THE ORIGINS OF AIDS - NGUỒN GỐC CỦA AIDS (2004) - documentary-phim tài liệu
Directors: Peter Chappell, Catherine Peix
Producers: Christine Le Goff, Arnie Gelbart, Michel Chepon,
Christine Pireaux
Co-production of Canada, France, Belgium, Spain
Tonight on Witness. Did scientists inadvertently cause the
AIDS epidemic?
Edward Hooper: An experimental oral polio vaccine that was
prepared, I believe, in chimpanzee kidneys and chimpanzee blood and which was
fed to over a million Africans, correlates so precisely with the first
appearances of AIDS.
Could it have been the polio vaccine? And why the scientists
are so ready to dismiss this possibility?
Dr. Robin Weiss: We go by evidence. And in the end hard
evidence wins the day.
THE ORIGINS OF AIDS. Exploring thе theory that won't go
away!
26 million dead. 40 million infected. And the continent of
Africa devastated. In 20 years AIDS has become the worst medical catastrophy
ever experienced by humankind!
Dr. Cecil Fox - Pathologist, National Institute of
Infectious Diseases, USA: When you only think that a hundred million people in
the next 50 years are going to die of HIV disease! Prematurely! It's not a
disease like cancer of old people! It's a disease of young people! And it's one
of the great human tragedies of all time. The west has ignored it, Ronald
Reagan ignored it, George Bush-senior ignored it, Bill Clinton ignored it and
it has spread and spread and spread and spread...
The origins of AIDS remain a mistery about which the
scientific community has long kept silent. Is it lack of interest or fear of
knowing? A few lone voices have asked the question and attempted to break this
coat of silence.
By following in the footsteps of these dedicated men into
the heart of Africa where it all began, we were able to relocate the places,
trails and witnesses of one of the worst tragedies we've ever known.
THE ORIGINS OF AIDS
HIV - the causitive virus of AIDS was first isolated in 1983
by Luke Montagnie's team at the "Pasteur Institute" in Paris. Simon
Wain Hobson was part of the team.
Dr. Simon Wain Hobson - Virologist, Director of Molecular
Retrovirus Laboratory, Pasteur Institute, France: When this first came, people
saw that this came from nowhere, necessitated sort of novel explanations. And
noone really knew, there was no cousin if you wish to this sort of virus, not
in the animal kingdom at that point.
But a cousin did exist! And in France in 1989 researchers
identified it among chimpanzees. They named it SIV - the Simian
Immunodeficiency Virus, analogous of HIV - the Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
The two viruses similarities prompted the researchers to designate SIV as HIV's
ancestor.
Dr. Simon Wain Hobson: And the intermediate precursor to
this virus going around the world, is chimpanzees. We all agreed on that. We
can discuss when, why, how, but we all agree on chimpanzee. So, when... I think
there's a consensus to say it's this century, where - clearly the epicentre is
the northern Uganda.
This region in the heart of chimpanzee country was part of
the Belgian Congo during the 1950s. Proffesor Vandepitte, a Belgium phisician,
collected human blood samples there in 1959 and gave them to a collegue to test
many years later.
Joseph Vandepitte - Microbiologist, Proffesor Emeritus,
Louvain University, Belgium: We collected more than 2000 adult blood samples.
Much later, he gave them to experts to see if there might be traces of HIV. A
lab found only one zeropositive sample, subsequently confirmed by other labs,
and I believe, that in the general literature it is considered to be the first
HIV/AIDS-zeropositive sample before the AIDS era. The number was L70, with L
standing for Leopoldville.
We have the date - 1959. And the place - Leopoldville,
former capital of the Belgian Congo, today known as Kinshasa. This first
evidence of AIDS emerged more than 20 years before the rise of the HIV/AIDS
epidemic in America.
Dr. Cecil Fox: So, if you went back and said, Well, HIV is
related to SIV, to the monkey AIDS virus, where do humans have contact with
monkeys? Well, the average person has no contact with monkeys. There are only
two ways that you can have contact with monkeys that I can figure. One is when
you have people eat monkeys and in so doing they clean the monkey and with a
sharp knife or a dull knife or what have, you can become infected that way. The
other way is, is that we still, when we used vaccines, they were made from
monkeys that we injected into people.
The scientific community has always favoured the hunter
theory where SIV passed on into humans as a result of killing or eating chimps.
However it fails to explain why AIDS has appeared only recently since monkeys
have been hunted and eaten across Africa for hundreds of years.
Another more disturbing theory emerged in 1992. An article
published in "Rolling Stone" magazine by freelance journalist Tom
Curtis linked the origin of AIDS to the polio vaccine.
Tom Curtis: It looked that the polio campaign that dr.
Koprowski had undertaken in the former Belgian Congo in the middle to late
1950s, and I did focus on that campaign because of certain geographic
similarities to where scientists were saying AIDS had begun in the human
population which was in this same region.
Curtis's hypothesys shook up the scientific community
because it questioned the work of Hilary Koprowski, a famous researcher and
pioneer of fight against polio.
Dr. Cecil Fox: There was a tremendous feeling in the
scientific community that they were somehow endangered. If you had journalist
writing articles in the "Rolling Stone", my God, what about our
dignity! So, there was a lot of concern from that viewpoint. There was a
concern that it was written by a person who was a professional journalist and
that they were affraid that people would no longer immunize their children
against polio.
To understand Curtis's questions about how the polio vaccine
was produced in this region of Africa, let's return to the polio years. In 1958
America was still hunted by this disease which have been paralysing and killing
mostly children for 50 years. In one of the largest mass vaccination campaigns
ever 90 million Americans were vaccinated - a great success for modern
medicine. It transformed its inventor Johnas Salk into a hero.
Archive footage, president Eisenhower: All 164 million
Americans do say nothing with all the other people of the world that will
profit from your discovery. I am very very happy.
The polio vaccine was the first to be derived from monkey
organs. Mass commercialization created an enormous market for monkeys used both
as guinea pigs and raw material from which to create the polio vaccine. In
America entire shippments of macaque monkeys arrived from India and the
Phillipines.
During the polio years Hilary Koprowski was a young
researcher, brilliant and ambitious, determined to make a name for himself in
his newly adopted country, the USA. In 1950, when Johnas Salks formula was
being widely used, Koprowski began testing his own prototype of a live polio
vaccine. A scandal erupted when it was discovered he'd been testing his product
secretly on handicapped children in Letchworth village, New York. That didn't
slow him down. He turned to the private sector to continue his testing.
On April 23, 1955, 260 children vaccinated with Johnas
Salk's formula became sick. 11 died! A subsequent investigation showed that
some vaccine lots were defective. Confidence in Salk's vaccine was shaken
clearing the way for Koprowski. But he was no longer alone. Another scientific
giant Albert Sabin was also developing a live vaccine. A race between these two
men to replace the Salk vaccine turned into a battle.
Dr. Cecil Fox: So, you have these two conflicting
individuals who were all working towards the same goal. And it's one of the
great dramas in modern times of how they interacted and how they worked! They
were willing to go and take subjects who may or may not have been informed of
what they were doing. They were willing to go to the backside of the moon if
admit that they could find out whether or not they had a valuable product.
To win this race they had to test. And to test they needed
large non-immunized population groups, something no longer available in
America. Sabin made a secret deal with his native country, the USSR, where he
vaccinated more than 6 million people, in Latvia, Estonia and Kazakhstan.
Koprowski chose an African country in full expansion - the Belgian Congo. A
jewel of the colonial empire, it had one of Africa's best organized and most
modern healthcare infrastructures at the time.
Archive footage: The Princess Astrid Institute is one of
Central Africa's most important and complete laboratories. It is staffed by
many personnel using ultramodern equipment to both conduct an ongoing analyses
for scientific research and prepare vaccines and serums used against a range of
infectious diseases. Officials are particularly concerned about the welfare of
children, the future of the country. From school age, all children are
subjected to medical examinations, during which each receives a health card, an
actual health identity document.
There was therefore flawless subject monitoring, making the
indigenous population a wonderful experimentation group.
Archive footage: Return to political quiet. After the recent
disturbances Leopoldville engages in all-round fight against infantile
paralysis. Crowding every clinic with mothers and their children, the latter to
receive orally administered shots of a new vaccine against this curse of
childhood. It is a live virus preparation developed in the US by Philadelphia's
doctor Hilary Koprowski and it differs from our famed Salk vaccine in that it
doesn't ....... with injections. And it must taste good if the children's
recent activity meets that criterion...
Sabin and Koprowski conducted their experiments at the same
time, both using a live oral polio vaccine. No AIDS cases emerged in the USSR
where Sabin did his testing, but in the Congo, where Koprowski's vaccine was
used, the first AIDS cases surfaced one year after the vaccination campaigns.
Was there, as Curtis suggested, something different in Koprowski's vaccine? In
1958 Albert Sabin analysed Koprowski's vaccine and found it to be unstable,
contaminated by an unknown virus which he designated "virus X". He
told Koprowski about the findings and received this response:
"Dear Albert, I have carefully considered your
extraordinary letter of November 17th, with its even more extraordinary
enclosures... I cannot imagine for a moment that I would dismiss 10 years of
work by another investigator with one airy wave on a intraspinal needle".
"Sir, your letter of December 1st, does not merit a
reply. It is clear that dispassionate analysis and discourse are impossible for
you. Sarchasm and invectives do not take the place of reproducible facts in
science. Farewell, my one time friend and colleague".
Sabin moved quickly to make his findings public. In June
1960 his vaccine, deemed more reliable, was chosen to replace Salk's. Koprowski
had lost the race. In his "Rolling Stone" article Tom Curtis echoed
Albert Sabin's findings. Koprowski's vaccine was contaminated with a virus. He
went on to say it was a monkey virus citing the African green monkey as the
source. And there Curtis made a major mistake. The green monkey does not carry
SIV - HIV predecessor, unlike the African chimp. This was enough to discredit Curtis's
findings.
Dr. Cecil Fox: Hilary Koprowski felt that his honour had
been defiled and that he had been done serious injury. The "Rolling
Stone" folded under and publically apologized for having publishing the
article. And that was as they say that for the time being.
The story could have ended there. But one man decided there
were many questions left unanswered.
Edward Hooper, a British journalist, went to Africa to
pursue the path of polio vaccinations. He was convinced that Koprowski used the
SIV carrying chimpanzees to make his polio vaccine. During 17 years he
interviewed hundreds of participants and observers of the period and collected
thousands of relevant documents. In 1999 Hooper published the results of his
research in a book of more than one thousand pages and once again the
scientific community was rocked.
Footage of the cover of Hooper's book: The River - a Journey
Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS.
News archive broadcast: Good evening, could AIDS have been
accidentally caused by scientists? A new book claims HIV has its origins in
AIDS of monkeys, that was passed onto humans when scientists in Africa used
primate tissue in a mass vaccination campaign against polio. I'll be asking the
book's author whether his allegations stand up.
Edward Hooper - Author, Le Vrai Journal, April 16, 2000:
AIDS came about as an act of man, not as an act of God. An experimental oral
polio vaccine that was prepared, I believe, in chimpanzee kidneys and
chimpanzee blood, and which was fed to over a million Africans in the Belgian
Congo, in Rwanda, and in Burundi, between 1957 and 1960, correlates so
precisely with the forst appearances of AIDS that I think what we have here, is
the root whereby this chimpanzee virus arrived in humans.
The intensity of the debate and the depth of Hooper's
research forced Hilary Koprowski to respond.
Interview of dr. Hilary Koprowski:
Dr. Hilary Koprowski: The tissue which I used were kidneys
obtained from either monkeys from Phillipines or from India which was rhesus
monkey, this is the normal term. And there are two other species,
macaka-mulata, I forgot the name of the species of Phillipines. And this is
documented by print.
Interviewer: So, you've never used chimpanzees to...?
Dr. Hilary Koprowski: Oh, never in my life!
Oddly there were no existing documents showing how Koprowski
made his CHAT vaccine. But archive footage from Koprowski's chimp facility can
shed some light.
Archive footage: In the Belgian Congo, Camp Polio, run by
dr. Courtois, houses 86 chimpanzees, on which the vaccine invented by dr.
Koprowski in 1947, is regularly tested. The animals are placed in cages with a
sliding rear door that allows injections to be given without risk to the
handlers. So the fight continues against one of the most terrible diseases of our
time.
So Koprowski's research camp did have chimpanzees and was in
fact one of the largest chimp facilities ever created to date!
Edward Hooper, Author, The River: Well, over 400 chimpanzees
were brought to Lindi camp in the space of less than two years, between 1956
and 1958. And that was one or two notable exceptions, animals which were
favourites, which were treated as pets, that every single one of these
chimpanzees ended up dead! But question has to be why were they killed?
Hooper found an ally for his theory. Bill Hamilton was a
renounced scientist, the most important evolutionary biologist since Darwin.
And Hamilton felt there was a 95 % chance that this theory was correct.
News archive broadcast:
CNN Center: Is there a possibility here scientists simply
don't want to know, don't want to accept, perhaps, at least the moral, if not
the legal, liability for what has been done for the AIDS virus?
Bill Hamilton - Evolutionary Biologist: I feel this is so
and it's one of the most worrying aspects of the case. I feel it's not only the
origin of AIDS that is in question here, it is the conduct of science towards
this hypothesis which has been one of almost paranoid rejection, I would say. I
think I would not exaggerate and describe it as medical science's well stated
hypothesis. And there seems to be a great reluctance to publish anything about
it or to test any of the available evidence that could be more directly tested.
Bill Hamilton made two trips to Africa to collect chimpanzee
samples. Sadly, during the second trip he contracted malaria and died in March
2000. Before his death Hamilton had asked the Royal Society of scientists in
London, England, to stage a debate on the hunter versus the vaccine theory of
the origin of AIDS. In his memory the conference went ahead. Edward Hooper was
invited to present his evidence to Koprowski in the scientific community. It
was the first time they had ever invited a non-scientist to debate a theory
with renowned experts in the field.
Dr. Hilary Koprowski: I am not to defend myself, Hooper is
to defend himself. Certainly, this meeting is very welcome. I think it's a good
meeting, it's an unusual meeting. A journalist presents a hypothesis without
facts and he had come to scientists and gave them all the scientific facts.
Edward Hooper: I think, we are gonna have a real debate
today. And it's gonna be a worldwide debate! And I think that it's between
Koprowski and myself. I think it's as far as more important than that.
From the opening of the conference arguments were launched
agaisnt Hooper's theory. Even the date when AIDS emerged among men was
challenged. But the final blow to Hooper was the suprise announcement that
samples from Koprowski's vaccine had been located and tested and contained no
trace of HIV, SIV or chimp DNA. That left little room for Hooper to respond.
Dr. Robin Weiss - Co-organiser of the Royal Society
Conference: This did offend Ed Hooper cause he was clearly the under dog at the
meeting. But science is of a cruel culture. We go by evidence and the way we
may be fooled in our interpretation we may fool ourselves in misinterpreting
evidence. In the end hard evidence wins the day.
But the scientific evidence that signaled the death now for
the polio vaccine theory needed to be re-examined. Exactly what was tested?
Dr. Robin Weiss: The actual samples that we used in the
Congo between late 1957 and the beginning of 1960, of course, don't exist
anymore. They were used. But one of the samples tested was the very same lot of
virus as Hooper thinks is by farther most likely to have been contaminated,
that was used in the Congo - the chat 10A11.
Similar samples? May be. But the real question is, was it or
was it not used in Congo?
Dr. Robin Weiss: This was discovered here in the UK who had
received it in 1981 from the State Institute in Stockholm who in turn received
it from the Wistar Institute around the time it was made. And it was sealed and
it have never been opened.
So the sample remained sealed since it was made at
Koprowski's laboratory. All one can say for certain is that it was never used
in Congo. Is this enough scientific trigger to use as a decisive statement
against the polio vaccine theory?
Dr. Cecil Fox: This was another event in which the
scientists eventually conjoined and had a public lynching in London for the
Royal Society in which they once again claimed to have labored as to the idea
that HIV could have come from polio vaccine. And I don't think they did a
better job than they have done before. There are still great gaping holes in
their story.
We wanted to see for ourselves if SIV carrying chimpanzees
were used just for testing or if their organs were used to make Koprowski's
vaccine. So we return to the Congo where all took place.
This is Stanleyville, Belgian Congo's former capital. On the
end's parts of town live remains of the vast Stanleyville medical laboratory.
In 1957 it was a sparkling new facility where Koprowski set up his operations
to produce and test his polio vaccine on the local people.
Camp Lindi which housed the chimpanzees was built on a
peninsula on the Lindi river, 40 minutes upstreem from Stanleyville. To get
there we had to take the road and then a ferry to cross the river.
During his research Edward Hooper had found Christophe
Bayello, one of the assistants working at camp Lindi. Bayello agreed to guide
us there. In the 1950s he was in charge of caring for and feeding the
chimpanzees.
Christophe Bayello - Assistant Camp Lindi: When white man
arrived, we were workers who didn't know anything. They came like that, they
did their polio, their operations, no one knows about it except maybe the
nurses! Not us, the nurses!... They know their secrets...
What secret is Bayello talking about? In the jungle only a
few traces remain. But other images bring these abandoned sites back to life.
These photographs were taken by Tom Norton - Koprowski's right hand man. The
photos help date one of Koprowski's trips to the Congo. February 1957. It
corresponds to an event. The first big influx of chimpanzees to Camp Lindi.
More than one hundred chimpanzees, an exorbitant number captured in about 15
days.
An important visit, it's immortalized with a symbolic
handshake between the two cofounders - dr. Courtois and Hilary Koprowski. On
this photo are the 11 camp assistants, including Christophe Bayello and Joseph
Limbaya, one of two nurses who observed first hand what was taking place at
Lindi.
Interview with Joseph Limbaya:
Joseph Limbaya - Nurse at Camp Lindi: We built the camp
because we put the chimps there and when I was asked to kill one of them, I
killed it. I killed two, two or three each day, if the doctor asked me to, then
I conducted an autopsy. I cut here, I cut everything and removed the liver...
We didn't remove the flesh, but the two organs there which touch each other
like that... the two balls called kidneys. The doctor took them to bring to the
laboratory in Kisangani and send off to the US... to bring them to America.
Interviewer: With which doctor did you work?
Joseph Limbaya: I worked with Paul Osterrieth.
According to Joseph, Paul Osterrieth, the lab's head of
virology, was in charge of killing the chimpanzees.
Christophe Bayello: Before conducting an autopsy by groups
of four or five, you couldn't give the monkeys anything to eat that day. The
next day they came to give an injection. The injection, that's to tranquilize
them. They're sort of paralyzed, they don't have any more energy, but they're
not dead, they just don't have any energy. Then you take them for the
operation. We pick them up, then they go with Joseph to have the operation.
After the operation we threw them aside and buried them. We didn't eat them, we
threw them away. The animals are still conscious and able to see during the
operations. "They speak"...
Joseph describes what he did, Bayello what he witnessed.
Their two accounts revealed that the Lindi staff sistematically harvested
organs from the Camp's chimps. So that's how it was, like this day in Lindi,
filmed by a team member...
What Joseph and Bayello revealed was that some animals were
disected alive! And the main reason in those days for harvesting living organs
was to make tissue cultures, needed to make the polio vaccine.
Jacques Kanyama and Philippe Elebe both worked in the
department of virology with Paul Osterrieth.
Philippe Elebe - Assistant in Virology Department,
Stanleyville: We made vaccine in the virology department because... after
making them, they're put into the 50 ml flasks, and we attached labels. It
wasn't something... undercover. There were labels and we even wrote
"anti-polio vaccine" upon them.
Interview with Jacques Kanyama:
Interviewer: Was it an oral vaccine?
Jacques Kanyama - Assistant to Dr. Osterrieth, laboratory in
Stanleyville (February 12, 1958-1960): Yes.
Interviewer: And against which disease?
Jacques Kanyama: But if you look closely, it was the
childhood anti-polio vaccine.
Interviewer: What proof is there that dr. Osterrieth
actually developed the vaccine?
Jacques Kanyama: Me, I know he prepared it himself because
when he called me, he told me to prepare the flasks. He told me: "Clean
and sterilize them!", so we can introduce the vaccine. He had prepared it
in a large vessel like that, sterile, and I divided it up. Since it came from
far away it couldn't stay in those conditions... So it was definitely him who
prepared it!
Paul Osterrieth refused to speak with us. But he was
categorical in his public denial before the Royal Society when he stated:
"It never would have occured to me to risk human life and my own
reputation on material prepared under such primitive conditions... I
categorically deny that I ever did that".
Gaston Ninane was also at Camp Lindi. He was a
microbiologist who took part in the vaccination campaigns in other parts of
Africa. Edward Hooper first interviewed him in November 1992 and recorded the
conversation.
Record of conversation:
Gaston Ninane: The virus was cultivated on kidney cells,
chimpanzee kidney cells. At this time, the tissue culture was made in a bottle
like this and this was in the beginning, because the kidney cell, the chimp
kidney cell, multiplies easily. And it was a good substrate for the polio
virus.
Edward Hooper: So this is quite extraordinary. Now, in the
end he always retracts the chimpanzee kidney cells and just says, I don't know
which type of monkey kidney, but the point is here that he says that they would
make it on chimpanzee kidney! I have no choice when I read "The
River" but to accept his retraction, to accept his final version of
events. And Gastone Ninane is now dead. But I believe very firmly that the
original version that he gave me was the correct one.
The few remaining records from Camp Lindi make it clear that
exams and organ extractions were conducted in a very systematic fashion. While
Koprowski and Osterrieth insisted that they would never use chimp kidneys to
make polio vaccines, research at that time pointed directly to the chimpanzee!
From 1953 Alexandre Jezierski, a veterinarian known by
Koprowski, conducted research in Eastern Congo on behalf of the Pasteur
Institute. He was looking for the best medium to use for the polio vaccine. In
his comparitive study of all African monkeys, chimpanzees topped the list.
The chimp, always the chimp, genetically so close to humans!
Were they used to create a vaccine given to a million African people?
Any of the Camp Lindi scientists deny that chimps were used
to make the polio vaccine. But Pierre Doupagne is not so sure. He was in charge
of laboratory testing at that time.
Pierre Doupagne - Chief Technician, Laboratory of
Stanleyville (1949-1960): The chimpanzee was definitely involved in the
development of the polio vaccine, but at which point, at which level I don't
know a thing about it. I don't understand why there's so much talk about the
chimpanzees if it didn't have something to do with... a scientific goal. But we
certainly used them for scientific research purposes. No, I don't have anything
else to say. I've already spoken enough as it is. I've even said too much.
Two months after our meeting Edward Hooper saw Doupagne and
during this recorded conversation he says a bit more.
Edward Hooper: ...the making of the culture...
Pierre Doupagne: The culture was sterile. I gave the sterile
culture to Osterrieth and Ninane... to do what, I don't know.
Edward Hooper: Let me ask you one more thing here, before I
go. How many times then would you say that you were making the sterile tissue
from chimps for Osterrieth?
Pierre Doupagne: A long time.
Edward Hooper: A long time...?
Pierre Doupagne: ...yes.
Doupagne sheds light on the true situation at the time. And
it makes sense that the polio vaccine would have been made locally for the
vaccination campaigns in Africa.
Edward Hooper: And then I discovered that routinely all the
people who were making the oral polio vaccine used one particular method. They
didn't send gallons of that vaccine overseas that would have been logisticly a
very very difficult process, they sent a small amount. They sent typically one
flask, may be a hundred cc of vaccine. And each of those polio vaccine makers
had another laboratory, laboratory near to where the vaccination was taking
place, grow the vaccine up in locally available tissue culture.
So Albert Sabin sent his vaccine to places like Hungary and
the Soviet Union in 1957 and it was grown up locally in laboratories in
Budapest, in Moscow, in Leningrad and so forth. From Paris Pierre Lepine from
the Pasteur Institute, he sent his vaccines out to places such as Brazzaville,
in Congo Brazaville, it was then French Equatorial Africa. And there again
apparently they grew up the vaccine virus in the locally available tissue
culture. There the ….......... monkey was .............
So basically although there was great control being exerted
about how they developed the vaccine itself, how they attenuated the vaccine,
they then grew it up in what was affectably locally available tissue. Now they
did their best, I am sure, to make sure that monkeys, primates they used, which
were healthy, which didn't appear to be sick, but there was no final check made
as to the material that was being fed to human beings. It was assumed that this
stuff, the cells from the locally available primate, was gonna be safe.
This contradicts Paul Osterrieth's testimony before the
Royal Society where he insisted that the polio vaccine could never have been
prepared in Stanleyville. But in one of the labs rare remaining official
documents we found 250.000 doses made for 250.000 people!
Interview with local people from Burundi:
Amelie Ndababaye - Villager, Gihanga, Burundi: No adult
could be late... and everyone had to attend. The children, either we carried
them or they walked. It was an important vaccine! No one could miss out. It was
a serious obligation, very strict!
Interviewer: What happened if someone refused to be
vaccinated?
Jean Ngezahayo - Villager, Gihanga, Burundi: If someone
hadn't been vaccinated, there were chiefs. They knew in which houses to find
them... No one was sent to jail, but we were ordеred to accept the vaccine.
Between 1956 and 1960 more than one million people were
ordered to receive Koprowski's chat vaccine. When this was revealed the WHO
immediately condemned these experiments.
Edward Hooper: It would be absolutely unfair if
responsibility for this sequence of events for the making of the vaccine in
chimpanzee cells was to be put solely on the shoulders of Paul Osterrieth. He
was the corporal sergeant but we must look for the generals here. His boss
Ghislain Courtois the head of the medical laboratory in Stanleyville clearly
approved this course of action, there's no doubt about that. And just a few
months before he began making the vaccine in chimp cells, Osterrieth was being
trained in tissue culture techniques at the Wistar Institute, at the specific
request of Hilary Koprowski. The person with overall responsibilty for this
sequence of events without a doubt is dr. Koprowski. Without his approval,
without his direction, this sequence of events would not have taken place!
Hilary Koprowski: I've no knowledge about it, I don't think
the Belgians have knowledge about it, you should take his evidence as grain of
salt.
Interviewer: Is it possible that this was done without your
knowing, that chimpanzee kidneys were used without your knowing about it?
Hilary Koprowski: No, there was no possibility to do
something like that!
From our trip to the Congo we learned that the Lindi chimps
and the Stanleyville laboratory facilitated the local production of the chat
vaccine. But does that resolve the question of where AIDS originated? The
impossibility of testing or gaining acess to the Congo samples if they still
exist will always cast a shadow upon the answer. For the moment in the
scientific community the polio vaccine theory is dead. But the extraordinary
convergence of Koprowski's polio vaccination campaigns with the epicentre of
AIDS might encourage them to investigate Edward Hooper's theory more closely.
At the very least questions have been raised about using monkey organs to make
polio vaccines.
Dr. Cecil Fox: We should have stopped using monkey kidney
tissues, I think, for virus production in 1960. And we've continued to do so.
The drug companies are the ones who really determine this. They have developed
facilities, they develop processes that would cost them a lot of money if they
had to do it in a different way. I think what makes me physically angry is the
fact that we now have the genetic ability to make synthetic polio vaccine from
recombinant proteins. And we are not doing it! That we continue to take monkey
parts and inject them into children!
