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January 21, 2007

The Ultimate "Constant Gardener" Scandal
The Origins of HIV/AIDS Film

Here's an important controversial film about the so-called OPV ("oral polio vaccine") theory of the origins of the AIDS epidemic, a disease that has already taken more than 26 million lives, with more than 100 million premature deaths in the next 50 ears --  now infecting, for example,  more than 5.5 million people in South Africa alone, where it is killing more than 1000 people per day.

This 2003 (poorly-distributed/ legally-threatened)  film built on 20 years of investigative reporting and "upstream swimming" against the scientific community by Edward Hooper, a courageous British journalist. Hooper contends that the disease was actually man-made,  originating in polio vaccination trials by scientists like Dr.Hillary Koprowski and Dr. Paul Osterrieth, who were rushing to perfect their own polio vaccine.

With the help of local chiefs, the vaccines were compulsory for more than 1 million people in the Congo and Burundi from 1957-60, which may have used chimpanzee tissue  as a "substrate" for tissue cultures, in the production of the vaccines.
Koprowski
Titre6 Hooper's 1999 book The River started this controversy. Contrary to popular mythology, the controversy continues unresolved to this date.

This spring, researchers claimed that HIV had been traced to chimps in the Cameroon, supposedly predating the OPV trials and lending support to a "bushmeat" theory of the virus' origins.   However, Hooper has raised several important criticisms of this theory, including its failure to explain the concentration of early HIV/AIDs cases in the Congo, quite far from Cameroon; the low incidence of HIV in Cameroon; and the prospect that Cameroon-type chimps had turned up in the 1950s Congo camps.

Since the original vaccines employed in the Congo trials have all somehow disappeared, we may never get to the bottom of this controversy. All we can be sure of is that this one lone journalist  has certainly succeeded in making the orthodox scientific community very uncomfortable.

Interested readers are referred to Hoopers' website for the latest developments.

origins of aids
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