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COVID-19 and the Origins of AIDS Debate

Abstract

There is much to be gained from learning how new diseases emerge.  This applies to the origins of the AIDS pandemic, which has now killed over 50 million people globally.  I (and to my knowledge many scientists) believe that a full and convincing explanation of how AIDS began has still not been provided by the scientific community, despite claims to the contrary by many prominent figures.  The COVID-19 pandemic is even more worrying in its potential impact on global health, and so there is even more need for a prompt and open-minded investigation into its origin.

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A New HIV-1 Sample from 1966

Just this evening I received a heads-up from an American professor about an on-line article announcing a new piece of work by Michael Worobey, a key member of the “bushmeat school”. This is a group of scientists who believe that the “AIDS virus”, pandemic HIV-1, transferred to humans a hundred or so years ago, when a human was infected with the nearest ancestral virus to HIV-1 (the simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, of the common chimpanzee) in south-eastern Cameroon.

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An Interesting Question

A man recently wrote in to this web-site to ask me an interesting question: why was it that I was still writing about the origins of AIDS? He reasoned that for most people (at least in the West) AIDS is now a treatable disease; most of the people who were involved with the CHAT oral polio vaccine in the 1950s are now dead, and in any case it is unlikely that my theory of origin will ever be definitively proved as true. Under these circumstances, why keep going? Was it just in order to apportion blame?

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Tom Curtis

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.”
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“A Dog’s Breakfast”: Michael Worobey’s New Paper Seeks to “Exonerate” Patient Zero

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.

To those who have spent any time examining the history of AIDS, this is hardly new news. However, it is a plausible peg on which to hang an article in an attempt to render it newsworthy.

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Wikipedia’s Strange Certainty

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

Strange CertaintyDownload
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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.

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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.
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