tim wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2025 8:36 am
Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science
Dr. Judy Mikovits is a modern-day Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant researcher shaking up the old boys’ club of science with her groundbreaking discoveries. And like many women who have trespassed into the world of men, she uncovered decades-old secrets that many would prefer to stay buried.
What I Really Think about HIV and Ebola
	
	The first concept I want you to understand is called zoonosis, or
	more properly, zoonotic diseases. If you think it’s a funny word
	and you immediately imagined a picture of a zoo, you wouldn’t be
	far off. Zoonosis literally means a disease which can spread between
	animals and humans.
	It may surprise you given my reputation as a renegade, but I
	believe the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) can occasionally
	provide good, basic information to the public. Here is what they
	have on their website about zoonotic diseases.
	Every year, tens of thousands of Americans will get sick
	from diseases spread between animals and people. These are known as
	zoonotic diseases. Zoonotic means infectious diseases that are
	spread between animals and people. Because these diseases cause
	sickness or death in people, CDC is always tracking them.
	Animals provide many benefits to people. Many people
	interact with animals in their daily lives, both at home and away
	from home. Pets offer companionship and entertainment, with millions
	of households having one or more pets . . .
	However, some animals can carry harmful genes that can
	be shared with people and cause illness—these are known as
	zoonotic diseases or zoonoses. Zoonotic diseases are caused by
	harmful germs like viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi. These
	germs can cause many different types of illnesses in people and
	animals ranging from mild to serious illness to death. Some animals
	can appear healthy even when they are carrying germs that can make
	people sick.
	And the biggest zoonotic disease that is not covered in that list
	is HIV-AIDS, which affected more than sixty million people leading
	to our world’s greatest modern plague. While a good deal of ink
	has been dedicated to the question of how prejudice against the gay
	lifestyle delayed efforts to properly address the disease, our job
	as scientists is to provide an explanation of events in the past and
	how problems might be avoided in the future.
	Let’s make sure we understand our terms. The human
	immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is linked to the condition known as
	acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). There was a brief time
	when the disease was known as gay-related immune disease (GRID), and
	many activists claim the name change to AIDS prompted a more
	balanced examination of the disease. Perhaps this is true.
	But what of the genesis of the retrovirus HIV? Where did it come
	from?
	We have a clear answer.
	It came from a primate. The field agrees the precursor to HIV was
	the simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV.
	To be more precise, the human virus came from a monkey or
	chimpanzee virus. 
	What we were told at the time was that the disease probably
	jumped to humans as a result of Africans forgetting how to cook
	their food, in this case chimpanzees, often referred to as “bush
	meat,” and that the promiscuous sexual lifestyles of African
	peoples (with implications of possible bestiality with primates) led
	to the cross-species jump and spread of the virus among the human
	population. I am now appalled that at the time we did not more
	closely question these assumptions.
	Since that time, there have been two competing and, in my mind,
	closely related theories of how a chimpanzee retrovirus made the
	jump to humans.
	The first was popularized by the journalist Edward Hooper and
	expanded upon in his lengthy 1999 book, The River: A Journey to the
	Source of HIV and AIDS, for which he conducted more than six hundred
	interviews. Of the interviews conducted, Hooper was most impressed
	with evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton, who, along with other
	independent researchers such as Louis Pascal, Tom Curtis, and Blaine
	Elswood, was proposing an idea that, before my work with XMRV, I
	would have found quite radical. They proposed that the jump from
	chimpanzees to humans came as a result of vaccine trials in the
	Belgian Congo from 1957 to 1960 in which more than five hundred
	common chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) were killed so
	that their kidney cells and sera could be used to grow the oral
	polio vaccine. This vaccine was subsequently administered to more
	than a million Africans during that time period.
	Hooper suggests there was great resistance to this idea, since
	even in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was little public
	support for the idea of using chimpanzees in such medical
	experiments. In addition, the Belgian royal family was publicly
	supporting the idea of wildlife conservation, and the revelation of
	these actions would go against that image. Hooper believes another
	reason for resistance to his idea is that if his theory was
	accepted, it would shake public confidence in the medical
	establishment as well as lead to multibillion-dollar class action
	lawsuits for the AIDS epidemic.
	This is what Edward Hooper has written on his website about the
	circumstances surrounding the creation of HIV-AIDS from these
	experiments and why it makes more sense than the competing bush-meat
	and “cut hunter” theory.
	By contrast, the oral	polio vaccine (OPV) theory proposes that an experimental OPV that
	had been locally prepared in chimpanzee cells and administered by
	mouth, or “fed,” to nearly one million Africans in vaccine
	trials staged in the then Belgian-ruled territories of the Belgian
	Congo and Ruanda-Urundi between 1957 and 1960, represents the origin
	of the AIDS pandemic. It provides a historically-supported
	background: that between 1956 and 1959 over 500 common chimpanzees
	(Pan troglodytes schweinfurthi and Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and
	bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) were housed together at
	Lindi Camp (Near Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo, or DRC).
	Hooper goes on to explain that the use of chimpanzees was not
	technically prohibited by any conventions, but that in most
	countries around the world at the time, Asian macaques were used in
	polio virus preparation. As for the claim of other outbreaks, Hooper
	believes they fit comfortably within the bounds of his theory:</p>
	<blockquote><a name="calibre_link-251"></a>The OPV theory ascribes
	the minor outbreaks of AIDS caused by other variants of HIV-1 (Group
	O, Group N and the more controversial “Group P”) to other polio
	vaccines (both oral and injected) that were prepared in the cells of
	chimpanzees and administered in French Equatorial Africa (including
	Congo Brazzaville and Gabon) in the same late fifties period. It
	ascribes the outbreak of AIDS from HIV-2 (of which it maintains that
	only two were epidemic outbreaks) to other polio vaccines (both oral
	and injected) that were prepared in the cells of sooty mangabeys (or
	other monkeys that had been caged with sooty mangabeys) and
	administered in French West Africa in 1956–1960. All the other
	HIV-2 groups that are claimed by bush-meat theorists have infected
	just a single person, and some OPV theory supporters argue that
	dead-end, non-transmissible infections such as these are the natural
	fate of SIVs that infect human beings via the bushmeat route: that
	unless they are introduced in an artificial manner (as via a
	vaccine), they simply die out.
	I find myself in complete agreement with Hooper’s analysis.
	Yes, viruses can jump from one species to another, possibly by the
	eating of an infected animal. But the natural process of degradation
	by the digestive system, as well as cooking (even when poorly done)
	is likely to inactivate most pathogens.
	The second plausible theory, which has come to be known as the
	“bush-meat” theory, is that sometime early in the twentieth
	century an individual became infected with SIV from handling
	chimpanzees or chimpanzee bush-meat. It usually involves the actions
	of some anonymous native hunter (often called the “cut hunter”
	because he cut himself shortly after having killed a chimpanzee).
	Added to this scenario is urbanization encroaching upon the jungle,
	allowing it to be spread by those newly introduced western evils of
	prostitution and intravenous drug usage.
	This theory has recently been expanded by the science writer
	David Quammen in The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an
	African Forest. Based on an extrapolation of some scientific data,
	Quammen sets the date for this viral transfer from chimp to human
	around 1908 in the area known as Leopoldville (later Kinshasa) in
	the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The description is vivid, and
	plausible, but I question much about it:
	
        Let’s give him due stature: not just a cut hunter but
	the Cut Hunter. Assuming he lived hereabouts in the first decade of
	the twentieth century, he probably captured his chimpanzee with a
	snare made from a forest vine, or in some other form of a trap, and
	then killed the animal with a spear. He may have been a Baka Pygmy
	man, living independently with his extended family in the forest or
	functioning as sort of a serf under the “protection” of a Bantu
	village chief . . . There’s no way of establishing his identity,
	nor even his ethnicity, but this remote southeastern corner of what
	was then Germany’s Kamerun colony offered plenty of candidates . .	
	The chimp too, tethered by a foot or a hand, would have
	been terrified as the man approached, but also angry and strong and
	dangerous. Maybe the man killed it without getting hurt; if so, he
	was lucky. Maybe there was an ugly fight; he might even have been
	pummeled by the chimp, or badly bitten. But he won. Then he would
	have butchered his prey, probably on the spot . . .
        
        I imagine him opening a
	long, sudden slice across the back of his left hand, into the
	muscular web between thumb and forefinger, his flesh smiling out
	pink and raw almost before he saw the damage or felt it, because his
	blade was so sharp . . . His blood flowed out and mingled with the
	chimp’s, the chimp’s flowed in and mingled with his, so that he
	couldn’t quite tell which was which. He was up to his elbows in
	gore. He wiped his hand. Blood leaked again into his cut, dribbled
	again into it from the chimp, and again he wiped. He had no way of
	knowing, no language or words or thoughts by which to conceive, that
	this animal was SIV-positive. The idea didn’t exist in 1908.
        It’s a possible scenario. I can’t say something like that didn’t happen. I just wonder why
	it hadn’t happened many centuries earlier. Africans had been
	hunting chimpanzees for thousands of years and cooking them. An
	interesting addition Quammen makes to the theory is that
	subsequently the virus spreads slowly among the population. But then
	starting in 1917, there were vaccination campaigns against sleeping
	sickness by European doctors who used glass syringes that were
	reusable. One French colonial doctor during a two-year period
	treated more than five thousand cases with only six syringes.
	These campaigns peaked in the early 1950s, and by that time the
	precursor to the deadly strain of HIV had arisen.
	When you think about it, you come to the realization there’s a
	battle of narratives, with science having a definite preference for
	one over the other.
	In the first scenario, unwitting scientists release a plague of
	massive proportions on the population because of their use of
	questionable animal experiments, infecting more than sixty million
	people and causing the death of at least thirty-nine million.
        In the second scenario, a chance event in a jungle encounter with
	an infected chimpanzee leads to cross-species transmission, then
	because it’s always a good play to blame urbanization and
	prostitution, as well as maybe a little inadvertent help from
	western medicine, and you have a new disease!
	Is it any surprise that scientists far prefer scenario number
	two?
	While I can’t come to a definitive conclusion as to which
	scenario is more likely, the first one, in which chimpanzees are
	directly harvested for their organs and the growing of polio virus,
	makes the most sense to me. It doesn’t have as many moving parts.
        The virus is in a certain percentage of the five hundred
	chimpanzees sacrificed. They’re cut up, then used to grow polio
	vaccine, which is then given orally to nearly a million Africans.
	And there’s another part of the story that makes Hooper’s
	account sound more plausible.
	After Hooper made his claim that the oral polio vaccine grown in
	chimpanzee tissue and given to humans was the source of the HIV-AIDS
	epidemic, there was an “investigation.” As I read Hooper’s
	account, it sounded a lot like the Ian Lipkin investigation into
	XMRV.
	In this great investigation, they sampled stocks of polio vaccine
	from the 1957–1960 period for traces of chimpanzee DNA, or simian
	virus. Lo and behold, they found NOTHING!
	There’s just one problem. All of the samples they used were
	from the United States.
	They did not have any samples of polio vaccine from Africa. The
	samples of polio vaccine from the United States had never used
	chimpanzee tissues as a growth medium or cell line.</p>
	<p>They DID NOT test African samples of the oral polio vaccine for
	that which used chimpanzee tissue.
	This is what Hooper wrote about the supposed investigation into
	the use of chimpanzee tissue in the development of the polio vaccine
	that was performed by the Royal Society in September of 2000:</p>
	Instead of the open and honest debate, and the
	even-handed investigation of the OPV theory, which had been
	promised, what actually took place was a carefully-planned attempt
	to suppress the theory by fair means or foul. The conference became
	focused around the testing of samples of CHAT vaccine which the
	parent institute (The Wistar in Philadelphia) had finally released
	for independent analysis. The vaccinators and the meeting organizers
	insisted that the vaccine samples were representative of the batches
	which had been prepared for use in Africa. Since they tested
	negative for HIV, SIV, and chimpanzee DNA, they concluded that the
	OPV hypothesis had been disproved— and an acquiescent press
	largely concurred.
	The reality, however, was very different. None of the
	tested samples had ever been near Africa, let alone prepared for the
	African trials.
	As the weeks and months
	passed after the meeting, it became clear that a carefully-organized
	whitewash was being carried out, partly by the original protagonists
	(who had, among other things, leant on witnesses to change key parts
	of their stories), and partly by well-meaning research scientists
	who could not countenance the possibility that their work of the
	last ten years might be erroneous, and who secondly were unwilling
	or unable to imagine that their peers might not be telling the
	truth.
	I’ve never met Edward Hooper, but he was writing this in 2004,
	years before I ever pursued a similar line of inquiry. I’m sure he
	must have undergone a similar evolution, from hopeful questioner to
	disillusioned critic. Is it so difficult to imagine that members of
	an organization will not believe the worst about their own members?
	Don’t we see the same pattern among police, members of the clergy,
	and our political class? Isn’t it the rare member of an
	organization who sees the flaws of their own group?</p>
	<p>We leave scientists alone in their research and practice,
	expecting somehow that they can self-police. But we do not even
	allow the police to self-police. There are citizen review boards,
	internal affairs, and oversight committees.
	In a similar manner, we have learned through bitter experience
	that just because a person is a member of the clergy doesn’t mean
	they are not capable of crimes against children. We are also
	beginning to understand that these crimes are not just committed
	against the flock, but there are more nuns and sisters in the
	Catholic Church who are coming forward with stories of rape and
	sexual assault committed by the male members of the clergy. These
	stories sicken us, but perhaps we have simply trusted too much in
	unaccountable authorities.
	Now, maybe Hooper is wrong about his accusation, but it sounds
	like a pretty serious charge to make. Given what I observed in the
	“official” investigation into XMRV and the way they cavalierly
	rewrote basic principles of virology, I’m more inclined to believe
	Hooper’s account. The scientific establishment tells their stories
	and expects we will believe them.
	The simian virus gets transferred into humans, and then the
	question becomes one of immune activation. What happened in the gay
	community in the late 1970s and early 1980s?
	There was a great deal of recreational drug usage, and it’s a
	scientific fact that anal sex, with its subsequent tearing of
	tissue, promotes immune activation. The sexual revolution for the
	heterosexual population, and the lesbian population as well, did not
	involve such risks.
	Are dangers to the human population limited to the use of
	chimpanzee tissue in the development of medical products, or is it a
	more general question of any animal tissue? I tend to believe the
	latter and use as an example the controversy over Simian Virus-40
	(SV-40) in the same antipolio campaign of the 1950s and 1960s. The
	concern is that these viruses may lie dormant in people until some
	form of immune stimulation, just as we saw with HIV and the gay
	lifestyle that included multiple partners, sexual activity that
	involved anal tearing, and high recreational drug usage.
        
        In her Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Pentagon’s Brain,
	detailing the work of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
	(DARPA), author Annie Jacobsen provides a brief overview of this
	controversy. One of the DARPA scientists she interviewed for the
	book was microbiologist Stephen Block, and this is what she wrote:
        
        If the notion of a
	stealth virus, or silent load, sounded improbable, Block cited a
	little-known controversy involving the anti-polio vaccination
	campaign of the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to Block,
	during this effort millions of Americans risked contracting the
	“cryptic human infection” of monkey virus, without ever being
	told. “These vaccines,” writes Block, “were prepared using
	live African green monkey kidney cells, and batches became
	contaminated by low levels of a monkey virus, Simian virus 40 (SV
	40), which eluded the quality control procedures of the day. As a
	result, large numbers of people—probably millions in fact—were
	inadvertently exposed to SV 40.”
	The controversy over SV 40 was whether it would ultimately lead
	to cancers in humans decades later. The virus would often be found
	in cancerous tissues, raising the question of whether it was simply
	a passenger or a causative agent. Again, this is the same concern
	raised by the finding of bovine leukemia virus in samples of breast
	cancer tissue and whether the use of growth hormone in the cattle
	was prompting the expression of this virus. It’s also worth noting
	that essentially zero testing is done these days of animal viruses
	contaminating our vaccines or other medical products. Our medical
	authorities simply assume we’re all tough enough to fight off
	these contaminating viruses. Jacobsen continues:
       
        Block says that two
	outcomes of this medical disaster remain debated. One side says the
	98 million people vaccinated dodged a bullet. The other side
	believes there is evidence the vaccine did harm. “A great deal of
	speculation occurs about whether [simian virus] may be responsible
	for some diseases” that manifests much later in the vaccinated
	person’s life, says Block, including cancer.
	Let’s go to the doubters who agree that at least ninety-eight
	million people were inoculated with a polio virus that was
	contaminated with SV-40. Is it reasonable to assume that if you fire
	ninety-eight million bullets, none will cause any harm?
	And this only considers the polio vaccine. Every vaccine has been
	grown in animal tissue, usually of several different species,
	including monkey, mouse, bird, and cow. Each one of these
	cross-species events has the potential to transfer a pathogen to
	humans, or to create some new strain that can cause harm. We have
	fired several billion bullets of biological ammunition at the human
	species, and it is the height of arrogance to believe we have caused
	zero damage.
	In my discussion of Ebola, I want to highlight an idea many
	others have been discussing in recent years in one form or another,
	but that is likely to reconfigure how we go about promoting health.