AIDS: Was it created by science?

A book written by an investigative journalist, titled "The River," posits the theory that Dr. Hilary Kaprowski and a small team of scientists working on polio vaccine in the Congo in 1956-1959 enabled the AIDS virus to jump into the human populace by using chimpanzee livers and kidneys as substrata for medium to grow the polio virus in. Is it plausible? Absolutely! Is it likely? Quite. Evidence strongly suggests that Kaprowski is lying when he denies he ever used chimps to grow polio virus. His claim that he only used monkeys is, at best, suspect, particularly given the number of documents and films made during the experiment in the Congo that support the contaminated vaccine theory. A theory that makes Kaprowski complicit, if not the facilitator of the AIDS virus' jump from chimpanzees into to humans.

Kaprowski and his team, led by a Belgium scientist named Ghistan Coustois, vaccinated 1 million Congolese people with a live-virus version of the then-new polio vaccine. The book proposes that Kaprowski's team grew copies of a polio virus using AIDS-infected chimpanzee livers and kidneys. It is common practive to use monkey kidneys and livers as a substrata for the medium mixture that virus cells grow upon in labs worldwide. But it's known, and was known in 1956, that chimpanzee organs were NOT optimum nor even recommended for such use.

Now Kaprowski's team was developing the live-virus version of polio vaccine AFTER Jonas Salk's miracle drug had been introduced to American children, elevating Salk to God-like status among his peers and among the common folk.

Appently, Kaprowski was and is an ego-centric self-promoting "star" among the hundreds of microvirology scientists in the latter days of the polio scourge.

Russians, French, English, German -scientists of virtually every nationality - were working on a better vaccine after Salk's version of the medical "miracle" was found to be less than perfect. Salk's vaccine, apparently an impure batch, killed 12 children and hundreds fell ill the much ballyhooed "cure."

The world was looking for a safer agent to fight the debilitating viral disease. Hence, the race involving Kaprowski and other highly renowned researchers. But, apparently, Kaprowski was not concerned about adverse or even deadly outcomes in the course of his experimentation. He began vaccinating humans well in advance of proving his vaccine's safety, a course of action that elicited a letter of censure from the World Health Organization and widespread criticism of Kaprowski from virtually every reputable scientist of the day.

Ain't life grand? Is it comforting to consider that medical researchers, in a hasty bid for fame, took shortcuts and ignored accepted research protocols in order to satisfy one man's hunger for wealth and power, and by following that course, perhaps, infected humans with a viruse that, prior to that fateful day, was limited to primate populations?

And now we have pharmaceutical companies paying billions of dollars to have scientists work on the problems the company determines worthwhile. And by virtue of the company's wealth and ability to control the scientist's work, by extension, we have monolithic for-profit corporations deciding scientific methodology - perhaps even condemning many people to horrible deaths.

And the world looks on mute and dumbfounded. Our world society has become enslaved by the corporate ethos. And what is corporate ethos? It's whatever creates, no, whatever generates profit.

Next time you go to the doctor, remember that the physician is working for the pharmaceutical companies. He or she is a paid representative of whichever drug manufacturer pads his or her payroll either directly, with cash, or indirectly, with junkets, perks (free drugs, and other goodies). Have no doubt about the verity of this statement.

Oh, it's not a big conspiracy. It's all done out in the open and defended vigorously by the American Medical Association at al. But it's a fact that physicians practice the kind of medicine that corporations want them to practice. Or they don't practice at all.

Given that fact, how safe do you feel following our wonderful medical society's advise?

C'est la vie, eh?

And oh yea, if you haven't seen it yet - and I cannot imagine many people who live in industrialized societies haven't - check out the film "Collateral." It's well worth two hours of attentive suspension of disbelief.

It's Sunday, again. Tomorrow is Monday and I'm not working on Mondays, so I'll probably just lay about all day. Perhaps read a bit of "The DaVinci Code."

Have a marvelous week, ya'll.