CHAT Oral Polio Vaccine Was Not the Source of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Group M for Humans

Abstract

A book published in 1999 hypothesized that the scientists who worked with the CHAT type 1 attenuated poliomyelitis strain, tested in the former Belgian Congo in the late 1950s, had covertly prepared the vaccine in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with a simian immunodeficiency virus, which evolved into human immunodeficiency virus type 1 group M. This article summarizes the results of the investigation conducted by the author to determine the legitimacy of the accusation. Testimony by eyewitnesses, historical documents of the time, epidemiological analysis, and analysis of ancillary phylogenetic, virological, and polymerase chain reaction data all indicate that this hypothesis is false.Poliomyelitis is rapidly disappearing from the world, thanks in large part to the widespread use of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) strains developed by Albert Sabin. The precursors of the Sabin strains were those developed by Hilary Koprowski, first at the Lederle Laboratories and then at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. The results of the first administration of OPV to humans were published by Koprowski et al. in 1952 [1] and concerned the TN strain, later identified as type 2 poliovirus. A type 1 strain, called SM, was reported in 1954 [2], and its descendant, a virus called "CHAT" was reported in 1957 [3]. The latter strain concerns us here, for in 1999, a British journalist published a book called The River: A Journal to the Source of HIV and AIDS [4], which proposed the hypothesis that CHAT had been produced in cells from chimpanzees that were contaminated with the simian precursor of HIV type 1 (HIV-1) group M, the major agent of the AIDS epidemic. This article examines that hypothesis in detail.For a proper understanding of the events recalled in this article, the state of polio vaccine development in the late 1950s is germane. In the late 1950s, obtaining cultures of kidney cells from rhesus monkeys was routine, and commercial laboratories were selling trypsinized kidneys or monolayer cultures in glass bottles. The plaque technique of Dulbecco and Vogt had also come into general use, permitting for the first time cloning (in the old sense) of genetically distinct virus populations. (Therefore, whereas both the early TN type 2 and SM type 1 attenuated strains of Koprowski had been attenuated in rodents, the SM strain was then further attenuated by alternate passages in chick embryo and cultures of monkey kidney cells.) However, the SM strain appeared to be too neurovirulent [5,6], and a substrain called SM-N90 was passed 4 times serially in humans by oral administration of filtered fecal virus, isolated after replication in the intestine. After the fourth human passage, the virus was plaqued 4 times ("plaque purification") in cultures of monkey kidney cells, and the resultant strain was renamed CHAT, after the name of the baby in whom the last human passage had been made.The plaque passage history was shown in detail in Koprowski's article ( figure 1) [3] . The sequence of plaque passage was plaque 9 to plaque 13 to...

The WetNet: What the Oral Polio Vaccine Hypothesis Exposes about Globalized Interspecies Fluid Bonds

“…For example, in The Origin of AIDS (Pepin 2011), a book that has emerged as the model for the explanation for AIDS, physician and historian Jacques Pepin devotes three pages to The River. Pepin bases his dismissal of Hooper on Plotkin's argument and (mistakenly) accuses Hooper of a rookie mistake in confusing local dilution of concentrated vaccine stock with local production or amplification (Gellin et al 2001;Pepin 2011, 52). Somewhat bizarrely, Pepin bases his account solely on the word of the scientists who ran the trial and accuses anyone who would doubt his reliance on the defendant scientist's account of conspiracy thinking.…”

Relook and Understanding the Fetal Immune system and Death

“…SV40 is not pathogenic in monkeys but has been found to be pathogenic in humans. There are some claims that this transmission of SV40 from monkeys to humans via contaminated kidney cell cultures used for the production of polio vaccination is now the cause of HIV which has been refuted [7].…”