The Coming Plague (67 page)

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Authors: Laurie Garrett

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The “Robert R.” samples collected in 1968 in St. Louis did
not
, as it turned out, contain HIV viruses. Nor did the 1970 Zaire samples originally tested by the Pasteur Institute. These individuals apparently did not die of AIDS. The 1959 “Leopoldville strain” was lost by American scientists and, therefore, could never be confirmed.
The PCR data seemed to confirm Myers's assertion that HIV-1 underwent some radical event after 1970; before that it was either virtually harmless or nearly noninfectious to human beings.
But the New York City laboratory of Dr. David Ho (at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Laboratory) used PCR techniques to study samples taken in 1959 from the Manchester sailor. The sailor was, indeed, infected, and the strain of HIV-1 found in his tissue—extracted painstakingly from paraffin histology blocks made thirty-five years earlier by the Manchester hospital—fit perfectly in the Type B clade. Indeed, Ho concluded that the Manchester sailor was infected with a virus that “looks just like a contemporary European HIV-1 B-type strain.”
That seemed to throw a serious monkey wrench in Myers's Big Bang theory. Myers, however, felt the sailor was an aberration; “the preponderance of evidence still argues for an explosive event in the mid-1970s,” he said. Furthermore, he insisted that the HIV-1 virus was fairly new, certainly only a few decades old, not centuries.
Ho and a number of other virologists disagreed, arguing that HIV-1 was “an ancient virus” that had existed at a low level in human beings for centuries. If an explosive surge occurred in the 1970s, as all epidemiological evidence indicated, it was due to human events, not to biological changes in the virus.
200
And what might those human events have been?
First of all, they had to have taken place simultaneously on at least two continents: Africa and North America. Though the Manchester sailor had the AIDS Type B strain in 1959, he could have become infected during travels to the United States or Canada. There is no evidence that he traveled in Central Africa. In the early 1980s all original European AIDS cases directly or indirectly involved visitors from North America and Africa.
If one of the explosive epidemics preceded the other—Africa's or North America's—it could not have been by many years; perhaps one preceded the other only by months.
In light of this duality in occurrence many people sought iatrogenic or conspiratorial explanations for the appearance of HIV-1. One set of theories shared the belief that HIV-1 entered the
Homo sapiens
population via vaccine products. Topping the suspect list was a batch of live polio vaccine that was prepared on African green monkey kidney cells.
201
The vaccines derived from that batch were widely dispensed between 1957 and 1960 in
Zaire, Rwanda, and Burundi. Another polio vaccine distributed by Lederle in 1977 was suspected of containing “C-type particles” that some critics later claimed were AIDS viruses. A scientific panel was assembled in the United States in 1992–93 to review available samples of early polio vaccines, as well as the safety and laboratory techniques used by polio pioneers of the late 1950s. After careful study it was concluded that the polio vaccines were HIV-free.
202
There were several other reasons to reject the polio vaccine hypothesis. To begin with, HIV-1 and SIVagm were only distantly related at the genetic level, so it seemed unlikely that in less than twenty years' time viruses originally from African green monkey cells could have mutated some 60 percent of their nucleotides to produce HIV-1.
203
Another theory, that a contaminated polio vaccine batch allegedly used in 1977 by American homosexuals to treat herpes was actually the source of AIDS, could be dismissed both because the vaccine was not AIDS-CONTAMINATED and because the timing was wrong. Clearly, 1977 was too late a date. Furthermore, the 1977 vaccine was used widely on populations that did not go on to develop AIDS—Polish schoolchildren, for example.
Two far more elaborate theories of vaccine origin of the AIDS epidemic put the blame on the global campaign to eliminate smallpox. The first version of the smallpox idea was promoted by
The Times
of London in 1987. It claimed that long-latent, ancient HIV infections were activated when people were vaccinated against smallpox. Failing to prove a connection between HIV and the smallpox campaign, five years later the same newspaper would lead an international campaign to discredit HIV's role in AIDS altogether.
The second twist on the smallpox theory, whose chief proponents were an anti-genetic engineering group called the Foundation for Economic Trends and an anti-vivisectionist organization in Los Angeles, claimed smallpox viruses grown on cow cells recombined in test tubes with the bovine leukemia virus, producing HIV.
204
Genetic sequence analysis of the smallpox and BLV viruses indicated that it would be impossible to create, through either deliberate or mistaken recombination of the two, anything that even remotely resembled HIV.
Nevertheless, a retired physician living in London, Dr. John Seale, asserted in 1985 that the AIDS virus was absolutely the result of genetic engineering—the deliberate outcome of biological weaponry experiments conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland, by the U.S. Army.
“I'm totally convinced it's man-made,” Seale said.
In an editorial published by the Royal Society of Medicine,
205
Seale argued that HIV was the result of deliberately mixing bits of the genetic sequences of BLV, visna (from sheep), two other lentiviruses found in horses and goats, and HTLV-I.
“It looks like a recombinant virus to me,” Seale said, adding, “We are accusing the retrovirologists as a group of making this virus.”
As evidence for his assertions Seale cited the work of Soviet scientist S. Drozdov of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow. Drozdov and other Soviet scientists were, in turn, influenced by retired East Berlin scientist Jacob Segal, of Humboldt University. Segal wrote a report, read throughout Eastern Europe, that claimed the AIDS virus was made at Fort Detrick in 1977 from a deliberate mixture of visna and HTLV-I. Though it had been the subject of discreet discussion inside the Soviet bloc for over a year, the Segal report was first publicly distributed at the 1986 Summit of the Nonaligned Movement, which convened in September in Harare, Zimbabwe. Over subsequent months the Segal and Seale reports got wide international play, particularly in developing countries.
206
The seventy-six-year-old Segal claimed to be the victim of CIA harassment. And he said that he possessed, but refused to reveal, documents proving that U.S. prisoners were injected with various experimental combinations of visna and HTLV-I until the perfect lethal form, HIV, was found. All this, he said, took place in 1977.
That such sophisticated forms of cloning hadn't yet been invented in 1977 did not seem to faze Segal. And the Segal/Seale notion that AIDS was the result of a sinister CIA plot found favor in many quarters, particularly African countries that felt unjustly targeted and blamed by American scientists as the origin of AIDS. A popular Soviet cartoon pictured an American scientist who was exchanging a test tube full of swastikas for a wad of cash, proffered by a general. At the characters' feet lay dead bodies.
In a blame-counterblame campaign, the U.S. State Department widely distributed a detailed denial in 1987, charging the KGB had concocted the entire campaign in order to discredit American government credibility in developing countries.
207
Years later, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet National Academy of Sciences would formally apologize for the accusation, acknowledging that it had been KGB-inspired.
Another theory of deliberate recombination came from Los Angeles anti-vivisectionist Dr. Robert Strecker, who gained a large following in 1987 by again claiming, on the basis of a supposed BLV connection, that the CIA made the AIDS virus.
“The AIDS virus was manufactured by crossing BLV and visna virus from animals into man to make the AIDS virus, and growing it in human tissue culture, and that's AIDS. And that's not complicated,” Strecker said in a fund-raising speech before wealthy North Hollywood residents. Asked why such a monstrous thing was done, Strecker said the CIA “requested it, to make cancer.”
“Why would they want to make cancer?” he was asked.
“You'd have to ask them, I don't know. I don't know! Everybody wants to know why, why, why! I'm just telling you how they did it. I'm not going to tell you why, that's for you to find out,” Strecker concluded.
Though Seale, Segal, and Strecker disappeared from the AIDS scene fairly quickly, they were replaced all over the world by others who saw in
the apparently sudden appearance of HIV something terribly insidious, deliberate, even conspiratorial.
The New York Native
gay newspaper spent years promoting the notion that AIDS was caused by a CIA attempt to wipe out the agricultural economy of Cuba through release of African swine fever virus—the true cause of AIDS, they said, not HIV. Years later the same newspaper would abandon the African swine fever theory, claiming instead that AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome were the same disease, both of which were caused by HHV-6, a herpes-type virus. A Vietnam War veteran living in St. Cloud, Minnesota, devoted years of his life to dispersing letters and pamphlets naming dioxin chemicals as the cause of AIDS: again, a conspiracy was afoot, involving a massive cover-up of the worldwide use of Agent Orange and the poisoning of the planet by the petrochemical industry that was destroying humanity's white blood cells. In 1986 the North Korean government charged that AIDS was created in a South Korean laboratory by, of course, the CIA with the goal of wiping out the North Koreans. The fact that virtually no Koreans had AIDS in 1986 was ignored.
Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, British astronomers, announced in 1986 that the AIDS virus came from outer space.
And sidestepping altogether the issue of the origin of HIV, University of California at Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg declared that it didn't matter where HIV originated. The virus had nothing to do with AIDS, he said. Duesberg claimed that AIDS was not an infectious disease and had no association with any virus: the disease commonly called AIDS had existed since the beginning of time, but seemed “epidemic” in the 1980s because people were injecting narcotics, snorting nitrites, taking amphetamines, getting parasitic diseases that scientists labeled “AIDS,” and leading what he called “a self-destructive gay lifestyle.”
208
“I don't mind to be shot up with it as long as it is a clean virus, without other junk, because I'm fully convinced it's not the cause of AIDS,” Duesberg said.
While Duesberg's theories were debunked point by point by scientists all over the world, the public attraction to his ideas was strong, in part because they suggested that such things as consistent condom use might not be necessary. And because blame for having a deadly disease could be leveled straight at the victim—the individual who led a “bad lifestyle” that caused an illness.
209
Though evidence for HIV as the cause of AIDS, the bona fide existence of a pandemic of infectious immunodeficiency, its evolutionary link to a family of monkey viruses, and its recent large-scale outbreak on earth was overwhelming, collective denial coupled with historically valid feelings of group persecution would continue to support acceptance of dark, conspiratorial theories. The most striking example of this was provided by University of Maryland researchers Stephen Thomas and Sandra Crouse Quinn, who conducted public opinion polls between 1988 and 1990 among working- and middle-class African-American residents of suburban Maryland,
Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Charlotte (North Carolina), Detroit, Kansas City (Missouri), and Tuscaloosa (Alabama). Among 999 surveyed members of church congregations, 65 percent either agreed with or were unsure about the statement: “I believe AIDS is a form of genocide against the black race.” Nearly 40 percent of African-American Washington, D.C., college students agreed with the statement: “I believe there is some truth in reports that the AIDS virus was produced in a germ-warfare laboratory.”
210
Grasping at straws to explain a spectacularly tragic and explosive disease event that wasn't supposed to happen, that just a decade earlier politicians and physicians proudly proclaimed the stuff of history, humanity was at a loss to look objectively at the rapidly spreading new microbes and reach collective understanding of their origin. Like Marburg, Ebola, Lassa, Machupo, the 1918–19 influenza, and a variety of other viruses described in this book, the HIVs and SIVs that seemed to suddenly appear out of nowhere—dropped from the sky, as Hoyle would have it—actually existed in various forms in nature for decades, or centuries.
“Simian viruses have evolved in simians in parallel with human viruses,” Joe McCormick said in 1987, discussing the origin of AIDS. “And the virus in humans has been around for a very long time. For quite a long time, I believe, in Africa. And I believe a whole family of these viruses … have co-evolved.”
Viruses had generally proven to be remarkably adaptable microbes, capable of altering both their “payload” and “delivery” systems (as Bernard Fields called them) to exploit changes in the animal world around them. If any potential host species underwent significant ecological change, selection pressure would come to bear upon the viruses. Those species that were closest to
Homo sapiens
on the evolutionary tree, chimpanzees and gorillas, seemed to have suffered the most from time's arrow, their populations over the millennia having greatly diminished. Restricted ecologically by their diets, chimps and gorillas had to reside in niches that were inside or near tropical rain forests or forest/savanna junctions. As the forest lands diminished, so did the sizes of their niches. Monkeys, too, had suffered niche encroachment or destruction at the hand of
Homo sapiens
, and many species had lost over half their original territory since the first arrival of European and Arab slave traders.

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