When AIDS officially began in 1981 the public was told that anal sex, drugs, and homosexuality were at the root of the new “gay plague.” The first cases were all young, predominantly white, and previously healthy homosexual men from Manhattan who were dying mysteriously from “gay pneumonia” and “gay cancer” in the form of Kaposi’s sarcoma. The association with homosexuality was so remarkable that the disease was initially termed GRID (“gay-related immune deficiency”). To this day, gays are still blamed for the spread of AIDS into the U.S. population.
When the disease first broke out, a new virus was suspected, but officials reassured “the general public” there was nothing to worry about. Of course, the health experts were wrong. Now most of the world’s AIDS cases are heterosexuals. The AIDS virus (HIV) can also be transmitted vaginally; and one does not need to be a drug abuser, a promiscuous person or a homosexual to contract AIDS.
The Green Monkey Theory
Where did HIV originate? Prominent cancer virologists and government epidemiologists have theorised that HIV originated in African green monkeys. Purportedly the monkey virus “jumped species” and entered the black population. From there it migrated to Haiti and Manhattan. After the virus entered the black heterosexual population in the late 1970s, it rapidly spread to millions of blacks because of transfusions with HIV-infected blood, dirty needles, promiscuity and genital ulcers — or so the experts said.
Not all scientists believe the official monkey story, although it is rare to find people who express this view publicly. One persistent underground rumor is that AIDS is biological warfare. Proponents of the AIDS conspiracy theory believe that AIDS has nothing to do with green monkeys, homosexuality, drug addiction, genital ulcerations, anal sex or promiscuity, but that it has to do with scientists experimenting on blacks and gays: in short, AIDS is genocide. Most African-Americans have heard the story that HIV is a manufactured virus genetically-engineered to kill off the black race. Thirty percent of New York City blacks polled by The New York Times (October 29, 1990) actually believe AIDS is an ethno-specific bioweapon designed in a laboratory to infect black people.
Despite the general acceptance that HIV came from monkeys and the rain forest, there is no scientific evidence to prove that HIV and AIDS originated in Africa. What is true is that the first AIDS cases were uncovered in the U.S. in 1979, around the same time that AIDS cases were discovered in Africa. In addition, no stored African tissue from the 1970s tests positive for HIV. And scientists have a hard time explaining how a black heterosexual epidemic centered in Africa could have quickly transformed itself into a white homosexual epidemic in Manhattan.
The Gay Hepatitis-B Vaccine Experiment
Conveniently lost in the history of AIDS is the gay Hepatitis-B vaccine experiment that immediately preceded the decimation of gay Americans. A “cohort” of over a thousand young gays was injected with the vaccine at the New York Blood Center in Manhattan during the period November 1978 to October 1979.1 Similar gay experiments were conducted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis, and Chicago, beginning in 1980.2 The AIDS epidemic broke out shortly thereafter.
The experiment was run by Wolf Szmuness, a Polish Jew born in 1919. He was a young medical student in eastern Poland when the Nazis invaded the country in 1939. His entire family perished in the Holocaust. When Poland was partitioned, Szmuness was taken prisoner and sent to Siberia.
After the war, he was allowed to finish medical school in Tomsk in central Russia. He married a Russian woman, had a daughter, and in 1959 was allowed to return to Poland where he became an expert in hepatitis.
According to June Goodfield’s account of his life in Quest for the Killers, Szmuness defected from Poland with his family in 1969, arriving penniless in New York with $15 in his pocket.3 Through scientific connections he found work as a laboratory technician at the New York Blood Center. Within a few years he was given his own lab at the center and was also appointed Professor of Public Health at Columbia University. By the mid-1970s, Szmuness was a world authority on hepatitis, and was invited back to Moscow in 1975 to give a scientific presentation. As a defector he was terrified to set foot back in the Soviet Union, but his colleagues assured him he would have the full protection of the U.S. State Department. His return to Russia was a scientific triumph.
In the late 1970s, Wolf Szmuness was awarded millions of dollars to undertake the most important mission of his life: the Hepatitis-B vaccine experiment. Szmuness specifically wanted to use gay men to avoid “serious legal and logistical problems.”4 For his study he did not want monogamous men, nor men with lovers. He chose only healthy, young, responsible, intelligent, and primarily white homosexuals. The experiment was costly and he didn’t want any uncooperative or hard-to-find gays messing up his experiment. Involved in the experiment were the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Abbott Laboratories, and Merck, Sharp & Dohme. Szmuness’ experiment was hugely successful, and his vaccine was hailed as having tremendous global implications.
The Gay Plague
The links of the gay experiment to the outbreak of AIDS are obvious to anyone who wants to see the connection. Three months after the experiment began, the first cases of AIDS reported to the CDC appeared in young gay men in Manhattan in 1979. The first San Francisco AIDS case appeared in that city in September 1980, six months after the Hepatitis-B experiment started there.5 In June 1981 the AIDS epidemic became “official.”
Were gay men given experimental vaccines contaminated with the AIDS virus? The government says no, but government agencies have a long history of covert and unethical medical experimentation, particularly with minorities. Was it simply a quirk of nature that a virus “out of Africa” would suddenly decimate the most hated minority in America?
Why did the U.S. government choose Wolf Szmuness, a Soviet-trained doctor and a recent American immigrant to head this dangerous experiment? Goodfield, who has written the definitive account of the Hepatitis-B experiment, claims Szmuness has a painful life. Confined as a political prisoner in Siberia during World War II, he was repeatedly interrogated and beaten by the Russian KGB for refusing to cooperate in spy activities. When he could not be broken, they warned him: “Say nothing of this to anyone, but remember. We will reach you anywhere in the world. No matter where you go, no matter where you try to hide, you will never be out of our grasp.”6
The experimental Hepatitis-B vaccine was primarily manufactured by Merck. However, during the experiment Szmuness was concerned about possible vaccine contamination. Goodfield writes, “This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one vaccine batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck’s.”7
After the Hepatitis-B experiment ended, Szmuness insisted that all thirteen thousand blood specimens donated by gay men be retained at the Blood Center for future use. Due to space requirements, it is highly unusual for any laboratory to retain so many old blood specimens. However, several years later when this blood was retested for the presence of HIV antibodies, government epidemiologists were able to detect the “introduction” and the spread of HIV into the gay community.
When asked why he was keeping so many vials of blood, Szmuness replied, “Because one day another disease may erupt and we’ll need this material.”8 A few months after the Hepatitis-B experiment began at the Center, the first AIDS cases began to appear in gay men living in Manhattan. And the retesting of gay blood at the Blood Center proved that HIV was first introduced into the gay population of New York City sometime around 1978-1979, the same year Szmuness’ gay Hepatitis-B experiment began.9
Was Szmuness psychic in his prediction that a new disease would appear in the gay community? Or did he actually know or suspect that a new, deadly virus was being introduced into the gay volunteers? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions can only be surmised. In June 1982 Szmuness died of lung cancer. In his eulogy, Aaron Kellner of the Blood Center wrote: “It is the rare physician who, like Wolf Szmuness, is given the grace to touch the lives of billions of people; those living on this planet and generations yet unborn.”
The seriousness of this becomes apparent when we consider the manufacture of vaccines requires the growth of virus in cell cultures using fetal calf serum in the growth medium. The contamination of vaccines with adventitious viruses has been of concern for many years and the presence of virus-like structures in ‘virus-screened’ bovine serum has been reported. It seems absolutely vital that all vaccines are screened for HIV prior to use and that bovine visna virus is further investigated as to its relationship to HIV and its possible causal role in progression towards AIDS.Millions of African blacks are reportedly infected with HIV. This large number could never have been infected by the simple act of a monkey virus “jumping” over to infect one African in the late 1970s. If that were the case, why don’t we now have millions of AIDS cases in the U.S.? One logical explanation for the millions of Africans infected is that the vaccines used in the World Health Organisation’s mass inoculation programs were contaminated. Was the contamination accidental or deliberate? It is well-known in vaccine circles that the vaccinia (cowpox) virus used in the manufacture of the smallpox vaccine works well in genetic engineering. Charles Pillar and Keith Yamamoto, authors of Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technology, state: “Researchers have been able to splice genes coding for the surface coats of other viruses, such as influenza, hepatitis, and rabies into vaccinia virus DNA. The result: a ‘broad spectrum’ vaccine with a coat of many colors.”
Creation of a Super Germ
A decade before the first cases of AIDS, Dr. Donald M. MacArthur, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Defense, told a Congressional Hearing that a “super germ” could be developed as part of our experimental bio-warfare program. This genetically engineered germ would be very different from any previous microbe known to mankind. The agent would be a highly effective killing agent because the immune system would be powerless against this super-microbe (Testimony before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1970, dated July 1, 1969). A transcript of this meeting on “Synthetic Biological Agents” records the following comments of Dr. MacArthur:
1. All biological agents up to the present time are representatives of naturally occurring disease, and thus are known by scientists throughout the world. They are easily available to qualified scientists for research, either for offensive or defensive purposes.Was the AIDS virus, or other so-called “emerging viruses” such as Ebola and Marburg viruses, created in bio-warfare laboratories during the 1970s? During the 1970s, the U.S. Army’s bio-warfare program intensified, particularly in the area of DNA and gene splicing research. Renouncing germ warfare except for “medical defensive research,” President Richard Nixon in 1971 ordered that a major part of the Army’s bio-warfare research be transferred over to the National Cancer Institute (where HIV would be discovered a decade later by Gallo).
2. Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.
3. A research program to explore the feasibility of this could be completed in approximately 5 years at a total cost of $10 million.
4. It would be very difficult to establish such a program. Molecular biology is a relatively new science. There are not many competent scientists in the field, almost all are in university laboratories, and they are generally adequately supported from sources other than the Department of Defense. However, it was considered possible to initiate an adequate program through the National Academy of Sciences — National Research Council (NAS-NRC). The matter was discussed with the NAS-NRC, and tentative plans were made to initiate the program. However, decreasing funds in CB (chemical/biological) research, growing criticism of the CB program, and our reluctance to involve the NAS-NRC in such a controversial endeavor have led us to postpone it for the past two years. It is a highly controversial issue and there are many who believe such research should not be undertaken lest it lead to yet another method of massive killing of large populations… Should an enemy develop it, there is little doubt that it is an important area of potential military technological inferiority in which there is no adequate research program.
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