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Chant Rises: 'Greed Costs Lives! Pills Cost Pennies!' Respectability for 'Man-Made AIDS' Theory Grows |
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By Jack Nichols
The Philadelphia group had recently stormed the Washington offices of the U.S. Trade Representative, Charlene Barshefsky pressing similar complaints. The Clinton-Gore administration, charge the activists, has threatened economic reprisals against countries that dare to reproduce expensive life-prolonging generic drugs patented by American pharmaceutical companies. The life-prolonging drugs, they say, are a privilege granted only to patients in richer nations, while profiteering drug manufacturing companies stand idly by as millions in other lands are dying.
The Science Times section of Tuesday's New York Times says that in The River, a book recently published by Little, Brown, British author Edward Hooper, has chronicled disturbing links in what the Times calls "a prodigious amount of research since 1990." GayToday, since its inception, has kept alive news of research projects that perceive AIDS as man-made and has regularly published articles by Dr. Alan Cantwell, including the full text of his pioneering work, Queer Blood. Tuesday's New York Times article clearly erred, therefore, in its assumption that man-made theories first came to light in a 1992 Rolling Stone article. In fact, the earliest of such references were published in The Times of London, England's best known establishment newspaper. A May 11, 1987 front-page London Times article, penned by the prestigeous newspaper's science editor, Pearce Wright first gave validity to man-made rumors. Mr. Wright, however, gave focus to smallpox vaccines rather than polio vaccines. He provided his readers with the following information: 1. The World Health Organization, attempting to eradicate smallpox, used a vaccine that was responsible for triggering AIDS in a mass vaccination campaign on two continents. 2. The World Health Organization's lethal tardiness in assessing the dimensions of the AIDS threat to planetary health--a tardiness for which then W.H.O. chief Halfdan Mahler offered apologies--may have been caused by a dispute inside the World Health Organization itself, following discovery of the organization's own possible culpability, unwitting though it reportedly was. The small-pox vaccine theory offered a more likely explanation for the world-wide distribution of the virus. Editor Pearce Wright wrote that "many experts have been reluctant to support the (small-pox-vaccine) theory publicly because they believe it would be interpreted unfairly as criticism of the World Health Organization." Dr. Robert Gallo, who stridently--and many believe falsely--claimed discovery of the HIV-virus in the USA, was quoted by Mr. Wright. He said:
Gallo insisted that "no blame can be attached to the World Health Organization," but that if the vaccine theory is correct, "it is a tragic situation and a warning we can not ignore." Gallo, however, had to ignore the controversy, having been caught up in career-shattering controversies of his own. For whatever reasons, as stated, mainstream U.S. networks and newspapers deliberately ignored such vaccine theories, in spite of the controversial nature of what The Times editor had said, namely that: "Some experts fear that in obliterating one disease (smallpox), another disease (AIDS) was transformed from a minor epidemic illness of the Third World into the current pandemic." The Times science editor also quoted an anonymous World Health Organization adviser who stated--unequivocally--"I now believe the smallpox vaccine theory is the explanation to the explosion of AIDS." |
