Serpo
2nd September 2011, 04:03 AM
http://www.rense.com/general94/gayvac.htm
Ever since the AIDS epidemic became official in June 1981, there have been rumors that AIDS is a man-made disease. Although this theory has been discredited by "scientific consensus," there is evidence linking the outbreak of this new disease to a vaccine experiment conducted on gay men in New York City, as well as in other U.S. cities, between 1978 and 1981.
The first epidemic cases of AIDS in America were uncovered exclusively in young, previously healthy, and mostly white gay men in Manhattan in 1979. The cause was unknown until 1984 when a virus, later named HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), was accepted as the infectious agent. How a sexually transmitted disease (STD), purportedly originating in Africa, was transferred into a so-called "gay disease" in New York City was left unexplained, except for preposterous stories like the gay Canadian airline steward Gaetan Dugas, who was demonized in the media and tabloids as "the man who brought AIDS to America."
THE GAY VACCINE EXPERIMENTS BEFORE AIDS (1978-1981)
Beginning in 1974, workers in a bloodmobile provided by the New York Blood Center in Manhattan began soliciting 8, 906 gay men for a hepatitis B vaccine research study (Koblin et al, 1992). Over the next few years more that 10,000 blood samples were donated by gays willing to participate in the development of a vaccine that might prevent hepatitis B. This viral disease was an STD disproportionately affecting sexually-active homosexuals.
The AIDS epidemic in the U.S. directly traces back to this government-sponsored vaccine experiment! Eventually, 1,083 gay men were recruited to be injected with an experimental hepatitis B vaccine at the New York Blood Center. In the months before the actual experiment began, the vaccine underwent preliminary testing for safety and immune response on two hundred physicians at New York Medical Center, as well as on twenty-eight employees of Merck & Co, which made the vaccine.
The first group of men in the actual trial were inoculated in November 1978. The experiment was confidential. Each man was given an anonymous identification number, which would be the only way they could be identified by the investigators. Each man got an initial dose of vaccine, then a repeat one month after, and a final inoculation six months later. All were asked to donate blood samples for two years after the three injections. Over a period of months, all 1,083 men would be injected. Half the men were given the experimental vaccine; the other half would serve as the control group and were given useless placebo injections. In this double-blind study, neither the men nor the investigators knew who was getting the vaccine or the placebo.
This experiment ended in September 1980. The success rate in preventing hepatitis B in the group receiving the vaccine was 92.3%. Additional experimental hep B vaccine trials, all using gay men as the guinea pig, were conducted in 1979 and 1980 in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver and St. Louis.
In May 1981, the men in the placebo group (who did not receive the vaccine) at the Blood Center were offered a chance to take the vaccine. As a result, 270 men were inoculated with the series of three shots and were asked to donate additional blood samples for two more years. Because men in the vaccine-recipient group and the placebo group were now both inoculated with the vaccine, it would no longer be possible to compare the two groups in terms of future HIV rates. Because the experiment was confidential and anonymous, the fate of the individual men in terms of acquiring HIV/AIDS in the future, could never be ascertained. In June 1981, after 41 cases of a new disease in homosexuals were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC), the AIDS epidemic became official.
THE "GAY PLAGUE" BEGINS IN MANHATTAN IN 1979
The first few cases of a new disease characterized by immunodeficiency, cancer and a previously rare form of pneumonia in young gay men, were uncovered in Manhattan in 1979. By the end of 1981 there were 160 cumulative cases from New York City; a decade later, 9,000 cases had been reported in NYC. The early cases were termed "gay related immune deficiency disease," or GRID, for short. Privately, it was called "the gay plague," with homosexuals dying from "gay cancer" in the form of Kaposi's sarcoma, and/or a rapidly fatal "gay pneumonia" caused by a yeast-like fungus.
By the end of 1979, 6.6% of 378 men who had been "hepatitis B trial participants" or who had donated blood in the experiment at the Center were already HIV- positive. By 1981, it was 20%! (This was at a time when the African AIDS epidemic was unknown.) By 1984 over 40% of the trial participants were HIV-positive (Stevens et al, 1986). These infection rates were determined in 1985 when the stored gay blood samples were retested for HIV.
A different (non-vaccine) hepatitis B study, conducted from 1978 to 1980 at the San Francisco City Clinic, recruited a cohort of 6,705 homosexuals. By 1982, 41% of all reported AIDS cases in S.F. were from this cohort. By 1989, 75% of the cohort was infected with HIV-and 1,479 had developed AIDS (Rutherford et al, 1990). Activist Tom Keske has posted an essay on his website entitled: "Was AIDS in the U.S. started intentionally?" He also provides an incriminating statistical analysis linking the AIDS outbreak in San Francisco to hepatitis B vaccine experiments conducted in that city.
In 1984, the CDC was apparently oblivious to the extremely high rate of HIV/AIDS infection in gay men who participated in the hepatitis experiments and studies, particularly at a time when the African AIDS epidemic was still largely unknown. In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, dated Dec 14, 1984, the agency simply concluded the hepatitis B vaccine was safe-and that "epidemiologic monitoring of AIDS cases and high-risk groups confirms the lack of AIDS transmission." When later studies revealed the high incidence of HIV in these men, as noted above, there was no official comment by the CDC.
To my knowledge, the CDC never tested the vaccine given to the men at the NY Blood center; and this CDC 1984 report is often cited to refute any connection between gay experiments and the AIDS outbreak. New York City quickly became the epicenter for the American epidemic, and has remained so to this day, with more that 100,000 New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS.
SIMIAN VIRUSES AND GAY VACCINE EXPERIMENTS
According to Luc Montagnier in his book "Virus" (1999), the African AIDS epidemic did not begin until the Autumn of 1982 at the earliest. There is also no epidemiologic or sexual connection between gay cases and African AIDS cases.
Was HIV introduced into gay men via a contaminated vaccine? HIV is not the first simian (i.e., monkey or chimp) virus to infect mankind. Simian virus-40 (SV40) is a cancer-causing green monkey virus that contaminated the polio vaccine, and was injected into millions of people worldwide beginning in the 1950s. SV40 was also used extensively in animals to induce cancer tumors conducted as part of the largely forgotten Special Virus Cancer Program (1964-1980). For details of this Program, see my Internet article entitled 'Blaming gays, blacks, and chimps for AIDS.'
There are strong connections between simian viruses and the experimental hep B vaccine, the gay participants, and the outbreak of AIDS. The vaccine given to gays was designed by Maurice Hilleman of Merck; and was "developed" by repeatedly injecting it into chimpanzees, as part of the safety testing of the vaccine. Could a chimp HIV-like virus have been transferred to the vaccine during the 65-week manufacturing process?
Humans and chimps have 99% of their active genetic material in common. As a result, chimps are used extensively in medical research. In 1974 veterinarians produced an AIDS-like disease in chimps by taking newborn chimps away from their mothers and feeding them virus-infected cow's milk. As a result of this interspecies transfer of virus, the chimps died of immunodeficiency, leukemia, and pneumocystis pneumonia, later known as the "gay pneumonia" of AIDS (McClure et al, 1974). Previously, leukemia had never been observed in chimps.
Also in 1974 the New York Blood Center established Vilab II, a little-publicized chimp research lab in Robertsville, Liberia, West Africa. It contained captive chimps, all of which were purposely infected with hepatitis. In 1978 Vilab began to release some chimps back into the wild and onto several islands. The Blood Center announced the closure of the lab in 2006 and the end to chimp research. Alfred Prince, a hepatitis researcher and virologist at the Blood Center, was also the Director of Vilab from 1975 to 2000.
Maurice Hilleman was well aware of simian viruses contaminating vaccines, having personally discovered SV40 in 1960 in polio vaccines. In a <http://youtube.com/>youtube.com video entitled "Merck chief brings HIV/AIDS to America, " posted by prolific AIDS origin researcher Leonard G Horowitz, Hilleman is recorded telling his colleagues, "I brought African greens [monkeys] in. I didn't know we were importing AIDS virus at the time [i.e., between 1970-1974]. His colleagues are heard laughing. Someone says, "It was you who introduced AIDS virus in." This shocking interview, conducted by Edward Shorter for WGBH public television, was cut from the TV documentary, based on Shorter's book "The Health Century" (1987), due to liability issues, undoubtedly reflecting poorly on Merck where the vaccine for gays was developed. Hilleman's assertion gives credence to the "conspiratorial" view that the most likely source of an AIDS-causing simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) virus was from a laboratory, and not from the wilds of Africa.
The close timeline between the hepatitis B vaccine trials, as well as the high incidence of HIV/AIDS in the participants, and the outbreak of the "gay plague" can hardly be denied. There are few sources, outside of medical journal reports, that reveal details of the experiment. The best source is June Goodfield's "Quest for the Killers" (1985), in a chapter entitled 'Vaccine on trial.' She emphasizes the dangerous aspects of the vaccine experiment, due to the pooling of the blood, as well as the concern regarding possible contamination of the vaccine. Hers is the only source revealing that some of the vaccine was made by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "Was something wrong with the vaccine, possibly contamination? This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one vaccine batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck's."
THE SIMIAN VIRUS ORIGIN OF HIV
Determining the simian ancestry of HIV is not the same as determining the origin of the AIDS epidemic in America. HIV is emphatically a "new virus" in humans, although its origin in simians may be ancient. The American AIDS epidemic clearly began in the late 1970s. The purported African origin of American AIDS is largely based on the genealogy of the AIDS virus in Africa. I could never understand why scientists never looked for a simian ancestor of HIV in the various primate virus labs and primate colonies in the U.S.
The simian "roots" of HIV depend on who is doing the genetic analysis. Some researchers claim that HIV has been circulating in humans since the 1930s, others date it back a century or more. A new "phylo-geographic" study suggests monkey SIVs are ancient and date back 32,000 to 75,000 years (Worobey et al, 2010).
The public was first told that HIV originated in Africa in green monkeys. This changed in 1999 when a SIV found in chimpanzees was widely accepted as the closest ancestor virus of HIV (Gao et al, 1999). Four years later, geneticists reversed themselves again, claiming HIV "didn't start its life in chimps" but arose through hybridization of two monkey strains of SIV that recombined in the chimpanzee host (Bailes et al, 2003). In other words, the ancestors of HIV were a mix of monkey immunodeficiency viruses transferred into chimps, which subsequently recombined to form a new hybrid virus with mixed genetic material. By the way, chimps are considered apes, have bigger bodies than monkeys, and are most closely related to humans. Monkeys have tails and are structurally closer to four-legged animals like cats and dogs.
Lost in all this conflicting genetic mumbo-jumbo, that few people can comprehend (including myself), was the fact that extensive mixing of simian viruses and the creation of hybrid viruses was going on for years in labs around the world in the years immediately preceding AIDS. This, in fact, is the basis of the AIDS "conspiracy theory," which proposes that the ancestor of HIV most likely originated in animal species transfer experiments in a virus laboratory. Yet this explanation is never considered by scientists. These genetic studies of HIV origin, widely reported in the major media, continue to reinforce the public perception that HIV/AIDS started in Africa.
There is no attempt made here to fully explain the origin of the horrible outbreak of AIDS in Africa beginning around 1983. This will up to future medical historians to unravel. Suffice it to say that sub-Saharan Africa has been the testing ground for pharmaceuticals and vaccines for many decades, and for massive vaccine programs with reuse of needles which could also spread HIV from person to person.
In "AIDS and the Doctors of Death" (1988), I mentioned a London Times explosive front page article connecting AIDS to extensive vaccine programs in Africa, and entitled "Smallpox vaccine triggered AIDS virus" (May 11, 1987). Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, was quoted as saying, "The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV." The full Times story never appeared in the major media in the U.S., but is available online.
Researchers have known for a long time that the particular strain of HIV that infected American gays is "subtype B." The prevalent strains in Africa are different, again suggesting that American AIDS cases did not come from Africa cases. Unlike some strains in Africa, which date back to the 1930s, a recent study by Perez-Losada at al (2010), indicates "subtype B" is quite new, dating back to around 1968, a decade before the hep B experiment. Max Essex claims the American B strain has an affinity for anal tissue and is more easily transmitted by homosexual contact and intravenous drug use, whereas the HIV subtypes in Africa tend to fuel heterosexual epidemics via a vaginal mucosal route.
THE LAB ORIGIN OF HIV IN AMERICA
Hilleman's hepatitis B vaccine was intentionally made from the pooled blood of 300 highly sexually-active gay and intravenous drug abusers in Manhattan. These men were the carriers of the hepatitis virus Hilleman required to manufacture his vaccine. As mentioned, the vaccine was developed in chimps, and took 65 weeks to make. His vaccine brew was collected in 1977. The specific year is important because there are no reports of AIDS cases at that time; and no stored American blood testing positive for HIV before that year.
In "Vaccinated" (2007) Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine developer who works for Merck, theorizes that although "HIV was likely present in the blood from which he made early preparations of his vaccine, Hilleman's choice of pepsin, urea, and formaldehyde had completely destroyed it."
In "Vaccinated," Offit is critical of my AIDS origin research. He writes, "The publisher of Alan Cantwell's book, Aries Rising Press, was founded by Cantwell himself to promote his uninformed views on the origin of the AIDS epidemic." Offit claims the American blood supply was "heavily contaminated" with HIV in the mid-1970s. He offers no documentation for this statement, nor are there any studies (or epidemic AIDS cases) which document this.
The earliest HIV-positive blood specimens in the American epidemic were uncovered in 1978-they are those deposited into the Blood Center by gay participants of the hep B experiment. There is no record of any other stored blood in the U.S testing positive for HIV, with one exception. According to "Virus Hunters of the CDC" (1996), author Joseph McCormick states six hundred blood specimens from Zaire, Africa, were sent to the CDC in 1976 during the Ebola virus outbreak. When re-tested in the mid-1980s for HIV, five of the specimens were positive. One has to wonder if other labs in the U.S were also harboring HIV-infected African blood used in animal (or human) research.
Unlike Offit, I have never promoted the idea that HIV was contained in Hilleman's blood brew in 1977. Yet Offit insists HIV first entered the U.S. a few years before Hilleman began working on his vaccine. He notes Hilleman would be "the first (and last) to use human blood to make a vaccine. He didn't know until years later that the blood was heavily contaminated with HIV."
Offit makes no mention of Hilleman importing HIV/AIDS via his monkeys and chimps, nor does he cite the 20% HIV infection rate of the men who participated in the trial at the Blood Center in 1981. He simply assures us the vaccine given to gay men was safe and free of HIV.
Ever since the AIDS epidemic became official in June 1981, there have been rumors that AIDS is a man-made disease. Although this theory has been discredited by "scientific consensus," there is evidence linking the outbreak of this new disease to a vaccine experiment conducted on gay men in New York City, as well as in other U.S. cities, between 1978 and 1981.
The first epidemic cases of AIDS in America were uncovered exclusively in young, previously healthy, and mostly white gay men in Manhattan in 1979. The cause was unknown until 1984 when a virus, later named HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), was accepted as the infectious agent. How a sexually transmitted disease (STD), purportedly originating in Africa, was transferred into a so-called "gay disease" in New York City was left unexplained, except for preposterous stories like the gay Canadian airline steward Gaetan Dugas, who was demonized in the media and tabloids as "the man who brought AIDS to America."
THE GAY VACCINE EXPERIMENTS BEFORE AIDS (1978-1981)
Beginning in 1974, workers in a bloodmobile provided by the New York Blood Center in Manhattan began soliciting 8, 906 gay men for a hepatitis B vaccine research study (Koblin et al, 1992). Over the next few years more that 10,000 blood samples were donated by gays willing to participate in the development of a vaccine that might prevent hepatitis B. This viral disease was an STD disproportionately affecting sexually-active homosexuals.
The AIDS epidemic in the U.S. directly traces back to this government-sponsored vaccine experiment! Eventually, 1,083 gay men were recruited to be injected with an experimental hepatitis B vaccine at the New York Blood Center. In the months before the actual experiment began, the vaccine underwent preliminary testing for safety and immune response on two hundred physicians at New York Medical Center, as well as on twenty-eight employees of Merck & Co, which made the vaccine.
The first group of men in the actual trial were inoculated in November 1978. The experiment was confidential. Each man was given an anonymous identification number, which would be the only way they could be identified by the investigators. Each man got an initial dose of vaccine, then a repeat one month after, and a final inoculation six months later. All were asked to donate blood samples for two years after the three injections. Over a period of months, all 1,083 men would be injected. Half the men were given the experimental vaccine; the other half would serve as the control group and were given useless placebo injections. In this double-blind study, neither the men nor the investigators knew who was getting the vaccine or the placebo.
This experiment ended in September 1980. The success rate in preventing hepatitis B in the group receiving the vaccine was 92.3%. Additional experimental hep B vaccine trials, all using gay men as the guinea pig, were conducted in 1979 and 1980 in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver and St. Louis.
In May 1981, the men in the placebo group (who did not receive the vaccine) at the Blood Center were offered a chance to take the vaccine. As a result, 270 men were inoculated with the series of three shots and were asked to donate additional blood samples for two more years. Because men in the vaccine-recipient group and the placebo group were now both inoculated with the vaccine, it would no longer be possible to compare the two groups in terms of future HIV rates. Because the experiment was confidential and anonymous, the fate of the individual men in terms of acquiring HIV/AIDS in the future, could never be ascertained. In June 1981, after 41 cases of a new disease in homosexuals were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC), the AIDS epidemic became official.
THE "GAY PLAGUE" BEGINS IN MANHATTAN IN 1979
The first few cases of a new disease characterized by immunodeficiency, cancer and a previously rare form of pneumonia in young gay men, were uncovered in Manhattan in 1979. By the end of 1981 there were 160 cumulative cases from New York City; a decade later, 9,000 cases had been reported in NYC. The early cases were termed "gay related immune deficiency disease," or GRID, for short. Privately, it was called "the gay plague," with homosexuals dying from "gay cancer" in the form of Kaposi's sarcoma, and/or a rapidly fatal "gay pneumonia" caused by a yeast-like fungus.
By the end of 1979, 6.6% of 378 men who had been "hepatitis B trial participants" or who had donated blood in the experiment at the Center were already HIV- positive. By 1981, it was 20%! (This was at a time when the African AIDS epidemic was unknown.) By 1984 over 40% of the trial participants were HIV-positive (Stevens et al, 1986). These infection rates were determined in 1985 when the stored gay blood samples were retested for HIV.
A different (non-vaccine) hepatitis B study, conducted from 1978 to 1980 at the San Francisco City Clinic, recruited a cohort of 6,705 homosexuals. By 1982, 41% of all reported AIDS cases in S.F. were from this cohort. By 1989, 75% of the cohort was infected with HIV-and 1,479 had developed AIDS (Rutherford et al, 1990). Activist Tom Keske has posted an essay on his website entitled: "Was AIDS in the U.S. started intentionally?" He also provides an incriminating statistical analysis linking the AIDS outbreak in San Francisco to hepatitis B vaccine experiments conducted in that city.
In 1984, the CDC was apparently oblivious to the extremely high rate of HIV/AIDS infection in gay men who participated in the hepatitis experiments and studies, particularly at a time when the African AIDS epidemic was still largely unknown. In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, dated Dec 14, 1984, the agency simply concluded the hepatitis B vaccine was safe-and that "epidemiologic monitoring of AIDS cases and high-risk groups confirms the lack of AIDS transmission." When later studies revealed the high incidence of HIV in these men, as noted above, there was no official comment by the CDC.
To my knowledge, the CDC never tested the vaccine given to the men at the NY Blood center; and this CDC 1984 report is often cited to refute any connection between gay experiments and the AIDS outbreak. New York City quickly became the epicenter for the American epidemic, and has remained so to this day, with more that 100,000 New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS.
SIMIAN VIRUSES AND GAY VACCINE EXPERIMENTS
According to Luc Montagnier in his book "Virus" (1999), the African AIDS epidemic did not begin until the Autumn of 1982 at the earliest. There is also no epidemiologic or sexual connection between gay cases and African AIDS cases.
Was HIV introduced into gay men via a contaminated vaccine? HIV is not the first simian (i.e., monkey or chimp) virus to infect mankind. Simian virus-40 (SV40) is a cancer-causing green monkey virus that contaminated the polio vaccine, and was injected into millions of people worldwide beginning in the 1950s. SV40 was also used extensively in animals to induce cancer tumors conducted as part of the largely forgotten Special Virus Cancer Program (1964-1980). For details of this Program, see my Internet article entitled 'Blaming gays, blacks, and chimps for AIDS.'
There are strong connections between simian viruses and the experimental hep B vaccine, the gay participants, and the outbreak of AIDS. The vaccine given to gays was designed by Maurice Hilleman of Merck; and was "developed" by repeatedly injecting it into chimpanzees, as part of the safety testing of the vaccine. Could a chimp HIV-like virus have been transferred to the vaccine during the 65-week manufacturing process?
Humans and chimps have 99% of their active genetic material in common. As a result, chimps are used extensively in medical research. In 1974 veterinarians produced an AIDS-like disease in chimps by taking newborn chimps away from their mothers and feeding them virus-infected cow's milk. As a result of this interspecies transfer of virus, the chimps died of immunodeficiency, leukemia, and pneumocystis pneumonia, later known as the "gay pneumonia" of AIDS (McClure et al, 1974). Previously, leukemia had never been observed in chimps.
Also in 1974 the New York Blood Center established Vilab II, a little-publicized chimp research lab in Robertsville, Liberia, West Africa. It contained captive chimps, all of which were purposely infected with hepatitis. In 1978 Vilab began to release some chimps back into the wild and onto several islands. The Blood Center announced the closure of the lab in 2006 and the end to chimp research. Alfred Prince, a hepatitis researcher and virologist at the Blood Center, was also the Director of Vilab from 1975 to 2000.
Maurice Hilleman was well aware of simian viruses contaminating vaccines, having personally discovered SV40 in 1960 in polio vaccines. In a <http://youtube.com/>youtube.com video entitled "Merck chief brings HIV/AIDS to America, " posted by prolific AIDS origin researcher Leonard G Horowitz, Hilleman is recorded telling his colleagues, "I brought African greens [monkeys] in. I didn't know we were importing AIDS virus at the time [i.e., between 1970-1974]. His colleagues are heard laughing. Someone says, "It was you who introduced AIDS virus in." This shocking interview, conducted by Edward Shorter for WGBH public television, was cut from the TV documentary, based on Shorter's book "The Health Century" (1987), due to liability issues, undoubtedly reflecting poorly on Merck where the vaccine for gays was developed. Hilleman's assertion gives credence to the "conspiratorial" view that the most likely source of an AIDS-causing simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) virus was from a laboratory, and not from the wilds of Africa.
The close timeline between the hepatitis B vaccine trials, as well as the high incidence of HIV/AIDS in the participants, and the outbreak of the "gay plague" can hardly be denied. There are few sources, outside of medical journal reports, that reveal details of the experiment. The best source is June Goodfield's "Quest for the Killers" (1985), in a chapter entitled 'Vaccine on trial.' She emphasizes the dangerous aspects of the vaccine experiment, due to the pooling of the blood, as well as the concern regarding possible contamination of the vaccine. Hers is the only source revealing that some of the vaccine was made by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "Was something wrong with the vaccine, possibly contamination? This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one vaccine batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck's."
THE SIMIAN VIRUS ORIGIN OF HIV
Determining the simian ancestry of HIV is not the same as determining the origin of the AIDS epidemic in America. HIV is emphatically a "new virus" in humans, although its origin in simians may be ancient. The American AIDS epidemic clearly began in the late 1970s. The purported African origin of American AIDS is largely based on the genealogy of the AIDS virus in Africa. I could never understand why scientists never looked for a simian ancestor of HIV in the various primate virus labs and primate colonies in the U.S.
The simian "roots" of HIV depend on who is doing the genetic analysis. Some researchers claim that HIV has been circulating in humans since the 1930s, others date it back a century or more. A new "phylo-geographic" study suggests monkey SIVs are ancient and date back 32,000 to 75,000 years (Worobey et al, 2010).
The public was first told that HIV originated in Africa in green monkeys. This changed in 1999 when a SIV found in chimpanzees was widely accepted as the closest ancestor virus of HIV (Gao et al, 1999). Four years later, geneticists reversed themselves again, claiming HIV "didn't start its life in chimps" but arose through hybridization of two monkey strains of SIV that recombined in the chimpanzee host (Bailes et al, 2003). In other words, the ancestors of HIV were a mix of monkey immunodeficiency viruses transferred into chimps, which subsequently recombined to form a new hybrid virus with mixed genetic material. By the way, chimps are considered apes, have bigger bodies than monkeys, and are most closely related to humans. Monkeys have tails and are structurally closer to four-legged animals like cats and dogs.
Lost in all this conflicting genetic mumbo-jumbo, that few people can comprehend (including myself), was the fact that extensive mixing of simian viruses and the creation of hybrid viruses was going on for years in labs around the world in the years immediately preceding AIDS. This, in fact, is the basis of the AIDS "conspiracy theory," which proposes that the ancestor of HIV most likely originated in animal species transfer experiments in a virus laboratory. Yet this explanation is never considered by scientists. These genetic studies of HIV origin, widely reported in the major media, continue to reinforce the public perception that HIV/AIDS started in Africa.
There is no attempt made here to fully explain the origin of the horrible outbreak of AIDS in Africa beginning around 1983. This will up to future medical historians to unravel. Suffice it to say that sub-Saharan Africa has been the testing ground for pharmaceuticals and vaccines for many decades, and for massive vaccine programs with reuse of needles which could also spread HIV from person to person.
In "AIDS and the Doctors of Death" (1988), I mentioned a London Times explosive front page article connecting AIDS to extensive vaccine programs in Africa, and entitled "Smallpox vaccine triggered AIDS virus" (May 11, 1987). Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, was quoted as saying, "The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV." The full Times story never appeared in the major media in the U.S., but is available online.
Researchers have known for a long time that the particular strain of HIV that infected American gays is "subtype B." The prevalent strains in Africa are different, again suggesting that American AIDS cases did not come from Africa cases. Unlike some strains in Africa, which date back to the 1930s, a recent study by Perez-Losada at al (2010), indicates "subtype B" is quite new, dating back to around 1968, a decade before the hep B experiment. Max Essex claims the American B strain has an affinity for anal tissue and is more easily transmitted by homosexual contact and intravenous drug use, whereas the HIV subtypes in Africa tend to fuel heterosexual epidemics via a vaginal mucosal route.
THE LAB ORIGIN OF HIV IN AMERICA
Hilleman's hepatitis B vaccine was intentionally made from the pooled blood of 300 highly sexually-active gay and intravenous drug abusers in Manhattan. These men were the carriers of the hepatitis virus Hilleman required to manufacture his vaccine. As mentioned, the vaccine was developed in chimps, and took 65 weeks to make. His vaccine brew was collected in 1977. The specific year is important because there are no reports of AIDS cases at that time; and no stored American blood testing positive for HIV before that year.
In "Vaccinated" (2007) Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine developer who works for Merck, theorizes that although "HIV was likely present in the blood from which he made early preparations of his vaccine, Hilleman's choice of pepsin, urea, and formaldehyde had completely destroyed it."
In "Vaccinated," Offit is critical of my AIDS origin research. He writes, "The publisher of Alan Cantwell's book, Aries Rising Press, was founded by Cantwell himself to promote his uninformed views on the origin of the AIDS epidemic." Offit claims the American blood supply was "heavily contaminated" with HIV in the mid-1970s. He offers no documentation for this statement, nor are there any studies (or epidemic AIDS cases) which document this.
The earliest HIV-positive blood specimens in the American epidemic were uncovered in 1978-they are those deposited into the Blood Center by gay participants of the hep B experiment. There is no record of any other stored blood in the U.S testing positive for HIV, with one exception. According to "Virus Hunters of the CDC" (1996), author Joseph McCormick states six hundred blood specimens from Zaire, Africa, were sent to the CDC in 1976 during the Ebola virus outbreak. When re-tested in the mid-1980s for HIV, five of the specimens were positive. One has to wonder if other labs in the U.S were also harboring HIV-infected African blood used in animal (or human) research.
Unlike Offit, I have never promoted the idea that HIV was contained in Hilleman's blood brew in 1977. Yet Offit insists HIV first entered the U.S. a few years before Hilleman began working on his vaccine. He notes Hilleman would be "the first (and last) to use human blood to make a vaccine. He didn't know until years later that the blood was heavily contaminated with HIV."
Offit makes no mention of Hilleman importing HIV/AIDS via his monkeys and chimps, nor does he cite the 20% HIV infection rate of the men who participated in the trial at the Blood Center in 1981. He simply assures us the vaccine given to gay men was safe and free of HIV.