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The Origins of AIDS: A December 2015 Update

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.

I have been silent on this topic for some time.  At the request of several readers, let me provide a quick update as of December 2015.

Continue reading “The Origins of AIDS: A December 2015 Update”

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“A Strange Case of Certainty”, by Robert Dildine.

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.

I would like to recommend Bob Dildine’s paper as a fascinating and astute piece of analysis, all the more welcome because it extends the significance of the Origins of AIDS debate into new territory, relating to such subjects as intellectual arrogance, the control of ideas, the impartiality (or otherwise) of Wikipedia entries, and the ways in which both the well-intentioned and those with something to hide may seek to influence public perceptions of what is true and what is not.

I have never met Mr Dildine, but I have been in written contact with him over the past five years, initiated through this website, and have exchanged views with him that have contributed in many ways to my own thinking on this topic. I recommend his paper for its independent appraisal of the Origin of AIDS debate, as well as for the broader issues he addresses.

This is the direct link to Robert Dildine’s paper: http://www.bmartin.cc/dissent/documents/AIDS/Dildine15.pdf

Ed Hooper, September 15th, 2015

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More supportive of OPV/AIDS than of the bushmeat hypothesis. (A revised response to the recent Faria paper in Science.)

[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 article is called “The early spread and epidemic ignition of HIV-1 in human populations”, and though released on-line earlier, it was published in the October 5th, 2014 issue of Science; [2014; 346; 56-61]. Most of the article is consistent with the rest of the work by its authors: the mooted early history of HIV-1 is nothing more or less than computer-generated guesswork.

But the authors have had a major rethink about some of the previous problem areas in their work, and certain crucial aspects of their analysis, though they do not advertise it, now align very closely with what I have been proposing for several years. All this is explained in more detail in the notes below. Continue reading “More supportive of OPV/AIDS than of the bushmeat hypothesis. (A revised response to the recent Faria paper in Science.)”

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The recent Faria paper in Science: More flimsy AIDS origins speculations

Several people have recently asked (either via the AIDS Origins 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 article is called “The early spread and epidemic ignition of HIV-1 in human populations“, and though released earlier on-line, it was formally published in the October 5th, 2014 issue of Science; [2014; 346; 56-61]. Most of the article is consistent with the rest of the work by its authors: the mooted early history of HIV-1 is nothing more or less than computer-generated guesswork.

But the authors have had a major rethink about one of the previous problem areas in their work, and one crucial aspect of their analysis, though they do not advertise it, now aligns precisely with what I have been proposing for several years. In fact, it serves as another powerful confirmation of the OPV hypothesis. All this is explained in more detail in the notes below.
Continue reading “The recent Faria paper in Science: More flimsy AIDS origins speculations”

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Nobel Prize-winner Lambasts Nature and Science

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.

Continue reading “Nobel Prize-winner Lambasts Nature and Science”

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“The Origins of AIDS” Documentary, 2003

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. No downloadable version was made available for purchase, and otherwise the film could only be bought from North America, via a quite complicated purchase procedure that ran through the National Film Board of Canada web-site. Moreover, at different times either the short (42-minute) or full-length (91-minute) versions of the film were unavailable for purchase. The reasons for the producers’ unwillingness to make the film more freely available are not known, but many have surmised that they may have come under external pressures. (The French co-producers took another approach, and in about 2005 quite suddenly refused to handle the film any more.)

Continue reading ““The Origins of AIDS” Documentary, 2003″

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NYT Letter: Hilary Koprowski

Sent to the Letters page of the NYT on 22/4/2013, but not printed…

Letter to the editor: re “Hilary Koprowski, Who Developed First Live-Virus Polio Vaccine, Dies at 96”, by Margalit Fox; (4/20/13).

Sir,

Margalit Fox’s obituary of Hilary Koprowski (April 20, 2013) claims the theory that his oral polio vaccine (OPV) sparked the AIDS pandemic has been “discredited”. This is untrue. In 2001 Belgian and Congolese ex-workers from the medical laboratory at Stanleyville, Belgian Congo, and the nearby chimpanzee facility at Lindi Camp, where 500 chimpanzees were sacrificed in 42 months, reported that chimpanzee kidneys and blood had been used in the late 1950s to prepare local batches of Koprowski’s OPV. Such batches were fed to one million Africans, but (unlike US-made batches) they were never tested for HIV-1. Similarly, the other claims allegedly “disproving” the OPV theory are based on faulty assertions and questionable hypotheses. The ancestral host to the immediate ancestor of HIV-1 is a chimpanzee subspecies (Pan troglodytes troglodytes, Ptt) that, it is alleged, was not found at Lindi Camp, but I have recently demonstrated that Ptt chimps were present there. The theoretical claim that HIV-1 first existed in 1908 is unsafe; it emanates from a mutation-based model which is inappropriate for lentiviruses, which evolve mainly through recombination. The earliest HIV-1 samples are from 1959 and 1960, and come from Leopoldville, Belgian Congo. Koprowski’s Congolese OPV trials began in 1957.

Edward Hooper

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Hilary Koprowski: LA Times Obituary

Los Angeles Times

April 22, 2013 Monday
Home Edition

OBITUARIES; HILARY KOPROWSKI, 1916 – 2013; Researcher developed live-virus oral polio vaccine

Hilary Koprowski, a Polish-born researcher who developed the first successful oral vaccine for polio, has died. He was 96.

Koprowski died of pneumonia April 11 at his Philadelphia home, said his son, Dr. Christopher Koprowski, a radiation oncologist.

In 1950, Hilary Koprowski showed that it was possible to use his live-virus oral vaccine against polio, which had plagued the United States and other countries for decades.

Another researcher, Dr. Albert Sabin, would win the race to get an oral vaccine licensed in the U.S. while Jonas Salk would develop an injectable vaccine that eliminated much of the disease in the country.
The two other scientists were far better known for helping to eradicate polio, but Koprowski’s contribution was considered groundbreaking.

“Both Salk and Sabin became public figures, quite justifiably,” Koprowski told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2000. “They traveled the world, meeting presidents and kings, whereas I got to continue my work. I believe this was a better way for me.”

Controversy often followed the feisty Koprowski. Continue reading “Hilary Koprowski: LA Times Obituary”