Yesterday I told you Scary Science Story #1, which ended more or less harmlessly because Virus W turned out to be more or less harmless to humans.
After that story, you could breathe a sigh of relief.
Now listen to this one:
- Chimpanzees are out running around in the wild doing chimpanzee things.
- Somehow these chimps develop a virus that we will refer to as Virus X.
- Virus X spreads widely in their population.
- Humans come and capture some of these chimpanzees.
- They are then turned over to scientists.
- The scientists vivisect the chimpanzees to obtain their kidneys.
- The kidneys are used to culture a vaccine to cure a disease that harms humans: polio.
- Somewhere in this sequence of events (possibly as far back as step 3 or as far forward as step 10), Virus X mutates into Virus Y.
- Unbeknownst to the scientists who cultured the vaccine in chimpanzee kidneys, the process they are using does not kill Virus X or Virus Y, neither of which which
has yet been identified by human science. - Virus Y piggybacks on the polio vaccine.
- The infected vaccine is sprayed into the mouths of thousands of human beings in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).
- Millions of people in the Congo become infected with Virus Y.
- Surrounding nations become a region of pandemic Virus Y infections, with the Congo–and specifically the villages where the oral polio vaccine was distrubted–as its epicenter.
- Virus Y is passed from people in this region to people all over the globe to the point that 80 million people have been infected worldwide.
- Virus Y does not immediately kill humans, which is why it is able to spread so far.
- But after about ten years, Virus Y creates Syndrome Z, which is 100% fatal.
The real name of Virus X is Simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV (technically, it’s one strain of SIV).
The real name of Virus Y is Human immunodeficiency virus-1 or HIV-1.
The real name of Syndrome Z is Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or AIDS.
The theory that Oral Polio Vaccine was the means by which HIV entered the human population is called the OPV AIDS Hypothesis.
The above story may be true, though it is highly controversial.
This is probably because HIV-1 does kill humans.
Since it does kill humans, the polio vaccine makers are
circling the wagons and impeding investigations of the matter–and
possibly lying about their vaccine cultivation methods in order to
cover themselves. All those are very human reactions.
Some have even been openly dismissive of why the matter should be investigated.
I’ll tell you why the matter needs to be investigated: Because if it’s true then it’s the biggest bloody medical disaster of all time and we need to know about it!
Even if it’s not true, we still have to be on guard against such things, for the case of SV40 (Scary Science Story #1) shows that things like this can happen.
READ WIKIPEDIA’S ENTRY ON THE SUBJECT.
READ AN EARLY ARTICLE THAT POPULARIZED THE OPV AIDS HYPOTHESIS.
READ A WEBSITE THAT CONTAINS THE LATEST ARGUMENTS AND COUNTER-ARGUMENTS.
Wow. That’s super-frightening. And sounds plausible even.
Using chimpanzees for the cultivation of human vaccines sounds really dangerous.
It’s like the mad cow crisis that was fueled by feeding cows the parts of sick dead cows.
I tend to be distrustful about the wilder theories of how AIDS started, simply because they often end up sounding like potential propaganda tools for someone (who, exactly, depends on which theory you’re talking about).
However, I just wanted to stop by and gloat: from the way you were going with Scary Story #1, I just knew Scary Story #2 was gonna involve AIDS.
I figured people would recognize what I would do with Scary Story #2 from what I did on #1 (which is why I warned no spoilers in the comments box).
I also am distrustful of the wilder theories (e.g., it was *deliberately* created–I don’t think we had that tech that far back–or that it was *deliberately* distributed). But the OPV AIDS hypothesis doesn’t hold that anyone was morally at fault here. It doesn’t view AIDS as a deliberately engineered or deliberately spread disease. It suggests AIDS was a huge accident of a kind we already know to be possible.
I don’t know whether the OPV AIDS hypothesis is true or not, but I think it’s something worth investigating. As I said above, if it *is* a huge accident, we need to know about it and understand why it happened thoroughly so we can prevent similar accidents from occurring in the future.
I have no problem with it being investigated, but as a general Sowellite, I’d want to know more about the success ratio of developing vaccines for humans using animals before generally condemning the practice. Everything has risks, including the choice not to use animals for testing and developing vaccines.
The issue now would be to determine what could be done to lower the risk in future attempts to develop vaccines, if the story is even true.
Unfortunately, people who have what Sowell calls the “unconstrained vision” want — and believe we can have — a risk-free world.
Those old vaccines did something else, too. I’m not sure if it is the same one. I think it was either polio or smallpox, and the result is a statistically significantly higher rate of pancreatic cancer, of which my Aunt, in that age group, died.
Of course, the scientists and pharmacists hadn’t a clue about the contaminant pathogen, and the vaccines probably saved magnitudes more lives than it will cost.