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Moreover, the correlation between human beings eating primates and Aids is poor. As we have noted, Guinea-Bissau has sooty mangabey Aids, but no sooty mangabeys. In northern Congo the pygmies eat primates, but have no HIV. The “natural transfer” theory simply does not deserve the confidence placed in it by most scientists. The burden of proof has been shifted.
One piece of evidence seems to support natural transfer, and that is the genetic differences among different HIV strains. The 10 or so different forms of HIV-1, group M, are all sufficiently different to assume that, with normal rates of evolutionary change in the genes of the virus, they must have shared a common ancestor in the 1940s or even earlier. Hooper has no problem with this. Either evolutionary change has been unusually rapid, as it often is in a new host species, or, just as plausibly, the 10 groups represent 10 different chimpanzees in the cages at Lindi, with slightly different viruses. Those chimps were caught from many different wild troops.
Hooper’s book has certainly stirred things up. Act-Up, an Aids campaigning group, has tried to organise a protest outside the Wistar Institute, where the originator of the Chat polio vaccine, Hilary Koprowski, shelters behind his lawyers. But Hooper refuses to endorse such demonstrations, believing that the problem is not a matter of blame but of historical research. The contamination, if it happened, was inadvertent.
Nevertheless, the implications are terrible. Even without the Aids link, what Hooper has found is appalling. A live vaccine, whose safety had not been properly tested, was given to hundreds of thousands of Africans, few of whom could benefit from it (many were immune to polio). That there was the most serious outbreak of polio in Kinshasa’s history shortly after the vaccinations there, suggests that the vaccine might have reverted to virulence, and set off the polio epidemic.
British doctors warned at the time that this was a danger, so ignorance was no excuse. Worse, the scientists who carried out this useless experiment never followed it up to see if there had been any safety problems.
Nor did they record exactly how they made the vaccine. Nor, of course, did they have much compunction about capturing hundreds of young wild chimpanzees (often killing the parents in the process), keeping them in dreadful conditions, and removing their organs, perhaps even before killing them. (One black technician in Kisangani, interviewed by Hooper and Hamilton, remembers vivisection of chimps which were paralysed but apparently conscious.) Even by the standards of the 1950s, this was pretty low. Little wonder that Hooper has found it so difficult to persuade the scientists involved to tell him what they got up to.
Yet, as he points out, if Aids did not derive from a contaminated vaccine, they have nothing to fear from the truth. If they did not use chimpanzees, then surely they could produce evidence of what they did use. If they know that the vaccine could not have been contaminated, then surely they can produce the protocols and do the experiments to show it. It is no longer enough simply to say that the hypothesis is too speculative and does not deserve to be tested. In terms of establishing cause and effect, it is now rather less speculative than the theory that salt causes high blood pressure.
Hooper’s opponents argue that knowing where Aids originated is irrelevant to stopping its progress. It makes no difference to the fight against Aids whether it was an accident or an act of God. Indeed, by discrediting vaccination, the Hooper argument might actually make the task of fighting Aids more difficult, should an Aids vaccine ever be developed. Hooper retorts that the truth matters.c
Matt Ridley is the author of Genome (Fourth Estate) and chairman of the International Centre for Life, Newcastle- upon-Tyne
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