AIDSOrigins

Latest Additions

The Death of a Trufhtul Man. Pierre Doupagne (1923 - 2008).
Ed Hooper pays tribute to the former technical assistant at the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville. (7 November, 2008).
More Worobey Misinformation
Dr Worobey is not a reliable source. (10 October, 2008).
HIV-1 in 1908? Another sad comedy of errors from Michael Worobey
An outline of the many problems in the recent work of Michael Worobey (9 October 2008).
A Nobel Prize for Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi
Congratulations to the winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine (7 October, 2008).

Michael Worobey’s possession of 1950s tissue samples from Stanleyville (Kisangani)
Ed Hooper outlines some possibly dangerous developments in the Origins of AIDS debate (19 March, 2008).
Michael Worobey’s wobbly research into the early history of HIV
More misleading research in the Origins debate (19 March, 2008).
"The Origins of AIDS"
Watch the 90min version of the film (31 November, 2007).
Contested testimony in scientific disputes: the case of the origins of AIDS
A new article by Brian Martin, with a brief intro. by Ed Hooper (3 November, 2007).
NEWSFLASH: How to buy "The River" on CD, and "The Origins of AIDS" on DVD
How to get hold of your own copy of the book and the DVD (1 July, 2007).
The Death of Professor Paul M. Osterrieth - and its Significance for the Origins of AIDS debate
Following the death of Paul Osterrieth, Ed Hooper examines his role in the origins of AIDS debate (4 January 2007).
Smoke and Mirrors from Stanley Plotkin
Ed Hooper exposes how some people operate in the origin of AIDS debate (8 December, 2006)
Three warnings about potential future malpractice by members of "the bushmeat group"
(27 July, 2006; updated 13 August, 2006)

Welcome to AIDSorigins

Welcome to www.aidsorigins.com, the site hosted by Ed Hooper that seeks to provide impartial and uncensored information about the origins of the AIDS pandemic. For a brief introduction to the origins of AIDS debate, see below:

There would be no need for this site to exist, were it not for the fact that it is increasingly obvious that a small group of eminent and influential mainstream scientists are willing to countenance only one version of events about how AIDS began - a version which is scientifically and historically flawed, but which serves the interests of certain powerful political groupings, and a large portion of the "vaccination fraternity".

I believe that this official version of events is wrong.

In 1999 I wrote a book, The River, which proposed the hypothesis that AIDS might be iatrogenic (caused by physicians), and that scientists might have unwittingly started the pandemic through an experimental oral polio vaccine (OPV) administered in central Africa in the 1950s. That book touched more buttons than I had anticipated, for it sparked a major cover-up among those who had been involved with making the vaccine, and among powerful interest groups within the medical community.

The attempted whitewash persuaded me to continue my researches. I have now been exclusively researching AIDS for 20 years, and its origins for 16. And whereas I was 95% persuaded of the merits of the vaccine theory when The River was published in 1999, I am now (in 2006) 99.9% persuaded that this is how AIDS began.

Background

By the end of 2006 AIDS will have killed some 40 million people, making it the worst outbreak of infectious disease in recorded history. (That, by the way, is 7 million more than the current population of Canada.) A further 50 million or more (equivalent to the current population of England) are infected with the causative virus, HIV-1.

The Death Of a Truthful Man. Pierre Doupagne, (1923-2008)

It is with sadness that I have to report the death of Pierre Doupagne, the former technical assistant at the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville, (LMS) in the Belgian Congo. He died peacefully in hospital in Liege, Belgium, on October 24th, 2008. He was 85 years old.

Although he was not one of the four doctors based at the LMS in the latter half of the 1950s, Pierre Doupagne was the man whose skills underpinned their work - and in the end he played a significant part in the origins of AIDS debate that began some 40 years later.

More Worobey Misinformation

The AIDSOrigins Webmaster has just drawn my attention to the following article on the Web. Apparently entitled: The AIDS Conspiracy Handbook, it was written by Juliet Lapidos.

It lists several wacky theories about the origins of AIDS. One of the theories that features is the OPV theory, and Ms Lapidos sums up as follows:

"Hooper's contaminated polio vaccine thesis sounds less wacky than most conspiracy theories and has attracted support from a few notable academics-including late Oxford professor W.D. Hamilton. But it's definitely wrong. Hooper says Koprowski got his kidney samples from chimps in the Congo. The problem is that the SIV strain endemic to chimps from that region is phylogenetically distinct from HIV. The offending chimps probably came from Cameroon."

But the claim that the OPV theory is definitely wrong is itself incorrect. The precise source of the chimpanzees that bore the SIV (or SIVs) that crossed into humans to make HIV-1 is still unproven. Ms Lapidos asserts that they "probably came from Cameroon", but the truth is that we still don't know. However, there is documentary evidence that at least one Pan troglodytes troglodytes (Ptt) chimpanzee from the west central African region that includes Cameroon was present among Koprowski's chimps in the Congo. (In reality, there were probably several such Ptt chimps present, but the one single documented chimp proves the point.) Because these chimps were co-caged and group-caged together, an SIV introduced by one single chimpanzee could have infected many others in the camp. For the OPV theory to work, it requires only one such SIV-infected chimp to provide kidney cells or sera that were used in the vaccine.

I was surprised at that very technical phrasing: "phylogenetically distinct from HIV" in the Lapidos article. Where had she picked up such a phrase, I wondered. But my surprise only lasted until I reached the bottom of the article, where Michael Worobey is thanked for his help. It seems that Dr Worobey is actively trying to discredit the OPV theory on the Web. Of course, one of the best ways of doing that is to try to link it to daft conspiracy theories.....and then for good measure to assert that it's "definitely wrong".

In an accompanying article, "HIV-1 in 1908?", I reveal among other things that Dr Worobey (who writes articles that seek to prove that the OPV theory is "definitely wrong") has been actively collaborating for the last seven years with the doctors who made and administered the suspect vaccine that was used in the Congo in the 1950s. These include Dr Koprowski's deputy in that era, Dr Stanley Plotkin. We may also safely assume that Dr Koprowski himself, now 91, is a "silent partner" in the enterprise. Now we see Worobey actively trying to diss the OPV theory on the Web. And he claims that he doesn't have an agenda!

Sorry, Dr Worobey, but you've been found out. Again!!

Ed Hooper. October 10th, 2008.

HIV-1 in 1908? Another sad comedy of errors from Michael Worobey

October 9th, 2008.

As forecast in my piece "Worobey's wobbly research", first posted on this site on March 19th, 2008, the Canadian molecular biologist Michael Worobey has just published new calculations about the age of the AIDS virus, HIV-1, which place its origins even further back in time.

His work appears in the form of a lengthy letter to the journal Nature, entitled "Direct evidence of extensive diversity of HIV-1 in Kinshasa by 1960", by M. Worobey, D.E. Teuwen, M. Bunce, S.M. Wolinsky et al.; [Nature; 2008 (October 2nd); 455; 661-664.]

On the basis of this one newly-discovered sample of HIV-1 dating from 1960, Worobey and his colleagues contend that the first human infection with the AIDS virus occurred in 1908, with outer confidence limits stretching from 1884 to 1924.

The previous "best guess" of molecular biologists such as Bette Korber was that the first HIV-1 virus existed in a human being by 1931. This in itself was a highly dubious finding. But the 1908 "guestimate" by Worobey and his team from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona is now being highlighted by extensive coverage and publicity in Nature, and then spoon-fed to a largely compliant press corps.

Worobey's calculations, according to his supporters Beatrice Hahn and Paul Sharp, who have been invited by Nature to write the accompanying commentary, employ "state-of-the-art statistical analyses". But they are actually based on just the one crucial new piece of data, this being a fragment of genetic sequence allegedly obtained from the stored lymph node of an African woman in 1960. Just like the the famous 1959 sample (the oldest known sample of HIV), this 1960 sample comes from a subject who was then living in the Belgian Congo capital of Leopoldville, (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo). This, quite clearly, is a significant detail, and yet not one of the press articles covering Worobey's paper seems to have picked it up. I, and the small group of people on whose wisdom and scientific expertise I informally rely (three quarters of whom are professional scientists, some of them quite eminent scientists) are strongly persuaded that these exciting-sounding dates from Worobey are highly dubious. We believe that his analysis and interpretation of the 1960 viral sequence are in reality little more than wishful thinking based on poorly-supported science.

We also believe that the discovery of that 1960 sample of HIV-1, and the coincidence of place with the 1959 HIV-1 sample, is the real story here, not Worobey's highly speculative 1908 guestimate of when the first AIDS virus might have existed. A much simpler and better-supported explanation for the recently- discovered 1960 HIV-1 fragment is that both it and the 1959 HIV-1 fragment are the results of the administering in Leopoldville and elsewhere in the Belgian Congo from 1957 onwards of different batches of an experimental live vaccine. This vaccine, an oral polio vaccine (OPV) called CHAT, was (as I have previously demonstrated) prepared locally in the Congo in chimpanzee cells, which cells were themselves almost certainly contaminated with SIVcpz (chimpanzee SIV, the immediate primate ancestor of HIV-1).

Part 1 of this essay gives a brief background to Worobey's latest paper.

In Part 2 I provide some analysis of the paper, and attempt to demonstrate where Dr Worobey has gone wrong.

In Part 3 I shall provide a much simpler explanation for the existence of this new HIV-1 sequence from 1960.

In Part 4 I shall provide some historical background to Dr Worobey's involvement in this debate.

And in Part 5 I shall provide more information about the large organised cover-up that has taken, and is taking place on this issue.

New Honour for Hilary Koprowski

Hilary Koprowski has been honoured by his native Poland. Read the press release here.

A Nobel Prize for Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi

Congratulations to Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute who, it was announced yesterday, have just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of the AIDS virus (now called HIV) in 1983. They shared the prize with Harald zur Hausen, from Germany, who discovered the link between Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and cervical cancer.

It is noteworthy that the Nobel citation for Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi makes no mention of the American researcher, Robert Gallo, despite the fact that Gallo is still officially credited in the US as a co-discoverer of the AIDS virus. Those who wonder why should refer to the book that forensically and compellingly reveals what actually happened ["Science Fictions" by John Crewdson; Little Brown; 2002]. This shows that both Gallo, in his lab at the NIH, and Robin Weiss, at the Chester Beatty lab in London, received samples of Montagnier's virus in 1983, and that later both men claimed independently that they themselves had discovered a virus in AIDS patients. Genetic sequencing later revealed that in both instances what they had discovered was actually Montagnier's virus, which had somehow become mixed up in their own cultures. Weiss later admitted his error, but to this day Gallo (who was later found guilty of scientific misconduct in an Office of Research Integrity enquiry) insists that he did nothing wrong. It would seem that the Nobel committee remains unconvinced.

(Interestingly, both Gallo and Weiss have also played key roles in the origins-of-AIDS debate. Gallo is a long-time collaborator and close personal friend of Hilary Koprowski, the man who in the 1950s developed and tested CHAT oral polio vaccine, the vaccine which lies at the core of the OPV theory of origin, in central Africa. In fact, Gallo sometimes describes Koprowski as his mentor, and he has defended Koprowski's role in several public statements. Weiss, meanwhile, has personally spearheaded the campaign to discredit the OPV theory and promote the bushmeat theory of origin. He delivered the closing speeches at two international meetings about the origins of HIV and AIDS, and is the man who effectively controls the consistently biased coverage of HIV/AIDS origin in the journal, Nature. As an aside, another key figure in the origins debate, the leading advocate of the bushmeat theory, Beatrice Hahn, was also involved in Gallo's AIDS virus research, having been a post-doc molecular biologist working in his lab in 1983.)

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