the threat of legal action as a device for getting his own way ever since the 1950s. As far as I can determine, he has not encountered very many opponents who are unafraid of him, and who are fully prepared to oppose his legal threats.

In any case, in recent years doctors Plotkin and Koprowski have adopted a different tack. They steer well clear of me, but instead they employ lawyers in a bid to pressure book publishers and television executives into not publishing books, or not broadcasting films, on this subject.

I have decided that enough is enough. I now have so much evidence about the activities of these doctors and about the untruths they have told, especially about their activities in Africa, that I feel it is time to invite them to put up or shut up. If they believe that they have evidence to show that I’m a liar, then let them produce that evidence.

Even though there are strong suggestions that the two doctors read the items posted on this web-site, I do not expect to hear back from them. This is despite the fact that they would clearly love to sue me for libel or defamation. However, as they and their lawyers know, “libel” is not libel if the writer has evidence to support what he claims – which I have, and which they, in very many cases, clearly do not!

In any case, I believe it is vitally important that some of their approaches to modifying the truth are exposed, even if the process, for several reasons, has to be a gradual one. Accordingly, copies of Dr Plotkin’s and Dr Wainberg’s letters to CBC can be read below, as can the three enclosures that accompanied Dr Plotkin’s letter. The letter that I wrote to Jerry McIntosh, Director of Independent Documentaries at CBC, in response to the claims in the two doctors’ letters can also be read.

Finally, just to complete the CBC history, I am led to believe that a polite but robust written response from a CBC executive to doctors Wainberg and Plotkin had already been drafted, or possibly sent, even before my letter to CBC arrived. Apparently it was pointed out that “The Origins of AIDS” had raised valid questions about how AIDS might have started. It was also apparently pointed out that, contrary to Plotkin’s and Wainberg’s claims, neither the bushmeat nor the OPV theory had been proven or disproven, and that it was therefore legitimate for a responsible news organisation like CBC to continue to examine and discuss both theories.

Ed Hooper. November 23rd, 2006; slightly adapted December 8th, 2006.

—-

September 25, 2006

Re: “The Origins of AIDS” documentary, and subsequent complaints about its recent broadcast by CBC.

Dear Mr McIntosh,

My name is Edward Hooper. I am the author of a book entitled The River, and I featured as a talking head in the later stages of the Galafilm/MFP documentary, “The Origins of AIDS”, a film that ends up offering considerable support to the oral polio vaccine [OPV] theory of origin of AIDS. I personally am strongly persuaded that this theory explains how the AIDS pandemic began.

The OPV theory proposes that pandemic HIV-1 arrived in humans via an OPV called CHAT, which was administered to nearly one million colonised Africans in the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi in the late 1950s and which, uniquely for such a vaccine, was prepared in the cells of the common chimpanzee, the animal that is host to a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that is the immediate ancestor of HIV-1.

The documentary has been extremely well-received and has won several awards, which is why opponents of the OPV theory have been trying so hard to suppress it.

My help has recently been sought by Arnie Gelbart of Galafilm, who has sent me a copy of an e-mail to him from your colleague Christine Whalen, together with letters to the executive officers of CBC by doctors Plotkin and Wainberg, and a copy of Dr Plotkin’s editorial in Vaccine, entitled “Chimpanzees and journalists”.

I think it’s rather important that you (and CBC) have the full picture of what is going on here, which is rather different from what you might assume on the basis of the latter three documents.

I note that Dr Plotkin, in his letter to Dr Burman, describes CBC’s broadcasting of “The Origins of AIDS” as “a wilful act of ignorance and irresponsibility”, and that Dr Wainberg, in his earlier letter, describes the OPV theory as one that is “dangerously misleading” and that has been “scientifically refuted”.

The first thing to point out is that doctors Plotkin and Wainberg are not just casual allies in this matter. They have been actively collaborating for more than two years, writing a series of identical or near-identical letters to film festival directors, urging them to drop the “Origins of AIDS” documentary from their schedules. I have copies of some of these letters. Moreover I believe, but cannot prove, that these men have also written similar letters to other television executives.

Dr Wainberg is one of a group of eight or nine doctors who have consistently collaborated with Dr Plotkin in this initiative since (at latest) the summer of 2004. The group also includes doctors Beatrice Hahn and Bette Korber (two of the most prominent supporters of the “officially-approved” bushmeat theory of AIDS origin, and both virulent opponents of the OPV theory); Hahn’s former boss Dr Robert Gallo (who has described Plotkin’s former boss, the developer of CHAT vaccine, Dr Hilary Koprowski, as his “mentor”); doctors Robin Weiss and Simon Wain-Hobson (the two surviving organisers of the Royal Society conference on “Origins of HIV and the AIDS epidemic” in 2000); and Dr John Moore, an AIDS vaccine expert with a good command of the English language, who has been metaphorically described by colleagues as a “gun for hire”, and who Dr Plotkin seems to have hired as a media and public relations advisor.

[Some further background. The bushmeat theory of origin proposes that pandemic HIV-1 arose via a single zoonotic (cross-species) infection in around 1931, after a bushmeat hunter or seller became infected with chimpanzee SIV, perhaps through a cut. It does not explain why AIDS (and not only the pandemic, but any of the other three known outbreaks) failed to appear before the twentieth century, and there is a 600-mile distance between the place where the bushmeat proponents believe the crucial zoonosis occurred, and Leopoldville/Kinshasa – the place they believe was the cradle of the epidemic. By contrast, the OPV theory can readily explain these two factors.]

If the arguments that Stanley Plotkin’s letter-writers made in their identical letters were proven, or even scientifically or historically reasonable, then one could not take issue with their campaign. But that is emphatically not the case.

Throughout the course of this campaign, their approach has been to present themselves as disinterested scientific “experts” who, because of their expertise, are party to the truth about how AIDS began. The reality, however, is that the letter-writers have a political agenda – that of suppressing open discussion of an uncomfortable alternative theory (OPV), by means fair or foul.

Almost every one of the scientific claims made by these men and women is either speculative, misleading, or just plain untrue. They rely on hypothesis and assertion, but when examined closely, it becomes apparent that their arguments are not supported by sound scientific reasoning. (I shall support these claims in more detail below.)

Their historical claims are based on a series of falsehoods – falsehoods which have been systematically placed in the medical literature in the last eight years, mainly by the same group of doctors and their allies. A group of three Belgian and Dutch scientists who have been working for Dr Plotkin since 2000, and whose work has been financed at least in part by the company of which Plotkin was formerly managing director (Sanofi Pasteur, formerly known as Aventis Pasteur) has pressured several of the witnesses whom I had previously tape-recorded, and quoted in The River, persuading them to adapt their testimony on key points. African collaborators of Dr Plotkin have used financial inducements to encourage certain African witnesses to do the same. Fortunately, not all of those so approached have acquiesced with this process, and I have evidence (much of it documentary evidence) to illustrate what has happened.

Before I go any further, I should provide some brief background about myself. Between 1985 and 1987 I was a Uganda-based freelance journalist working mainly for the BBC and the Guardian (but on a couple of occasions for CBC radio). I first came across the AIDS epidemic by chance in 1986, and I have been researching and writing exclusively about AIDS since 1987. Since 1990 I have written only three or four articles for newspapers or magazines, so it is hardly appropriate for Dr Plotkin and his allies to refer to me as a “journalist”, though it suits them to do so, and thus imply that I merely have a passing interest in the subject. I don’t much like pigeon-holing myself, but since I have spent the last 19 years researching and writing books about AIDS (and the last 16 years about the origins of the condition), I personally feel that the terms “author” and “science writer” are more appropriate.

The great majority of those who have read my work, and in particular The River, would attest, I believe, that I am a careful and conscientious researcher, a good science writer, and a man of integrity. (Of course, the aforementioned scientists would doubtless disagree!) But at the risk of being accused of blowing my own trumpet, I will go further. In recent years, several scientists who are widely considered to be wise and impartial, and who are well-versed in this field, have told me (or others) that I probably know more about the subject of the origin of AIDS, in all its aspects (scientific, historical and political) than anyone else alive. One person who said this to my face was the great evolutionary biologist, Bill Hamilton, who was my mentor, and who wrote the foreword to The River. Sadly, Bill died in 2000, after paying a second visit to the Congo in an attempt to gather further faecal specimens from chimpanzees. After his death, this unassuming man was lionised, with one obituary describing him as “the greatest biologist since Charles Darwin”.

Now let me turn to the “Chimpanzees and journalists” editorial by Dr Stanley Plotkin. It should be noted that Dr Plotkin is on the editorial board of Vaccine, in which the editorial appears, and that this little-known journal therefore provides him with a convenient mouthpiece for his views.

He bases his editorial primarily on an article in the same issue of Vaccine written by Dr Paul Osterrieth, which we may presume was commissioned by Dr Plotkin himself. Dr Osterrieth was head of the virology lab at the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville [LMS], where the CHAT vaccine experiments were carried out in the late 1950s. Osterrieth’s article is entitled: “Oral polio vaccine: fact versus fiction”, but unfortunately it relies heavily on the latter. Several of the claims that Osterrieth makes in that article are provably untrue, and some of his claims contradict statements he himself has previously made in published writings on this subject.

Dr Osterrieth has for several years been unreliable about what he did and did not do at the LMS. In the one page paper he presented before the Royal Society in 2000, entitled “Vaccine could not have been prepared in Stanleyville”, Dr Osterrieth asserted that “[the polio] [v]accine was never handled in my laboratory, and contamination with chimpanzee cells was not possible”. But I have seven or eight witnesses, Belgian and African, who state unequivocally that the polio vaccine in question (CHAT) was handled in his laboratory. Several other witnesses have told me that materials (organs and blood) from some of the 450-odd chimpanzees that were sacrificed at Lindi camp (a holding centre for over 500 chimps that was set up in the rain forest, some 15 kilometres from Stanleyville) were routinely brought to Osterrieth’s lab, so clearly contamination (either accidental or through vaccine production) was possible.

Furthermore, the chief LMS lab technician of that period, Pierre Doupagne, told me in 2002 that he himself had routinely prepared chimpanzee tissue cultures and given them to Dr Osterrieth, “to do what with, I do not know”. That was a courageous admission for Doupagne (a personal friend of Osterrieth’s) to make, even if he was not prepared to go the whole way and admit what Osterrieth was doing with the tissue cultures. However, African assistants who were working at the LMS, one of them in Osterrieth’s lab, testify that Osterrieth himself was indeed preparing the polio vaccine there. This process was not complicated, for it simply involved the inoculation of a small quantity of the American-made polio vaccine into chimpanzee tissue culture, to make a larger quantity of new vaccine of higher titer, or concentration. (This is similar to the process of seeding a litre of warm milk with a spoonful of old yogurt, to produce a fresh pot of yogurt.) In short, it is clear that the title of Osterrieth’s article is misleading, and that in reality, vaccine could very readily have been prepared in Stanleyville, just as the lab assistants stated.

Supporting this analysis, I have three significant witnesses who held senior roles with respect to the Stanleyville research programme in the 1950s, and who have told me quite simply that Koprowski’s vaccine was being prepared in the cells of the Lindi chimps. Furthermore, I have eye-witnesses who confirm each individual step of the process, from the extraction of kidneys from an anaesthetised but still living chimpanzee (to minimise the risks of bacterial contamination), to the feeding of vaccine that had been made in Osterrieth’s lab to soldiers in the local army camp. Most of these steps are multiply confirmed.

To sum up, I believe there is overwhelming evidence (both documentary and testimonial) to show that Dr Osterrieth is not telling the truth about the work he did at the LMS.

However, in his editorial, Dr Plotkin predicates his entire argument on the assumption that the claims in Osterrieth’s “Fact versus fiction” article should be treated as gospel truth, and therefore as an irrevocable disproof of my claim that CHAT vaccine was being prepared locally, and in chimpanzee cells. Let me now address some of the specific scientific claims made in the Vaccine editorial. Unlike several of Dr Plotkin’s previous contributions on this subject, this article is written in seemingly restrained and reasonable language. However, that title, “Chimpanzees and journalists” gives some sense of the aggression that is bubbling beneath the surface.

[In each case below, I indicate the paragraph of the editorial in which the initial claim appears. I list some appropriate supporting references at the end of this letter.]

a) [Paragraph 2] Plotkin’s assertion that the “physical evidence” presented at two conferences on the origins of HIV-1, held at London and Rome, “was all against the OPV hypothesis” is a falsehood. To explain why, I need first to provide some brief background about those meetings, both of which (though the Plotkin camp might deny it) were convened in direct response to a reawakening of public and scientific interest in the OPV hypothesis, after The River was published in 1999.

The Society meeting held in London in 2000 was carefully choreographed by the above-mentioned doctors, Weiss and Wain-Hobson, in order to present an apparent victory for the medical powers-that-be, and a come-uppance for myself – and was so reported in most press outlets. (Bill Hamilton, who had initially proposed this conference to the Royal Society, was also scheduled to be a co-organiser, but sadly he died before the meeting took place.) Before the conference, the list of speakers was adapted in order to overcome the objections of doctors Plotkin, Koprowski, Hahn and Korber, who had otherwise threatened to boycott the meeting. Dr Weiss insisted that only one epidemiologist (Dr Kevin De Cock, a collaborator of Dr Hahn’s) should be allowed as a full speaker, and at the end of the meeting, Weiss delivered a profoundly biased closing speech.

At the Rome meeting a year later (also initially proposed by Bill Hamilton) I was asked to speak in his place, which was a great honour. Here, the balance of speakers was much fairer. Yet Dr Weiss had again been invited in order to give the closing comments, and again his analysis was one-sided, simply ignoring most of the new information I had presented. I was so disgusted that I found myself rising from my chair and walking out.

In reality, not one single piece of “physical evidence” against the OPV theory was presented at either of these conferences.

None the less, let me examine the evidence that was presented. At the Royal Society meeting, various scientists reported the testing of five or six different American-made pools of the suspect polio vaccine, CHAT, which had belatedly been released by Koprowski’s former institute, the Wistar. They found these CHAT samples to be free of HIV-1, chimpanzee SIV, and chimp DNA – and their negative results were undoubtedly accurately reported. However, doctors Plotkin and Koprowski then falsely claimed that these were the same vaccines that had been used in Africa. In fact, none of these vaccine samples had ever been near Africa, and neither were they from the same vaccine batches that were used in Africa. (A batch represents vaccine made in a single production run. Therefore every vaccine batch is considered homogenous, which cannot be said of every vaccine pool.)

My suspicions about this crucial detail were confirmed in early 2001, when I returned to Africa for eight weeks, and discovered that batches of CHAT vaccine had been locally prepared in Stanleyville/Kisangani. Put simply, the original vaccine had been regrown locally in the cells and sera of common chimpanzees, hundreds of which were available (supposedly merely for testing polio vaccine safety) at Lindi camp. I have since learnt that in the late 1950s it was standard practice for recipient laboratories in places like Europe, Africa and Asia to regrow American-produced polio vaccines in locally available tissue culture cells. This had the effect of boosting both quantity and also titer, or concentration. (However, in the case of the Stanleyville research, there may also have been an experimental aspect to the work.)

Plotkin, Koprowski and Osterrieth have stated that my claims that CHAT was prepared locally in Stanleyville are based on the memories of unreliable African technicians, who didn’t know what was going on. I find this (to say the least) quite condescending. However, since my 2001 trip, further (senior, non-African) sources have confirmed this crucial detail about local preparation in Stanleyville, and it is now apparent that the majority of the CHAT vaccine used in Africa (with the exception of a final campaign in Burundi, which occurred at the start of 1960) was locally prepared.

(One further related point. Plotkin claims that since The River was published, “the author seems to have abandoned the idea that contamination occurred in Philadelphia and now postulates wildcat production of CHAT in chimpanzee cells in Stanleyville”. What he fails to say is that my initial belief that the vaccine could only have been made in America or Europe was based almost exclusively on assurances provided by himself and Dr Koprowski, and by doctors Osterrieth and Ninane from the LMS. I can now prove that significant parts of the information provided by these doctors in their early interviews was deliberately misleading. I detected much of this false testimony before The River was published in 1999, but as I say, only obtained confirmation that vaccine had been locally prepared in chimp cells in 2001.)

b) [Paragraph 2] Plotkin, Hahn and Korber claim that the ancestor of HIV-1 existed in or around 1931, long before the polio vaccine trials. However, this is pseudo-science, using a false model to “calculate” the age of the virus. (More than any other organism known to medical science, HIV-1 evolves through recombination, a process whereby two different strains of the virus meet inside a cell – either in a living host, or else in a tissue culture in a laboratory – and exchange genetic material to produce an entirely new progeny. Some have described this process as “viral sex”. 90% of HIV-1’s evolution occurs through recombination, and only 10% through mutation, an entirely different process. Yet the dating techniques of the geneticists like Korber are able to measure only mutation. The geneticists’ claims that they can date the age of the HIVs by theoretical calculations are, quite simply, spurious.)

[Paragraph 2] Plotkin claims that “the chimpanzees available to the [Stanleyville] research team in the late 1950s, had they been infected with SIV, would have been infected by strains distant from HIV-1”, but this is pure speculation.

Plotkin and Hahn both assert that the true ancestor of pandemic HIV-1 is found only in one sub-species of the common chimp, Pan troglodytes troglodytes [ptt], the range of which begins 800 miles west of Kisangani/Stanleyville. It is true that the genetic analysis of chimp SIVs that has been published to date suggests that SIV-infected Ptt chimps seem to have a virus that is normally about 10% closer genetically to pandemic HIV-1 than the SIV of the Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii [Pts] chimps that are found near Stanleyville/Kisangani. However, fewer than 1 in 200 chimp troops from central Africa have been sampled, and all the sampling carried out to date has been done either by Beatrice Hahn or her collaborators. There is evidence to suggest that certain interesting results that do not fit with her overall thesis may not have been published.

Furthermore, this entire line of enquiry may well be irrelevant. Firstly, because I have recently located a document that proves what I had long suspected from anecdotal accounts: that the Ptt sub-species of chimps was also present among the research animals used at Stanleyville. The second reason is that if pandemic HIV-1 arose through recombination between different chimp SIV strains, as appears increasingly likely, then the SIVs from either sub-species (Ptt or Pts), or indeed both sub-species, could have provided the necessary ingredients.

Lastly, Dr Plotkin raises doubts about whether the Stanleyville chimps would have been SIV-infected. However, roughly 13% of wild chimpanzees (both Ptt and Pts) seem to be naturally infected with SIV, meaning that approximately 50 of the chimps that were specifically used for the polio research are likely to have been SIV-infected upon arrival at Lindi camp. Co-caging and group caging of chimps were practised at both Lindi and the LMS research hangar, which would have readily allowed onward transmission of SIVs, whether from Pts or Ptt, to further chimpanzees of either sub-species.

d) [Paragraph 1] Plotkin writes that: “A correlation between locations where CHAT was administered and early possible cases of AIDS was also proposed [by Hooper], though the supposed correlation was later heavily criticised.” The claims by Dr De Cock that there was no epidemiological linkage between the vaccinations and the first appearances of HIV-1 and AIDS were inherently slanted, and all the more so because he inexplicably excluded the vaccinations in Ruanda-Urundi, which made up two-thirds of the total, from his analysis. Plotkin’s own analysis of the data was indeed heavily critical of me, but it was also highly revealing, being littered with mistakes, which served to show both his bias and his ignorance of African geography.

An experienced statistician has since looked at the raw data, and concluded that the correlations between CHAT vaccinations and early HIV-1 are “highly significant” (meaning there is a chance of less than 1 in 1,000 that the findings result from coincidence), and those between the vaccinations and early AIDS are “significant” (a less than 1 in 100 chance of coincidence). These two quite separate epidemiological confirmations are immensely important, and the work will be published soon.

e) [Paragraph 3] Plotkin claims that virologists who visited the LMS in the 1950s state that “Osterrieth’s attempts at simian cell culture [ie making tissue culture] post-date the vaccination campaign in which HIV-transfer supposedly occurred.” Yet information obtained from Pierre Doupagne in Belgium, and his assistant in Africa indicates the opposite. They claim that they were preparing chimp cultures from 1956 (the year Lindi camp opened) at latest, and supplying them to Osterrieth. Furthermore, one of Osterrieth’s assistants states that Osterrieth was making polio vaccine in the weeks immediately preceding the key vaccination campaign in Ruzizi (which occurred in February to April 1958).

f) [Paragraph 4] Plotkin suggests that technicians and other persons working at the LMS may have confused “diluting a [vaccine] stock made in Philadelphia” with “making new vaccine”. Again, this is disingenuous and misleading. Both contemporary articles and the personal diary of one of the vaccinators reveal that dilution of the CHAT vaccine in Africa took place not in the lab, but in the field, on the morning that the vaccine was to be used. Later, Plotkin writes that: “Those scientists with a technical background sufficient to make the distinction [between diluting vaccine and making vaccine] are unanimous in doubting that a vaccine could have been produced [in Stanleyville].” This claim is absurd. Growing polio vaccine virus in local tissue culture is not a difficult process, provided that all lab tools and glassware are kept sterile. Killed polio vaccines were being produced locally in Africa in the cells of local primates from 1953 onwards, and live vaccines were being similarly produced from 1955 onwards. One of the places where both types of vaccine were being produced was the small veterinary lab of Gabu, in the same Congolese province as Stanleyville. The vaccine-maker was an inconoclastic Polish vet called Alexandre Jezierski, with whose work both Koprowski and his Belgian collaborators were familiar, from (respectively) 1955 and 1954 onwards.

g) [Paragraph 5] Plotkin states that “Although the journalist in question will never abandon his ideas, they have not been confirmed, and it is unfortunate that they have hindered eradication of polio by OPV in Africa.” The latter claim, just like similar claims by Dr Koprowski, is false, and is part of a smear campaign designed to present me as the villain of the piece. Different peoples in Africa have been refusing to accept vaccines since the beginning of the last century, and refusing polio vaccines since at least the 1970s. The reasons given are various, and include fears that the vaccines are contaminated with substances such as “family planning drugs”, “cancer” and “AIDS”. Plotkin and Koprowski’s claims are pure fabrication, for not one of the articles they cite actually blames vaccine refusal on my work. Indeed, one of the articles cited by Koprowski does not even exist! In reality, the recent rejection of polio vaccines in northern Nigeria seems to have been largely based on religio-cultural-political concerns following 9/11.

Furthermore, virologists with whom I have spoken believe that for a variety of technical reasons, complete eradication of poliovirus from the planet may prove to be extremely difficult. It may therefore suit the interests of certain scientists to try to blame the failure to eradicate polio (which was originally scheduled for year 2000) on myself. I should perhaps add that in all my public statements on this issue, I have always stressed that: “as far as is known, modern polio vaccines are safe.”

Dr Plotkin asserts that “[t]he journalist in question will never abandon his ideas”, but again he is wrong. I am perfectly prepared to abandon my “ideas” if Dr Plotkin or others ever produce a single piece of compelling proof to refute the OPV theory. Up to now, all Dr Plotkin has managed to produce is a mixture of indignation, sloppy science, and false testimonies. There is now so much evidence of false reporting by Plotkin and his collaborators, and by some of the sources he quotes, that no impartial observer could reasonably explain away all the instances as “honest mistakes” or the product of “faulty memories”. It is now quite clear that a deliberate cover-up is underway.

In the last seven years this cover-up has been greatly assisted by scientific friends and colleagues of Plotkin and Koprowski, some of whom are quite innocently inclined to “take their word for it”. The cover-up has also been assisted by certain defensive virologists and public health officials who believe that an attack on the safety of any vaccine, even an experimental vaccine used only in the late 1950s, constitutes an attack on the safety of vaccination per se.

A major role in the process has been played by the two main pillars of scientific enquiry, Nature and Science, which over the last seven years have regularly published (to great fanfare) new “disproofs” and “refutations” of the OPV theory, not one of which has stood up scientifically. Yet these journals steadfastly refuse to publish the responses of those (including myself) who think differently, or even to allow the theory they are so determined to refute to be laid out, just once, in their pages.

It is surely no coincidence that all major coverage of AIDS in Nature is channelled through Robin Weiss, while major AIDS coverage in Science is apparently routed through another committed defender of Koprowski, Jon Cohen.

– o –

I have already written far more than I intended to write. Apart from supplying some supporting references (mainly essays from my web-site, which themselves cite a wide range of references), I will now bring this response to a close.

One thing I should make clear, however, is that I am fully familiar with the libel laws, and that I can support the claims made in this letter.

Dr Plotkin has tried threatening me legally on two occasions, and his old boss, Dr Koprowski, has done so on three occasions. On each occasion, I responded robustly, and never heard from them again.

In reality, these two men will never carry through a legal suit against me, because they are fully aware (a) that even if I had to finance it myself, I would go to court to fight them; (b) that they would not win such a court case; and (c) that so much information directly confounding their claims would come to light that the event would almost certainly arouse considerable media interest.

Their technique, instead, is quietly to pressure people such as television executives, film festival organisers, book publishers and journal publishers with letters of the type you have received, letters which falsely seek to present the debate as one that they have already won, and letters which (in the past at least) have often hinted at the possibility of legal action. Using such clandestine approaches, they have achieved a surprising degree of success in promoting their own fabricated versions of history, and suppressing the OPV theory.

I believe that such smoke and mirrors techniques have traditionally been used in the past by certain corporations, such as those that have been determined to promote the safety of cigarette-smoking, or to present the concept of global warming as a myth.

I estimate that I get to hear about only some 20% to 30% of such approaches – but whenever I have the time, I try – as here – to provide appropriate counter-evidence.

If you do wish to have further details, I would be willing to cooperate, and could, if required, supply supporting material for the claims made in this letter. However, I’m afraid I could only do this if I were paid professional rates for my time. I am 100% independent in my research, and I have placed a lot of my written material in the public domain so that it is feely available, for instance on my web-site, www.aidsorigins.com. However, I am currently busy with my own work, and so would need to charge for any further hours or days spent following up this issue on your behalf.

I hope that this discussion of the Plotkin documents has been of assistance to you.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Edward Hooper

References

(all of which can be found on www.aidsorigins.com):

1) A response to the alleged scientific “disproofs” of the OPV theory that are claimed by Dr Plotkin and his collaborators:

“The latest scientific evidence strongly supports the OPV theory”,E. Hooper; January 2005.

2) An analysis of the slanted nature of the debate at the Royal Society:

The Politics of a Scientific Meeting: The Origin-of-AIDS Debate at the Royal Society , B. Martin, Politics and the Life Sciences 20 (2) 119-130 (September 2005).

3) A response to Dr Plotkin’s claims that The River has endangered the global polio eradication campaign:

“As far as is known, modern polio vaccines are safe”, E. Hooper; February 2004.

4) My latest article responding to Dr Beatrice Hahn’s claims that she has discovered the “source” of HIV-1:

“The Hollywooding of Science”, E. Hooper; August 2006.

5) If proved, the OPV theory might spark a billion-dollar class-action law suit. For this and other reasons, there are genuine concerns that one of Dr Plotkin’s supporters might be tempted to fabricate “evidence” in a bid to support his position. In the following article, I highlight the genuine concerns that one of these scientists might be tempted to cheat in a big way.

“Three warnings about potential future malpractice by members of ‘the bushmeat group’”, E. Hooper; August 2006.

6) In this article, I describe how, in 2001, doctors collaborating with Stanley Plotkin smuggled highly relevant 1950s biopsy and autopsy samples out of Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville); nothing has been heard of them since.

“The annexing of the Stanleyville samples”, E. Hooper; November 2004.

A new drama documentary about the origins of AIDS.

The Seeds of Doom
Story of a controversial theory about the origin of AIDS

The author and performer of this one-man play, Christian Biasco, is a 33-year-old Italian-speaking Swiss man who is taking a DEA (which falls somewhere between a Masters and a PhD) in the History of Medicine at the University of Geneva. After first coming across the origins-of-AIDS controversy in 2001, he decided to choose this as his specialist topic, and as the subject of his dissertation.

He also decided to write a play on the subject, “The Seeds of Doom”, which he has performed in over 30 venues in Switzerland and northern Italy in the last three years, eliciting warm praise and considerable interest among those who have seen it. Christian refers to it as a “drama-documentary”, and whenever possible he takes questions from the audience after the performance.

Continue reading “The Seeds of Doom”

“Science” magazine rejects yet another submission that opposes the bushmeat hypothesis of AIDS origin.

On June 6th, 2006, I submitted the following letter (“The Origins of Pandemic HIV-1: A Different Hypothesis”) to “Science” magazine, in response to Keele and Hahn’s paper about Cameroonian chimp SIVs, published in late May in Science express.

This letter contains 300 words, the maximum permitted by Science for letters to the editor, and I also submitted a version at 358 words, which included some material about the flimsy nature of the phylogenetic dating of HIV-1.

On June 9th, I received a rejection note from “Science editorial” by e-mail. It did not afford the possibility of discussion or reply.

Given the history of rejection by Science and Nature of all submissions which question the hegemony of the bushmeat hypothesis of origin, this latest rejection letter is perhaps not surprising.

What is worrying about it, however, is that these two magazines have consistently declined to publish any article setting out the OPV/AIDS theory, and yet have repeatedly published (with brash headlines and great fanfare) articles, letters and opinion pieces which falsely claim that the OPV theory has “died its final death”, or that it has been refuted or disproved.

I find this obsession with allegedly “disproving” a hypothesis which they have never even published to be rather revealing.

Viewed within that context, one can only conclude that on this, one of the most vital biomedical issues of the last hundred years, Science magazine, just like Nature magazine, is determined to present only a distorted and politically acceptable version of the truth to its readership.

A most depressing conclusion.

Ed Hooper. 27/07/06.

The Origins of Pandemic HIV-1: A Different Hypothesis.

Dear Sir/Madam,

The ongoing SIV testing of wild chimpanzees by investigators Keele, Hahn and colleagues is welcome. However, under 0.5% of central African chimp troops have been sampled, which raises doubts about their certainty that the Pan troglodytes troglodytes (Ptt) SIVs from south-eastern Cameroon represent the ancestral “reservoir”, or “source”, of pandemic HIV-1.[1]

But even if they’re correct, their data seem as supportive of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory of AIDS origin as of their bushmeat theory.

They posit an infected chimp-hunter or bushmeat-seller who sparks no local outbreaks, but who instead travels down the Sangha and Congo rivers, across 650 miles and two national boundaries, and delivers the virus to Leopoldville, where they believe the AIDS pandemic was “spawned”.

Others, however, might visualise Ptt chimpanzees being transported 1050 miles down the Sangha to Coquilhatville (Mbandaka) district, and up the Congo (again: two steamer journeys and two national boundaries), to arrive at the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville (LMS), or at nearby Lindi camp, where experiments with CHAT OPV were conducted in 400-odd chimps in the 1950s. These were mostly Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii (whose SIVs appear, thus far, less closely related to pandemic HIV-1). However, chimp purchases by LMS scientists apparently sparked an influx from downriver, and the sparse remaining records reveal one chimp from Coquilhatville, and one Ptt, at Lindi and the LMS.[2] Co-caging and group-caging were routine at both places.

Hahn’s new Ptt SIVs from Cameroon are closer to pandemic HIV-1 than previously-tested SIVs, but are hardly “dead ringers”, as she claims.[3] A likelier explanation for bridging the genetic gap between the viruses is recombination in vitro in Stanleyville between SIVs infecting tissue cultures (comprising chimpanzee cells and sera) used locally to prepare CHAT, or in vivo recombination – either in Lindi chimps, or CHAT vaccinees from 31 known African trials.[4]

Yours faithfully

E.J. Hooper

References

[1] B.F. Keele, B.H. Hahn et al., “Chimpanzee Reservoirs of Pandemic and Nonpandemic HIV-1”, [Science Express: 10.1126/science.1126531]; P. M. Sharp, “Where AIDS Came From” [Webcast]; 13th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections; Denver, CO, USA; February 5-8th, 2006.

[2] F. Deinhardt, Lindi Databook, 1959. M.M. Vastesaeger et al.; “L’atherosclerose experimentale du chimpanze. Recherches preliminaires”; Acta Cardiol.; 1965; Supp. II; 283-297.

[3] “The Age of AIDS”, PBS documentary, 2006. M. Carmichael, “How it began: HIV before the age of AIDS”; PBS web-site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/virus/origins.html.

[4] “The Origins of AIDS”; MFP/Galafilm documentary, 2004. E. Hooper, “The source of pandemic AIDS? Beatrice Hahn’s latest SIV sequences from Cameroonian chimps: an alternative interpretation”; www.aidsorigins.com.

[NB. The latter essay was an early version of “The Hollywooding of Science”, available on this web-site.