AIDS AS A MAN-MADE PLAGUE:

On January 8, 1990, nearly three years after the mysterious appearance of a May 11, 1987 AIDS expose on the front page of the prestigious Times of London, the Homosexual Anarchist column in SCREW magazine belatedly alerted readers to the existence of this article, parlaying to a select audience its disturbing conclusions, which now form a minority view on the origins of AIDS.

But with only one or two exceptions such as SCREW, the Times' disturbing conclusions began and ended with its one-time May 11 expose: saying, specifically, that AIDS was organizationally-spread world-wide. After May 11, 1987--exactly a decade ago-- such rumors nearly ceased altogether. Neither American nor British media deigned to say anything about the contents of this alarming news report by the science editor of the Times, one that begged an immediate follow up but never got it. The Bay Area Reporter--in the early 90's-- did make such a mention in the gay press, calling attention to SCREW and to the Times.

Also, a lone physician, Dr. Alan R. Cantwell, Jr., convinced by a host of multiplying clues, was moved to publish a series of books, putting his focus on AIDS as a man-made phenomenon. These books, including Queer Blood, and AIDS and the Doctors of Death are available from Aries Rising Press, P.O. Box 29532, Los Angeles, California, 90029.

Such "man-made" rumors examined in Dr. Cantwell's books have now received a new boost , in Canada's Consumer Health Newsletter (April issue). Once again the reputed "green monkey" origins of AIDS are being called into question. The little-known but unnerving theory, that the disease was purposefully created and deliberately or unwittingly spread through supposedly benign health vaccines, has been resurrected by another physician, Len Horowitz, a doctor who comes armed with impressive medical credentials.

Dr. Horowitz is president of Tetrahedron, Inc., a non-profit educational corporation in Rockport, Massachusetts. Horowitz received his doctorate from Tufts University, earned his Masters degree in health education/ counseling psychology from Beacon College and his Master of Public Health in behavioral science/media health promotion from Harvard University. He has trained over 20,000 health professionals, presented customized programs for associations, corporations, government agencies, hospitals, schools and colleges, management and insurance groups. He has also appeared as a health spokesperson on major TV and radio networks, including nationally syndicated programs.

"Why?" he asks, "would AIDS experts claim the origin of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) is unimportant? Are they covering up something too horrifying to consider? Could AIDS have been man-made?"

This is precisely the question that has repeatedly been asked in Dr. Alan R. Cantwell's books, by SCREW's gay columnist, and by a host of other little-heard sources, starting with the Times of London, England's most respectable newspaper.

The May 11, 1987 front page Times article, penned by the newspaper's science editor, Pearce Wright, helped solidify the man-made rumors by providing its readers with the following information:

1. The World Health Organization, attempting during the 1970's 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 was--or one hopes it was.

The small-pox vaccine theory offered a 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 as saying that "the link between the World Health Organization (vaccination) program and the (AIDS) epidemic in Africa is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV." 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, has 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 have purposefully ignored the vaccine theories, in spite of what The Times editor 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."

Wright, as one of England's most respected science investigators, brought both English reserve and the knowledge required to report on the significance of scientific endeavors to Britain's literary elite. Since the day-- May 11, 1987--his investigative report appeared, the ideas therein have been squelched and major questions beg answers: Why have we seen no investigative reports in the mainstream U.S. press? Why is Dr. Horowitz's commentary appearing in a Canadian health newsletter? Why has the gay press, with only a few exceptions, ignored the controversy? Have there been news blackouts--fueled by assimilationist peer pressures-- in order to save possibly well-meaning, possibly murderous, but, nevertheless, poisonous government and industry hides?

The smallpox campaign, according to The Times, lasted 13 years, ending in 1980. The vaccine theory helps account for seven Central African countries having had the greatest number of HIV infections, and explains how Brazil became the Latin American nation with the highest rate of infections. It also provides an understanding of how AIDS--in vaccinated locales--became more evenly distributed--in Africa-- among males and females.

"The greatest spread of HIV infection coincides with the most intense immunization programs," explained Wright, and "deaths estimated by the World Health Organization are concentrated in the countries where the smallpox immunization programme was most intensive."

The likely reason the U.S. press may have been persuaded to keep the lid on this theory is that, as some medical professionals have noted, the theory would impact negatively on other public-health programs involving vaccines.

The connection between the smallpox vaccine and the rise of AIDS was already known to World Health Organization officials in 1986, a full year before the startling news appeared in its brief Times spotlight. It wasn't until late 1986 that Halfdan Mahler admitted his tardiness in mobilizing against AIDS. SCREW asked "How much did he know, and when did he know it?"

Now, Dr. Horowitz has revived the most painful aspects of the origins controversy, rightly insisting that "therapeutic advances are needed" and that "new therapies might be developed from a better understanding of AIDS' origin." Horowitz says, "the events precipitating the epidemic should never be allowed to happen again."

"Oddly," he writes, "the scientific literature holds no direct evidence for HIV's natural evolution from monkey to man, only circumstantial testimony. Alternatively, much evidence indicated the origin of HIV-1 may be associated with early laboratory investigations and viral vaccine trials." This possibility is also stressed in Dr. Alan Cantwell's books.

"Unfortunately," says Dr. Horowitz, "I can't conclude that AIDS was an accident." Horowitz believes that the spread of AIDS has much to do with research conducted under the supervision of Dr. Robert Gallo ("infamous for his contested role in the discovery of the AIDS virus") himself. Gallo worked with teams from the National Cancer Institute and Litton Bionetics, isolating reverse transcriptase--the unique enzyme that makes the AIDS and leukemia viruses work. "Gallo's past research," writes Dr. Horowitz, "is most incriminating. Synthetic nucleic acids (RNA) and cat leukemia virus 'templates' were added to the 'human type C' viruses--those associated with cancers of the lymph nodes. This increased the rate of DNA production as much as thirty times. Gallo and his biological weapons contractors (at Bionetics) spent much of their time during the early 1970's, and more than $2 million a year in taxpayer money, to study these mutated viruses to induce unique immune-system suppression leukemia, Lymphoma, and sarcoma cancer complexes never before seen on planet earth in humans before 1978 with the first AIDS cases."

Dr. Horowitz tells how America's premier biological weapons testing facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary by sponsoring a controversial symposium on the "entry and control of foreign nucleic acids." Around the same time, he writes, "the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, informed the U.S. Department of Defense that they would help the military develop a 'new infective microorganism which would differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organism. Most important of these is that might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious diseases.' "

Soon thereafter, Dr. Horowitz charges, "before a special symposium sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Dr. Gallo presented some of the above research. More disconcerting, Litton Bionetics, The New York University Medical Center and Merck, Sharp & Dohme--both associated with the New York Blood Center's hepatitis B vaccine trials--were contractors for the U.S. Army and the CIA's top secret biological weapons project MK:NAOMI. George W. Merck, in fact, the president of MSD, directed America's biological weapons industry during most of the cold war."

Dr. Horowitz says that Dr. Gallo's "speculation" that HIV naturally evolved from African green monkeys to infect humans is "unsupported and downright ridiculous." Gallo's silence regarding this truth, he says, is "self-incriminating if not criminal."

"In light of the scientific facts," writes Horowitz, "all it might have taken was one contaminated chimpanzee used to develop the 1974 experimental hepatitis B vaccine to have given rise to the world's AIDS epidemic. Likewise, all it might have taken was one CIA agent with access to Merck's Lab to have produced the same result."

Dr. Alan Cantwell's books describe how the experimental hepatitis B vaccine was given, in the 1970's, to a large targeted group: gay males who sought protection from hepatitis. Dr. Horowitz says that Maurice Hilleman, the world's leading vaccine developer for the largest pharaceutical company in the world--Merck, Sharp & Dohme (MSD)--prepared "4 lots of (experimental hepititis B) vaccine...that would amount to perhaps 20,000 human doses." Horowitz says that Hilleman, along with his collegues at the U.S. Food and Drug Adminsitration (FDA) and Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) then tested these four subtypes of vaccine to establish its safety.

According to Dr. Horowitz, the researchers used Willowbrook State School for mentally retarded children, gay men in New York City, and Black African villagers to test these heavily contaminated preparations.