AIDS Origins

It is with great regret that I have learnt through one of the subscribers to this site of the death of the American journalist Tom Curtis on January 22nd, 2017. Below is the notice that appeared on his Facebook page.

"To all friends of Tom Curtis.

Tom passed away peacefully at noon today after a many-years-long struggle with Parkinson's disease. He will be sorely missed by the many who knew him and worked with him over the past 70+ years. There will be a gathering at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 502 Church Rear Street, Galveston, TX on January 29 at 10:30 a.m. According to my sources, everyone who knew or admired Tom would be welcome to attend."

A new paper from the team of the University of Arizona molecular biologist, Michael Worobey, has just been published in Nature, to the usual fanfare of publicity. It seeks to demonstrate that the Canadian air steward, Gaetan Dugas, was not responsible for seeding the AIDS epidemic in the United States.

A recent, and highly relevant article by Brian Martin.

Critical thinking about the origin of AIDS: Comments on Stephen Jenkins’ account

Some weeks ago I heard disturbing rumours of new activity on Wikipedia regarding my work and that of Brian Martin. I asked Robert Dildine, who has previously done excellent work in this and similar areas, to investigate, and he has produced the following piece, which I commend to our readership.

Ed Hooper. 16th May, 2016

Dear Readers,

Many thanks to all those who continue to write in to this web-site with their support and encouragement, and sometimes with fresh information as well.  All such messages are greatly appreciated.    It's immensely reassuring that I can only recall one or two unsympathetic messages among the thousands received since we started this site 11 years ago. 

A paper entitled "A Strange Case of Certainty", written by Robert Dildine, an American analyst with a background in economics and law, has recently been posted on Brian Martin's excellent Suppression of Dissent website. The paper analyses ways in which, even in a democratic society, institutional interests (both governmental and corporate) can influence or subtly control the thinking and opinions of individuals, especially in instances where popular opinion may have important political or economic implications.

The paper uses the "Origin of AIDS debate" as its central case-study.

[A recent communication from one of the co-authors of the Faria paper has provided new information, which requires an updated response from myself. Surprisingly, this information reveals even more evidence in favour of the OPV theory. Ed Hooper, November 11th, 2014.]

Several people have recently asked (either via the AIDSorigins site or via on-line message boards) for my opinions on the latest article about dating the beginning of the AIDS epidemic to Leopoldville/KInshasa in 1920.

The following has been contributed by a friend, after reading the latest claims by the bushmeat people in the paper by Faria et al. I hope you like it. I think it provides a fresh and rather astute asessment of what is going on.

Ed Hooper, 3 November 2014

For many years I have been criticising Nature and Science for their biased mis-reporting and distortion of the Origins-of-AIDS debate.

Now a leading scientist - the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, the US biologist Randy Schekman - has come out in public to criticise these journals for distorting the scientific process, and for representing a tyranny that needs to be broken.

Although versions of this multiple prize-winning film (which focuses on the OPV theory and the opposition it has encountered) have been available on and off on the Web for the last 10 years, the Canadian producers have made strenuous efforts to have any unofficial versions taken down. This would have been entirely reasonable had they made it easy to purchase the film documentary through other channels, but rather surprisingly they have not done so.

There has been a remarkably low-key response by the medical community to the passing of Dr Hilary Koprowski. Five days have passed, and the only reports that I have seen to date are the Associated Press report already mentioned (which has been used by the New York Times, the Huffington Post and others), and an article by Stacey Burling in the Philadelphia Inquirer, entitled "Hilary Koprowski, Polio Vaccine Pioneer, Dead at 96".

Koprowski lived in a well-to-do suburb on the outskirts of Philadelphia for most of his final 56 years, so this is effectively his home-town newspaper.

It has just been announced that Dr Hilary Koprowski died on Thursday April 11th, at the age of 96.

The first report I have seen comes from The Huffington Post, and at the head of the following comments we learn that "HuffPo is filtering out the justifiable controversy surrounding this mans career." It will be interesting to see what sort of coverage Koprowski's death engenders elsewhere in the coming days.

Review of Spillover, by David Quammen; [The Bodley Head; 2012]

Gentle reader, beware! Do not believe all that you read in this book.

Two new books and a flurry of new articles have recently appeared about the "origins of AIDS", plus a third conference on the subject has been staged.....

Some Glimmer of Light, Perhaps, At The End Of The Tunnel?

I shall use this blog to address five new developments in the origins of AIDS debate.

The first three, sadly, are the same old same old, even if they sometimes reveal just how desperate some of the "1908 Cameroonian Bushmeat" group have become. But the last two may contain some positive developments.