“Origin of AIDS” Update

Published in Rolling Stone, 9 December 1993, p. 39


In our March 19, 1992, issue (RS 626), Rolling Stone published an article by Tom Curtis entitled “The Origin of AIDS: A Startling New Theory Attempts to Answer the Question ‘Was It an Act of God or an Act of Man?'” In a nutshell, the article raised the theoretical question of whether the AIDS virus or precursor virus might have been transmitted inadvertently from monkeys to humans during a mass-polio-vaccination campaign that was conducted in the Belgian Congo in 1957 through 1960 using a vaccine developed by Dr. Hilary Koprowski. The article did not state that this in fact occurred but only that the possibility that one of his vaccines might have been contaminated with such a virus was one of several disputed and unproven theories.

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Preliminary Notes Concerning Shortcomings of a Correspondence by Y. Ohta

Preliminary Notes Concerning Shortcomings of a
Correspondence by Y. Ohta, et al., Entitled “No Evidence for the Contamination of Live Oral Poliomyelitis Vaccines with Simian Immunodeficiency Virus,” Published in AIDS, 3: 183-4, 1989

Introduction: This piece is to be read in conjunction with L
Pascal, What Happens When Science Goes Bad, Science and
Technology Analysis Working Paper #9, Department of Science and
Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522,
Australia, Dec 1991. It should also be read in conjunction with the
report of the Wistar Committee (C Basilico, C Buck, R Desrosiers, D
Ho, F Lilly, E Wimmer, “Report from the AIDS/Poliovirus Advisory
Committee,” Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 3601 Spruce St.,
Philadelphia, PA 19104, 18 Sep 1992). The Ohta paper is discussed at
some length in the appendix to What Happens When Science Goes
Bad,
but its errors greatly exceeded the space available to point
them out. In addition, both the Wistar Committee and Koprowski have
continued to make important use of the Ohta piece in their arguments;
hence this more detailed treatment.

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