Abstract
The author analyzes the aftermath of EdwardHooper'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 toHooper'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.
Highlights
The press and scientific literature consistently present the “natural transfer,” “bushmeat,” or “cut hunter” theory, based on phylogenetic computer modeling of hypothesized mutation rates of HIV, as explaining the origin of the HIV/AIDS epidemic
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
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
Summary
The press and scientific literature consistently present the “natural transfer,” “bushmeat,” or “cut hunter” theory, based on phylogenetic computer modeling of hypothesized mutation rates of HIV, as explaining the origin of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Hooper works from the first known case of HIV-1 in Kinshasa (Leopoldville) in 1959 He finds a stunning geographic correlation between the OPV trials and the earliest cases of HIV, presents a comprehensive reconstruction of the chimpanzee camp and the nearby lab in Kisangani (Stanleyville, the base location of the trials), and details the development of the vaccine at the Wistar Institute in Pennsylvania by Hilary Koprowski. He argues that the vaccine, which Koprowski’s team orally fed to about a million inhabitants of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda–Urundi, could, in theory, have led to a viral crossover through oral cuts or abrasions. He proposes other polio vaccine trials that took place in the former French colonies of Africa as sources for the minor outbreaks of HIV/AIDS (Hooper 2000c, 827–77)
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