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

Abstract

The author analyzes the aftermath of Edward Hooper's suggestion that the trial of an oral polio vaccine (OPV) in the Belgian colonies of Africa engendered the pandemic form of the AIDS virus, HIV-1. In response to Hooper's book, The River (1999), the Royal Society in London held a conference to debate the origins of HIV. Examination of the quick dismissal of the OPV theory opens a space for legitimately challenging the widely held belief that the vaccine contamination question was convincingly resolved. This article interrogates the relationship between historiography and the making of scientific facts and history, suggesting that historians have been too credulous of scientists' testimony. The further result of the lack of a thorough analysis of the evidence backing the OPV hypothesis has resulted in a missed opportunity to read The River as one of the few detailed accounts of the immense social, political, technological, and interspecies infrastructure constituted by Cold War vaccine production. This biomedical infrastructure dramatically changed the geographic and interspecies mobility of viruses in ways that may be impossible to reconstruct. Yet these potential transmission routes remain crucial to acknowledge. The COVID-19 pandemic draws attention to the critical importance of studying The WetNet, a concept coined by the author to name the conceptual and material infrastructures of inter-and intraspecies fluid bonding. [HIV origins, The WetNet, experimentality, Africa, zoonosis]

Plagues, Pandemics, Health Security, and the War on Nature

“…The proximal origin of COVID-19 is unclear, other than its distal origin in a bat. The natural origin and the laboratory associated theories remain plausible, not only for COVID-19, but even for HIV/AIDS [7]. If the first theory is correct then it is a powerful warning, from nature, that our species is running a great risk.…”

“…While most experts date the beginning of the Anthropocene to the 18 th century or later, Ruddiman and his colleagues have long argued for a much earlier date, perhaps 7,000 years ago [11]. All major infectious diseases that have affected humans have not only occurred in this period, in a time when humans have increasingly transformed nature, but also laboratory ingenuity, though not necessarily laboratory wisdom [7,12].…”

“…Nevertheless, this statement was, for over a decade, considered plausible. The spell was fractured by the emergence of HIV/AIDS, a pandemic virus generally thought to have been originally transmitted to humans from contact with "bushmeat" (probably a primate) in the African forest [7]. But, once the causes ongoing of HIV/AIDS transmission were understood, fear of it faded, at least for populations with access to health literacy and effective anti-viral medication.…”

‘WE'RE ALL WATCHING EACH OTHER’: Dunedin Supermarket Workers and the 2020 Pandemic Lockdown

“…These changes are embedded in the mundane spaces of everyday life, such as supermarkets (as this paper explores), as well as more formal spaces of governance and decision-making. Anthropological analyses have considered and connected both, exploring the policy implications of national responses (Cadruff 2020;Eriksen 2020;Ecks 2020;Appleton et al 2020;Davis-Floyd, Gutschow, and Schwartz 2020;Kasstan 2020), the insights from historical comparisons with other epidemics (Jain 2020;Berlivet and Löwy 2020;Onoma 2020), the significance of the affective tones and states associated with the pandemic at the personal or institutional level (Hardy 2020;Ali 2020;Raffaetà 2020;Trnka 2020, Trnka et al 2021, Einboden 2020 along with militarised responses to the risk of contagion (Parker, MacGregor, and Akello 2020), dystopic and conspiratorial responses (Sturm and Albrecht 2020) and the social exclusions and responsibilities created by pandemics (Cohen 2020;Iskander 2020;Manderson and Wahlberg 2020;Oyarzun 2020).…”

Hotspots, spillovers and the shifting geopolitics of zoonotic emerging infectious diseases: A commentary

“…It is a term Jain has coined to describe 'the massive global infrastructure', driven by virology research and the post-Second World War vaccine industry, 'involving interspecies fluid exchanges on a scale nearly unimaginable to a lay reader'. 14…”