Oral polio vaccine AIDS hypothesis
OPV also provides long lasting immunity, and stimulates the production of polio neutralizing antibodies in the pharynx and gut.
[6] Oral polio vaccines were developed in the late 1950s by several groups, including those led by Albert Sabin, Hilary Koprowski and H. R.
[8] Between 1957 and 1960, Koprowski's vaccine was administered to roughly one million people in the Belgian territories, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.
[12] In the 1950s, before dangers inherent to the process were well controlled, seed stocks of vaccines were occasionally transported to distant regions, then standard tissue culture methods[13][14][15] were used to amplify the virus at local production facilities.
[20] A few scientists, notably the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton, thought the hypothesis required serious investigation, but they received little support from the scientific community.
[22] Hamilton wrote the foreword for the book and did two expeditions to Congo between December 1999 and January 2000 to collect evidences on the OPV hypothesis.
[25] In 2001, Hilary Koprowski responded by making a detailed rebuttal of the points made in the book, also in a talk to the Royal Society.
[26] In 2004, the Origin of Aids, a French TV documentary strongly supportive of the OPV hypothesis, appeared on several television stations around the world.
These included accounts of an interview with Jacques Kanyama, a virology technician at the lab in Stanleyville (the Laboratoire Médical de Stanleyville (LMS)) responsible for testing the CHAT vaccine and performing the initial set of vaccinations, who was reported to have said that batches of CHAT had been produced on site by Paul Osterrieth.
[17]In an August 1992 letter published in Science, Koprowski repudiated the OPV AIDS hypothesis, pointing to multiple errors of fact in its assertions.
In 2008, partial HIV viral sequences were identified from a specimen of lymph node collected from an adult female, also in Kinshasa, in 1960.
At this meeting, three independent labs released the results of tests on the remaining stocks of Koprowski's vaccine, which Edward Hooper had demanded in The River.
The tests confirmed Koprowski's contention that his vaccine was made from monkey, rather than chimpanzee, kidney, and found no evidence of SIV or HIV contamination.
"[3] An accompanying editorial in Nature concluded: The new data may not convince the hardened conspiracy theorist who thinks that contamination of OPV by chimpanzee virus was subsequently and deliberately covered up.
[45]The possibility that chimpanzees found near Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Stanleyville) were, indirectly, the true source of HIV-1 was directly addressed in a 2004 study published in Nature.
However, the disease has since resurged in Nigeria and in several other nations of Africa, which epidemiologists trace to refusals by certain local populations to allow their children to be administered the Sabin oral vaccine.
[50] Since 2003, these fears have spread among some in the Muslim community, with Datti Ahmed, of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria stating that: We believe that modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and viruses which are known to cause HIV and AIDS.
