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From: Peter Brookesmith Mendoza <DarkSecretPB@compuserve.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 09:05:14 -0400
Fwd Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 23:01:26 -0400
Subject: Re: 'The AIDS-ET Connection'


With the compliments of the Duke of mendoza:

>Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 11:39:46 -0700
>From: Judith Dale <judithdale@earthlink.net>
>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
>Subject: Re: 'The AIDS-ET Connection'

>Yes, well, the CDC and WHO would like us to believe that the
>origin of HIV lies in the Green Monkey. However, there is also
>the theory that HIV was grown in the biological warfare labs,
>which interestingly are often in the same companies that
>produce vaccines.

Here are the antidotes to this kind of factoid:

In the USA and Europe in the 1980s and '90s there were
suspicions that HIV had reached the human population through
vaccines, in particular a batch of live polio vaccine that was
created using African green monkey cells. This was used in
Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi between 1957 and 1960. An American
scientific panel examined the evidence in 1992-3, and concluded
the vaccines were free of HIV. A major problem with the
'contaminated vaccine' theory was that the HIV-1 and SIV viruses
are genetically so far apart that it was virtually impossible
for the SIV to have mutated into HIV-1 in such a short timespan.
It was suggested too that viruses in smallpox vaccine grown on
cow cells had reacted with bovine leukemia viruses to produce
HIV, but this theory too collapsed when it was shown that the
DNA of the two microorganisms were incapable of combining.
Astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe declared
their conviction that the AIDS virus came from outer space. The
two British scientists have long maintained that many
epidemic-inducing microbes arrive on meteorites, asteroids and
minor comets entering the Earth's atmosphere. The distinguished
astronomers have consistently ignored biologists' objections
that the microbes would be wiped out by a combination of
ultra-violet light in outer space and the heat generated when
the space debris enters the atmosphere.

Then came the conspiracy theorists. One of the first was British
doctor John Seale, who published an article in the Journal of
the Royal Society of Medicine in 1985 that claimed the US Army
had concocted HIV out of genetic material from viruses causing
bovine leukemia, visna in sheep, lentiviruses from horses and
goats, and human T-cell leukemia/lymphocyte virus. The recipe,
Seale said, had been cooked up at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in
1977. Lying behind Seale's thesis were two articles that had
appeared the same year in Literaturnaya Gazeta, the journal of
the Soviet Writer's Union, and told much the same story.
According to Professor S. Drozdov of the Research Institute of
Poliomyelitis and Encephalitis in Moscow, the CIA had let the
virus loose by testing it on federal prisoners in the USA and in
the field in Africa.

None of these claims bore much relation to scientific or to
historical facts. The earliest identified AIDS cases date back
to 1959, when the concept of genetic coding was unknown. Reverse
transcriptase was discovered in 1970, and retroviruses were
discovered in people in 1978. But it was not until 1983 that the
technique of polymerase chain reaction, which revolutionized
research into and manipulation of DNA, was invented. Essentially
the cloning technology that the 'invention' of HIV requires did
not exist in 1977. In 1986, the Soviets admitted they had their
own cases of AIDS, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
the Soviet Academy of Sciences apologized for disseminating the
notion that AIDS was an American invention, an idea that, it
admitted, had been inspired by the KGB. The US State Department
had already concluded as much, and believed the accusations were
designed to discredit the USA in developing countries.

Facts have never stood in the way of a good conspiracy theory,
however. In 1996 Dr Leonard G. Horowitz, a dental health expert
and former faculty member of Tufts and Harvard Universities,
published (at his own expense) a 592-page hardcover 'expose' -
Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional?
- of the links between AIDS, the National Institutes of Health,
US biological warfare research establishments and an almost
inevitable list of several favorite targets of conspiracy
addicts, such as the Rockeller family, the CIA, the Council on
Foreign Relations, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Nixon
administrations of 1968-74. According to Dr Horowitz's book,
AIDS researcher Dr Robert Gallo did not discover HIV in 1984,
but had already invented it by 1971. (One is amazed that Dr
Gallo has refrained from legal action.) The virus was deployed
in Africa as a means of population control, and the whole plot
was originally put together by Dr Henry Kissinger as early as
1969.

Dr Horowitz also claims that 'the world's most feared and deadly
viruses' - Marburg and Ebola - were likewise man-made, and
'share the dubious distinction of breaking out in or around
areas of CIA/NATO operations' in Africa, and were put to good
use in diplomatic blackmail. NATO does not operate in Africa.
Circumstantial evidence and a powerful belief system can prove
almost anything. Horowitz's 'critical examination' of 'the New
York Times bestselling "nonfiction" book The Hot Zone by Richard
Preston ... reveals Preston's book is undoubtedly
counterintelligence propaganda seemingly intended to prepare the
world for future epidemics and additional virus outbreaks.'
(Horowitz says rather breathlessly that a 'a final serendipitous
discovery identified ... Preston as the recipient of a $20,000
literary grant from the Sloan Foundation', a fact that could be
gleaned by looking at the first few pages of the book.)

But the point of conspiracy theories is less to satisfy logic
than to articulate and dramatize emotions. In the case of AIDS,
the blaming ritual that conspiracy theory requires has
amalgamated moral disgust and social and racial stereotyping.
The Reagan administration's unwillingness to commit funds to HIV
and AIDS research stemmed from a disbelief that AIDS would ever
affect heterosexuals, despite growing evidence to the contrary.
The disease had already quarantined itself, in this view, and
had conveniently done so among a group of people whose way of
life was morally and physically repugnant to the decision
makers. Behind them stood a phalanx of right-wing religious
bigots only too ready to proclaim that gays had brought their
plague upon themselves: 'AIDS is a judgement of God,' thundered
the Rev. Billy Graham, and was echoed by television evangelist
and Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell: 'AIDS is God's
punishment. The scripture is clear: We do reap it in our flesh
when we violate the laws of God.' Alabama senator Jeremiah
Denton was reported to have said unequivocally, 'Let the faggots
die.'

By the late 1980s, the claim that AIDS was a product of
biological warfare experiments in Africa had metamorphosed itself
to haunt the imagination as home-grown folklore. On the political
fringe, groups such as the United Front Against Racism and
Capitalist Oppression could maintain that that AIDS was
'bio-warfare directed mainly against gays' by the CIA. But by
this time the threat to heterosexuals was widely recognized, and
so among many African Americans the legend grew - along with the
disproportionate spread of AIDS in the black community - that the
biological 'war' was a genocidal attack on them. This was not a
belief limited to separatist groups or black nationalists,
although it was certainly endorsed by them. Stephen Thomas and
Sandra Quinn, from the University of Maryland, polled black
Americans in seven states between 1988 and 1990 on attitudes to
the disease. Nearly 40 per cent of the black college students
surveyed in Washington, DC, agreed with the statement: 'I believe
there is some truth in reports that the AIDS virus was produced
in a germ-warfare laboratory.' Still more disturbing was the
finding that of 999 black churchgoers, one third agreed strongly
with the statement: 'I believe AIDS is a form of genocide against
the black race.'

Against this backcloth it becomes all the more urgent to promote
some rational, fact-based approach to the causes of AIDS and
emerging diseases.

Incidentally, it's also not true that the numbers of AIDS
infections, nationally or globally, is not tracked. But national
pride in some Third World countries and simple lack of medical
infrastructure in others make the figures not entirely reliable.

----------------

FURTHER READING
Berridge, Virginia: AIDS in the UK (Oxford University Press) 1996
Conner, S. & Kingman, S: The Search for the Virus (Penguin) 1988
Epstein, Steven: Impure Science (University of California Press)
1996
Fisher-Hoch, S. & McCormick, J.B: The Virus Hunters (Bloomsbury)
1996
Garrett, Laurie: The Coming Plague (Penguin) 1995
Gould, Peter: The Slow Plague (Blackwell) 1993
Karlen, Arno: Plague's Progress (Victor Gollancz) 1995
 Mack, Arien(ed): In Time of Plague (New York University Press)
1991
McNeill, William H.: Plagues and Peoples (Basil Blackwell) 1977
Porter, Roy: Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550-1860
(Cambridge University Press) 1995
Preston, Richard: The Hot Zone (Random House) 1994
Rosenberg, Charles: Explaining Epidemics (Cambridge University
Press) 1992
Wills, Christopher: Plagues (HarperCollins) 1996

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