COVID-19: A Parallel With AIDS?
Could science be behind the spread of both viruses?
No, COVID-19 is not a virus similar to AIDS, although both are zoonotic. But experts and media have recently suggested that this virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. What is interesting is that decades ago, AIDS was the subject of such rumors.
This idea is considered by many to be a conspiracy theory, but it leads us to ask a tricky question: did a vaccine cause the spread of AIDS in Africa?
Before answering, we must first introduce the phenomenon to better understand what is behind it.
The Chimpanzee’s Fault
A Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), the SIVcpz, or the chimpanzee virus, is the source of HIV. There are two types of SIVcpz: HIV-1 and HIV-2. But the HIV-1 is of much greater concern because it is one of its subtypes, group M, that caused the AIDS epidemic.
Most scientists explained the emergence of AIDS in humans through the bushmeat theory, which holds that SIV was transmitted as a result of a bite from an infected chimpanzee or an injury sustained by a hunter or a vendor when butchering an equally infected animal. The Belgian Congo was reportedly the main epicenter of the virus, which seems to have appeared between 1880 and the beginning of the 1930s.
Now, what about its spread? Urbanization in post-independence Africa, paired with increased travel, has been the primary cause of the AIDS epidemic, according to the bushmeat theory advocates, but a British journalist has clashed with those advocates on that issue and turned it into a much more captivating story.
The Contaminated Polio Vaccine Theory
February 1950. Hilary Koprowski, an American researcher, creates the first polio vaccine. Seven years later, he starts his vaccination campaign on thousands of Africans from the Belgian Congo. This massive operation is orchestrated from two sites: Camp Lindi, established in May 1956 near Stanleyville (Kisangani), and the Stanleyville laboratory, inaugurated on October 1, 1957.
Koprowski gets bad press at the time. This is evidenced by the World Health Organization’s disapproval of its mass vaccination program. The scientist, however, goes on with his work until the government of the newly independent Congo demands that he put an end to it in 1960.
A British journalist, Edward Hooper, believes that Koprowski’s vaccination campaign could have been the ground zero of AIDS. Hooper expounded his theory in his book The River, A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, published in 1999. His investigation lasted 17 years, after which he concluded that HIV was involuntarily developed in the Stanleyville laboratory between 1957 and 1960 by Hilary Koprowski and his team. Unsurprisingly, Hooper’s theory was rejected by the scientific community.
During his investigation, Hooper got hold of a copy of an annual report from the Stanleyville laboratory, dated 1959, which revealed that 250,000 doses of his vaccine had been “conditioned”. Conditioned? The journalist sought clarification on the matter from Paul Osterrieth, one of Koprowski’s aides in Stanleyville. The scientist’s response: don’t look for scandals, the “[vaccine] certainly wasn’t prepared in the lab”.
This assertion, though, was disputed by Jacques Kanyama, a former assistant to Paul Osterrieth, who confirmed that the laboratory had been used for the production of the vaccine. Pierre Doupagne, a chief technician at the Stanleyville laboratory from 1949 to 1960, echoed Kanyama’s statements, adding that he was one of those who prepared tissue cultures extracted from chimpanzees. Tissue cultures from monkeys are required for the production of the polio vaccine.
About Kanyama, Osterrieth said that he “was a low-level employee with no scientific background” and that he “did not work with me on cell culture”. But in The Origin of Aids, a documentary directed by Peter Chappell and Catherine Peix Eyrolle (2004), Kanyama recalled that one of the tasks he had to carry out at the Stanleyville laboratory was to put the vaccine made by Koprowski’s team into vials. These vials were later used during the vaccination campaign in the Belgian Congo.
The tissue cultures needed for the preparation of the vaccine came from chimpanzees in Camp Lindi, where dozens if not hundreds of them had been caged. Edward Hooper claims that at least one of those chimps could have been infected with SIV.
Hooper’s Theory Refuted, but…
In February 2000, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia announced that it had discovered in its stocks a vial of the polio vaccine that was supposedly coming from Koprowski’s vaccination campaign in Congo. After analyzing the vaccine, the institute made a new announcement in April 2001, this time to notify that no trace of HIV or SIV had been found. A second analysis confirmed that only kidney cells from macaques had been used to create Koprowski’s vaccine. But according to the documentary, The Origin of Aids, this sample of the Wistar Institute did not come from the Stanleyville laboratory.
Researcher Stanley Plotkin, among other scientists, defended Koprowski, arguing that SIVcpz would have taken several years to turn into HIV-1 in humans, which refutes Hooper’s theory.
So, let’s ask the question again: if we admit that Koprowski’s vaccine did not create AIDS, did it facilitate its spread? A question that unfortunately remains unanswered.
Sources
Wikipedia #1, #2, Actualité News, Avert, AIDS Origins #1, #2, The Origin of AIDS
