In case you’d like to name names responsible for the COVID-19 disaster


Rolling Stone tracks all the errors leading to our current unprepared state, and names the names.

Robert Redfield:

The front-line agency built to respond to a pandemic, the CDC, was placed in unreliable hands. Dr. Robert Redfield is a right-wing darling with a checkered scientific past. His 2018 nomination was a triumph for the Christian right, a coup in particular for evangelical activists Shepherd and Anita Smith, who have been instrumental in driving a global AIDS strategy centered on abstinence.

Redfield’s tight-knit relationship with the Smiths goes back at least three decades, beginning when Shepherd Smith recruited him to join the board of his religious nonprofit, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP). The Smiths made their views plain in the 1990 book Christians in the Age of AIDS, which argued HIV infection resulted from “people’s sinfulness,” and described AIDS as a consequence for those who “violate God’s laws.” Redfield, a devout Catholic who was then a prominent HIV researcher in the Army, wrote the introduction, calling for the rejection of “false prophets who preach the quick-fix strategies of condoms and free needles.”

Alex Azar:

The CDC reports to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Alex Azar, a former executive for the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly who gained infamy, in his five-year tenure, by doubling the price of insulin.

Azar is a creature of the GOP establishment: He cut his teeth as a Supreme Court clerk to Antonin Scalia, worked with Brett Kavanaugh on the Clinton-Whitewater investigation under special counsel Ken Starr, and served as a deputy HHS administrator in the George W. Bush era, before becoming Eli Lilly’s top lobbyist. Azar, 52, is the type of corporate leader Republicans have long touted as capable of driving efficiencies in the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell praised Azar’s nomination in 2017, insisting, “Alex brings a wealth of private-sector knowledge that will prepare him well for this crucial role.”

Stephen Hahn:

Stephen Hahn had been on the job at the FDA for barely a month. A bald, 60-year-old of modest height, Hahn has an impeccable résumé — he served as chief medical executive at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center — but he had no experience running a government agency.

The need to engage the private sector for coronavirus testing was not only foreseeable, it was foreseen — by Trump’s first FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb. In a January 28th Wall Street Journal article, “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic,” Gottlieb warned that the “CDC will struggle to keep up with the volume of screening.” He said the government must begin “working with private industry to develop easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic tests.”

If Hahn read his predecessor’s call to action, he did not act on it. Hahn did not lack authority; the FDA has broad discretion to relax the rules that were locked into place with Azar’s declaration. But Azar had, unaccountably, not included Hahn on the Coronavirus Task Force. By default, private test developers were now required to obtain an “emergency-use authorization” from the FDA to deploy COVID-19 testing. “Companies couldn’t make their own lab-developed tests,” Adalja says, “so you had Quest and LabCorp and the big-university labs on the sidelines.”

Donald Trump:

Having plunged the nation headlong and unprepared into the deadliest disease outbreak in a century, President Trump is now proving to be one of the greatest obstacles to an effective national response.

Sebelius ultimately blames Trump for failing to end the infighting and fix the testing failure. “The White House has a unique way to get agencies’ attention, by making it clear that they want a solution, and everybody at the table with that solution within 24 hours,” she says. “If the president wants this to happen, it will happen.” But on his visit to the CDC in Atlanta, Trump had made an extraordinary admission: That he did not want to let passengers from a cruise ship, then suffering an outbreak off the California coast, to come on shore because the tally of patients would rise. “I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said.

There are many other players, like Mike Pence, but these four are singled out for having the greatest responsibility and potential ability to have addressed the problem early on, who then failed and continue to fail spectacularly. Given the US’s historical failure to be able to hold our leaders accountable for anything — we’re treating the war criminal George W. Bush like a statesman now — I suspect they’re all going to emerge from this debacle unscathed, with a hundred thousand dead (or more) at their feet, and they won’t be arrested and tried for malignant neglect of their duties.

I still hold Henry Kissinger guilty of being a monster, and yet he’s still advising governments on how to murder their citizens. He’s a walking, talking declaration to the world that there is no justice.

Comments

  1. says

    Oh, it will be a lot more than 100,000 dead. It already is actually. Officially reported deaths are at about 81,000, and it will be 83,000 tomorrow. That understates the actual death toll by at least 50% or so, but we’ll be over 100,00 officially before the end of this month. People don’t seem to get the dimension of time with this.

  2. riversol says

    Responsible Party #1 and 2: Carnism Joe and Jane. This barbaric duo has been at it for centuries. Disrespecting the environment and the sentient creatures in it has set the stage for all of these epidemics. Animal husbandry, wet markets, bush meat, animal based medicine, et al are at the core of so many global problems including this one. Consider taking responsibility by investigating vegan choices.

  3. weylguy says

    My son is a scientist with the CDC. He and his fellow scientists were dismayed when Trump’s first pick for CDC Director, Brenda Fitzgerald, had to quit following allegations she invested in tobacco stocks. The current Director, Robert Redfield, is no better. This is what a critical agency like CDC gets when Trump appoints fawning sycophants to positions that require brains and capability, not conservative political ideologies.

  4. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    Larry@5,
    Actually, I think for it to be genocide, there would have to be intent–and nothing about this has had any sort of thought behind it. It’s stupid people who don’t understand the situation and don’t understand that they don’t understand all the way down.

  5. says

    @6&@5
    It’s already clear that this disease kills a disproportionate number of people of color and people of limited economic means. Not really a genocide, more of a “non-icide” I guess. People aren’t being deliberately killed, but they are being killed by neglect. American classism at work once again.

  6. raven says

    The agency that would normally handle these pandemics is the CDC.
    It’s right there in its name, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
    They’ve done it before, notably in the last major outbreaks, Swine flu 2009 and Zika.

    The CDC has been Missing In Action for this entire pandemic.
    By now, it is obvious they aren’t ever going to get it together.
    The CDC is all but dead.

    There are a lot of simple reasons for this.
    The CDC has been hollowed out by budget cuts and losing a lot of staff over the years.
    Probably the biggest reason is lack of leadership.
    The leaders are political appointees with a notable lack of ability and accomplishments.

  7. says

    A note under credit where credit is due: the religious right kooks packing the US government and the federal courts come courtesy of Pence & Co. Trump seems to never have had a single religious impulse; he’s like one of those Dave Silverman/CPAC atheists we’re so fond of, except Trump doesn’t give a shit. Of course he rubber stamps these assholes as his nominees – as long as they never said anything bad about his fucking hair or whatever.

    @7: “American classism at work once again.”

    Indeed. American capitalism at work, with its classism conveniently built-in.

  8. raven says

    The MIA CDC is going to be ominous going forward.
    We have outbreaks of these emerging diseases every few years.
    In the 21st century we’ve had West Nile, Ebola, Swine flu, Avian flu, Zika, SARS, Covid-19 etc. along with resurgences of old diseases, whooping cough and measles.

    It’s for sure that Covid-19 isn’t going to be the last emerging disease.
    There will be another one along in the next few years.
    Will the US and world drop the ball again or not?
    You can bet that if the GOP is in power, they absolutely will fail again.

  9. raven says

    I thought Jared was going to help?!

    AFAICT, all Jared has done is flounder around a lot while accomplishing nothing.

    Except, making sure a lot of the pandemic relief money goes to GOP donors and friends in a text book example of corruption and crony capitalism.

  10. Larry says

    @ #12

    Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure Jared wets his beak on all the PPE equipment he steals from the states and offers to his associates to resell at significant markup.

  11. Saad says

    Trump is not failing. You can’t say someone is failing at something if they aren’t even trying to do it. Trump isn’t interested in saving lives or controlling the pandemic. He’s interested in conflict, showing off, bullying, insulting, competing, winning reelection etc. Look at any of his actions or statements about the pandemic and you’ll find only one or more of those categories.

  12. mudpuddles says

    @3:

    @2
    You sound like you come from the Bill Maher school of medical science.

    That’s unfair, and just wrong. I’ve been working in conservation medicine for 20 years, and everything riversol says is correct. This outbreak has been predicted by my colleagues for over 15 years, in both the scientific literature and wider media, linked to modern intensified agriculture and animal husbandry, wet markets, bush meat, and animal-based traditional medicine. at each stage of this mess – when a SARS-like coronavirus was identified as the cause of this disease, when the likely source of the outbreak was traced to live animal markets, when it was declared a pandemic, when it’s genetic sequence was found to confirm that it originated in the wild – our response was “of course, and we fucking warned you again and again and again.”
    And as much as the pandemic seems to have spread globally from China, politicians and pundits pointing the finger at Chinese practices miss the fact that the entire causal chain cannot be separated from our Western food systems and consumer culture. Switching the bulk of our diets to vegetarian or vegan is an increasingly necessary reality, if we are going to be serious about preventing a Covid-20, -21, or -22, or something even more serious later on.

  13. mudpuddles says

    Just to add: the US government knew of the risk of a pandemic caused by a coronavirus, and the threat it would pose to the United States, a decade ago. Under Obama, and to a lesser extent even earlier under GW Bush, measures were taken to enhance US research and response capabilities in this area. One of the programmes in conservation medicine which lead the world in this area was the PREVENT programme lead by the EcoHealth Alliance in New York. Their funding working on identifying novel viruses with zoonotic potential, and their critical work with Chinese scientists which has already been instrumental in telling us what we now know about the virus and potential treatments and vaccines, has just been pulled thanks to a bullshit political agenda pushed by soulless GOP hacks.

  14. raven says

    The proximity of 7.8 billion humans to the entire earth’s biosphere in general and non-human animals in particular is just part of the puzzle of emerging diseases.

    We’ve known this since the mid-20th century, with the first Swine flu outbreak of 1976. About that time, a scientist wrote a paper outlining the problem and predicting that we would have emerging disease outbreaks every year or two into the future.
    Shortly after that HIV-1 appeared and 36 million people have died of AIDS.

    The other part of the puzzle is staring right at us.
    7.8 billion people.
    A planetary monoculture, since 36% of the earth’s large animal biomass is…humans.
    That makes us a huge target for any opportunistic and ambitious pathogen on the planet.

  15. KG says

    mudpuddles@12,

    There’s also the fact that, not only in the USA but around the world, the gigantic slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants that have emerged from the concentration of market power in the hands of a few corporations, employing low-waged workers by the thousand in close proximity, are proving to be focal points of the pandemic. You don’t need to be a vegan or even vegetarian to recognise that the modern livestock industry is unutterably foul.

  16. robro says

    Iris Vander Pluym @ #9

    Trump seems to never have had a single religious impulse.

    That’s my impression…certainly not evangelical Christianity…but I recently read that he attended Norman Vincent Peale’s church in New York when he was young and was a big fan of “the power of positive thinking.” Kind of makes sense in a way…deny any problems, just assert everything is ok.

  17. wzrd1 says

    @15 mudpuddles, not quite on the mark.
    Without “animal based medicine”, we’d not have insulin that is now cultured in reactors with either bacteria or yeast, nor would the COVID-19 patients suffering from DIC be able to receive the heparin that they need to survive.
    Indeed, it’s looking like we’ll be having a heparin shortage for two reasons, the coagulopathies from COVID-19 and many of the slaughterhouses that provide the mucosal tissues that are the source for heparin are closed.
    I’ll not even go into cardiac valves from cattle…

    @robro, my wife and I met Trump. He’s extremely religious, as he worships his god-king self above any and all others. Everyone else to him aren’t even people, they are things to use for his benefit or discard as useless to him.

  18. daverytier says

    Animal husbandry, wet markets, bush meat, animal based medicine, et al are at the core of so many global problems including this one. Consider taking responsibility by investigating vegan choices.

    Yep. Without a lot of high energy food like animal meat ( and the inherent difficulty of getting it ), our ancestors would never evolve those big and power hungry brains and the whole paleolithic and hominid evolution would just not happen and we would be still swinging from branch to branch, not having all those problems. ( only to be hunted to extinction after the chimps evolve towards civilization instead of us )

  19. unclefrogy says

    @17
    add to that mass urbanization and air travel then you have a rare occurrence of human infection with an animal pathogen and you have the definition of a world pandemic
    the biggest variables responsible for the dimensions of the current outbreak are the ignorance, incompetence and vanity of the leadership in these times

    He’s extremely religious, as he worships his god-king self above any and all others. Everyone else to him aren’t even people, they are things to use for his benefit or discard as useless to him

    I am all ways amazed that that simple fact is not foremost when talking heads do the analyst thing with regards to him and his “policies”
    uncle frogy

  20. says

    “Animal husbandry, wet markets, bush meat, animal based medicine, et al are at the core of so many global problems including this one. Consider taking responsibility by investigating vegan choices.”

    Is this a “negative vibes” thing, or is there actual evidence supporting this?

  21. mudpuddles says

    @ 20, wzrd1:

    @15 mudpuddles, not quite on the mark.
    Without “animal based medicine”, we’d not have insulin that is now cultured in reactors with either bacteria or yeast, nor would the COVID-19 patients suffering from DIC be able to receive the heparin that they need to survive.

    I specifically mentioned “animal-based traditional medicine”, by which I mean the consumption of wild animals or their body parts in useless naturopathic concoctions or other spurious “remedies”.

  22. mudpuddles says

    @ 21, daverytier:

    Yep. Without a lot of high energy food like animal meat ( and the inherent difficulty of getting it ), our ancestors would never evolve those big and power hungry brains and the whole paleolithic and hominid evolution would just not happen and we would be still swinging from branch to branch, not having all those problems. ( only to be hunted to extinction after the chimps evolve towards civilization instead of us )

    That’s a bit daft, you’re conflating two unrelated subjects. riversol may have over-generalised with simply “animal husbandry”, but whether or not humankind’s current mental agility and prowess is due to the diet of our ancestors is not relevant to either the morality or impacts of the modern practices of globalised mass-production animal-rearing methods.

  23. chrislawson says

    This is not a criticism of veganism/vegetarianism and agree that we need a much better approach to food production both for human and ecological health, but we don’t yet know how the first animal-to-human transmission happened for this or any of the previous coronavirus epidemics. There is a good chance this one jumped to humans from animals in a food market — not that we know for sure — but the worst human infectious diseases have nothing to do with eating or herding animals — they’re TB, HIV, malaria, hepatitis C, cholera, and measles in descending order. Only one of these is transmitted by eating/drinking, and can be just as easily transmitted by water or vegetables as meat. Even nasty viruses from bats such as lyssavirus or Hendra virus are not transmitted by eating them.

    It wasn’t just vegans and vegetarians warning about a potential COVID outbreak, it was virtually every virologist and epidemiologist.

    As for “animal based medicines”, the only one I can think of that ever contributed to an infectious epidemic was blood transfusion products with blood borne infections like HIV, Hep B, etc. — which is now incredibly rare (<1 per million transfusions in Australia) — and that’s a product derived from human sources so it’s not in the same moral class anyway. I’d be interested to learn of any animal-based medicines that drove an infectious outbreak if you have examples.

  24. mudpuddles says

    @ 23, Susan Montgomery:

    Is this a “negative vibes” thing, or is there actual evidence supporting this?

    In terms of the relationship between those things and the emergence of infectious disease, and their role in driving unsustainable development, the evidence is overwhelming and has been for years. Here’s a handful out of literally hundreds of papers on the subject:
    Di Marco, M., Baker, M. L., Daszak, P., De Barro, P., Eskew, E. A., Godde, C. M., … & Karesh, W. B. (2020). Opinion: Sustainable development must account for pandemic risk. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(8), 3888-3892.
    Fèvre, E. M., Bronsvoort, B. M. D. C., Hamilton, K. A., & Cleaveland, S. (2006). Animal movements and the spread of infectious diseases. Trends in microbiology, 14(3), 125-131.
    Coker, R. J., Hunter, B. M., Rudge, J. W., Liverani, M., & Hanvoravongchai, P. (2011). Emerging infectious diseases in southeast Asia: regional challenges to control. The Lancet, 377(9765), 599-609.
    Greger, M. (2007). The human/animal interface: emergence and resurgence of zoonotic infectious diseases. Critical reviews in microbiology, 33(4), 243-299.
    Karesh, W. B., Cook, R.A. (2005). The Human-Animal Link. Foreign Affairs, July / August 2005.
    Karesh, W. B., Cook, R. A., Bennett, E. L., & Newcomb, J. (2005). Wildlife trade and global disease emergence. Emerging infectious diseases, 11(7), 1000.
    Smith, K. F., Behrens, M., Schloegel, L. M., Marano, N., Burgiel, S., & Daszak, P. (2009). Reducing the risks of the wildlife trade. Science, 324(5927), 594-595.

  25. Walter Solomon says

    riversol @ #2

    Animal husbandry, wet markets, bush meat, animal based medicine, et al are at the core of so many global problems including this one.

    You are forgetting the role deforestation plays in increasing the rate of pandemics. Deforestation is done for land to plant crops as much as it’s done to feed cattle. Monoculture isn’t good for the environment. So, instead of veganism, perhaps you should be promoting locavorism.

  26. vucodlak says

    @ riversol, #2

    Responsible Party #1 and 2: Carnism Joe and Jane. This barbaric duo has been at it for centuries. Disrespecting the environment and the sentient creatures in it has set the stage for all of these epidemics.

    No, no it hasn’t. Some plagues have come from eating other animals. Other plagues have come from merely sharing a planet with other forms of life.

    Animal husbandry, wet markets, bush meat, animal based medicine, et al are at the core of so many global problems including this one. Consider taking responsibility by investigating vegan choices.

    In other words, this is irrelevant at best. Deadly plagues will come whether we eat animal proteins or not,* and we need an infrastructure for dealing with them. We had such an infrastructure just a few years ago, and the people named in this article (among others) dismantled it out of mixture of short-sighted greed and sheer stupidity.

    We also had an economic infrastructure that could effectively supply the logistics solutions to our medical supply shortages at one time, but that’s been gone a long time, and the list of people to blame for its loss is much, much longer.

    So take your fucking hobby horse and set free in a meadow or something. It doesn’t belong here.

    *Which doesn’t take into account the millions who would die without access to animal proteins. They won’t have died of a plague, but they’ll still be just as dead.

  27. unclefrogy says

    in thinking about plagues I realized it is not just plagues of the human population we have to worry about. We have had and will continue to have plagues of the livestock we depend on, they are just a worry some and as devastating to the people and the blessed economy. in some sense they are a little more controllable as the animals are already “sequestered’ and separated from other groups though still being tightly confined. An ongoing problem. There are also plant pathogens that could devastate agriculture, not only weeds and insects but bacteria and viruses that would be devastating as well.
    We happen to get this virus first, other ones with different histories are out there as well some having no connection to agriculture at all. That is a fact we ignore at our own peril, it is like weather something that exists and complaining about or trying to find some person, or behavior to blame for it will do nothing at all to mitigate the effects today nor prepare for the future events that are truly going to happen.
    It is how biology works it’s like why there is such a thing as an immune system in the first place.
    I have a question that arises out of thinking about “the situation”
    A new and deadly pathogen is going to find a pathway to infect humans is something that is bound to happen and has repeatedly through out history and it would be wise to be prepared for it.
    Similarly recessions or economic downturns have occurred with some regularity for a very long time I do not know enough history to say that they have always occurred maybe so.
    Why is it that even when they are know to occur and are predicted well in advance we are always it seems caught flat footed with no idea of what to do to get through what seems to be such a regular temporary part of economic cycles?
    uncle frogy

  28. Ridana says

    30) vucodlak wrote:

    [they] dismantled it out of mixture of short-sighted greed and sheer stupidity.

    Let’s not forget naked jealousy and smoldering grudges. Chump has been systematically trying to erase every single thing Obama did, if he can’t try to take credit for it himself. The preparation for another epidemic was just one of the things on the must-destroy list. Just like he’s trying to kill the Post Office because he thinks it benefits Bezos, and firing everyone who he feels has crossed him in some way.

  29. says

    Given the US’s historical failure to be able to hold our leaders accountable for anything — we’re treating the war criminal George W. Bush like a statesman now — I suspect they’re all going to emerge from this debacle unscathed, with a hundred thousand dead (or more) at their feet, and they won’t be arrested and tried for malignant neglect of their duties.

    We can’t hold George W. Bush responsible for his crimes because between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, every single thing he did wrong has been embraced by either a Democratic President or by a Democratic presidential nominee. And since the party has decided that it will justify its increasingly monstrous candidates by refusing to tolerate any demands for progressive policy at all, Bush cannot be criticized — criticizing Bush, after all, means suggesting that things should be otherwise, which implicitly is an implication of the Obama administration or our bizarrely right-wing candidates who followed it. Besides, Bush gave Michelle Obama a candy, isn’t that nice and human? Surely giving candy to another rich power-holder means he’s a good person and it cancels out all the things like double-tapping and ICE.

    (But the nonpartisanship only works when it’s to the advantage of horrible people — when Kavanaugh was accused of rape, 70% of Democrats said that if he was guilty he should not be permitted to sit on the Supreme Court. Now, polling shows that only 30% of Democrats feel that if Joe Biden is guilty of rape — meaning: if that is actually assumed to be true, from the outset — he should not be permitted to become President. Neither Republicans and Independents had anywhere near that much of a split between the two statistics. Only Democrats are so nakedly partisan. The party has become a massive joke in bad taste, and its partisans are a bunch of hacks who deserve everything the Republicans do.)

  30. jrkrideau says

    @ 31 unclefrogy
    SARS-CoV-2 seems to have taken this off the news but here is a 2019 item on / Asian Swine Flu. And let’s not forget the Irish Potato Famine.

  31. John Morales says

    Vicar:

    We can’t hold George W. Bush responsible for his crimes because between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, every single thing he did wrong has been embraced by either a Democratic President or by a Democratic presidential nominee.

    That’s a ridiculous claim. That others may be accessories after the fact doesn’t exculpate the actual perpetrator.

  32. psychomath says

    @33 – The Vicar

    “Now, polling shows that only 30% of Democrats feel that if Joe Biden is guilty of rape — meaning: if that is actually assumed to be true, from the outset — he should not be permitted to become President.”

    Can you point me at this poll? I can’t find it and would be very surprised to see that, so naturally I’m interested.

  33. unclefrogy says

    @34
    one of the things I was thinking of, there was also a cattle disease outbreak recently (last few years) as well, bees come to mind their loose would be substantial and others that never make the 6 o’clock news
    We are really Walking on a High Wire , we are here by luck as precarious as a soap bubble,
    it’s no wonder ideas like eternal beings who love and care for us are so attractive, too bad all the evidence says something else.
    uncle frogy

  34. chrislawson says

    Back to the OP: I personally think the list of people responsible for the mishandling of this epidemic is 62,984,828 long.

  35. chrislawson says

    mudpuddles@27–

    Yes, those are good papers, but all of them include meat eating as one of many factors, the biggest being deforestation and habitat loss. And you’re yet to respond to my request for any examples of epidemics promoted by “animal based medicine”. Please, a single example.

  36. chrislawson says

    unclefrogy–

    I disagree. We are not walking a tightrope. Ecology is incredibly resilient and has survived multiple mass extinctions from meteorite impacts, volcanism, ice ages, etc. The problem is that humans are pushing ecosystems into danger territory despite the resilience of nature. Just to choose one example, deforestation is not a problem because forest ecosystems are fragile. It’s a problem because we’ve cut down half of the world’s forests in 400 years and the deforestation rate is still increasing…

  37. unclefrogy says

    @41
    the we I was referring to was human’s and pacifically modern civilization. A case could be made though that each life is precarious and temporary as well. Life as a whole and all the processes will continue for some time I have no doubt but things could happen that could change that rather easily and will some day in the future.
    uncle frogy

  38. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To chrislawson

    And you’re yet to respond to my request for any examples of epidemics promoted by “animal based medicine”.

    I’ll probably regret posting this, but I tend to think that the Congo’s oral polio vaccine of 1957-1959 is likely crossover point of monkey SIV to humans, and that would perfectly fit the criteria. It’s the one (borderline) conspiracy theory that I suspect is correct.

    However, I agree with your main thrust, which is that animal based medicines seems to be almost completely unrelated to pandemics, especially if we don’t use monkey and ape bits to cultivate vaccines.

  39. chrislawson says

    GerrardOfTitanServer–

    Thanks for that reminder about SV40. That does fit the bill of an animal-based medicine that spread a virus, although there is suggestive but as yet no compelling evidence of it causing health risk in the people who received the contaminated vaccine. However it did lead me to the “Cutter Incident” of 1955 where improperly inactivated polio vaccine was given to 200,000 American children. (Mind you, this was more a failure of manufacturing than the fault of using an animal-derived product…especially as there is no way to culture polio virus except in an animal or animal tissue culture even today. But it meets the criteria for an epidemic driven by animal-based medicine, so I now have one definite example!)

    It’s pretty much certain that HIV evolved from SIV so the polio vaccine theory was biologically plausible for a while (although it should be pointed out that it was proposed in a paper from Medical Hypotheses, one of the worst journals in the world) but is now well-debunked. The strain of SIV in Kisangani chimpanzees is unrelated to the SIVs that mutated into HIVs.

    The evolution of HIV is quite complex but fascinating. Most people aren’t aware that HIV-1 and HIV-2 are actually moderately distant relations. They both have closer relatives in the SIV family than to each other, which indicates that they evolved separately from different SIV strains rather than from a common HIV ancestor. In fact, if you check out the phylogenetic tree you can see that even HIV-1 and HIV-2 are not single strains themselves, but are actually groups of strains that have SIV branches in the middle of their lineage.

    Ironically given the context, chimpanzees probably became hosts for SIV from hunting monkeys for meat.

    A couple of points to clear up:

    Despite the name, SV40 and SIV are completely different viruses. SV40 is a 5.2-kbp DNA polyomavirus. SIV is a 9.5-kbp RNA lentivirus.

    The SV40 contamination affected supplies from 1955-1961. The best estimate from phylogenetics is that HIV first appeared in 1931 (CI 1915-1941). Those periods don’t overlap.

    The other important point here is that SV40 only contaminated Salk polio vaccine, not Sabin polio vaccine. Salk was the inactivated vaccine that was injected and was theoretically less likely to be contaminated. The Sabin vaccine is a live attenuated vaccine that is swallowed. SV40 has been found in old Salk stores and in antibodies from the Salk-vaccinated. It has never been identified in historical samples of Sabin or serology in the Sabin-vaccinated. The reason is that Salk cultured polio in tissue cultures of monkey kidney cells. He had no way of knowing there was such a thing as SV40 (discovered in 1960) let alone a way of testing for it. It was also assumed that the inactivation process would kill any other pathogens along for the ride but we know now that this was not true for SV40. Sabin, on the other hand, cultured his polio in rodents. So no SV40.

  40. birgerjohansson says

    The British government is technically not as insane as the Merican one, but their mishandling of the pandemic is just as horrifying.
    And the Trump clone in Brazil just flat out denies there is a problem. Finally, the president-for-life in Kazhakstan has banned all mention of any pandemic.

  41. raven says

    Wikipedia
    … an estimated 10–30 million Americans may have received a dose of vaccine contaminated with SV40.[32]
    and
    The published findings from the study revealed no increased incidence of cancer in persons who may have received vaccine containing SV40.[38] Another large study in Sweden examined cancer rates of 700,000 individuals who had received potentially contaminated polio vaccine as late as 1957; the study again revealed no increased cancer incidence between persons who received polio vaccines containing SV40 and those who did not.[39]

    The contaminating virus in the early Salk vaccine was SV40 from AGMK cells.
    There is no evidence that SV40 caused cancer in humans.

    One of the people possibly exposed to the SV40 virus in polio virus vaccine was…myself, vaccinated with 4 shots of the Salk vaccine in the 1950’s. I don’t worry about it.

  42. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To chrislawson
    If you read up on the controversy, it’s plausible that a few people on Science and Nature have direct links to Kaprowski, and are covering for him. In conjunction, the paper dating the crossover point of monkey SIV to human HIV is flawed for numerous reasons. It assumes a single crossover point for the purposes of dating, which is not necessarily applicable for the Congo OPV theory where there was a half a million individual people given a vaccine produced, purportedly, through the amplification in the livers and kidneys of 400+ chimps. Also, the dating method is possibly inappropriate for an RNA retrovirus like HIV that changes primarily through recombination instead of mutation. Some of the dating papers say that they have eliminated recombinant strands from the analysis, but other experts say that identifying recombinant strands from the early phase of its evolution with the data available is basically impossible.

    Compare the two explanations.

    The traditional story has a human being infected circa 1930 or 1910 or whatever date they’re imagining now, in country that is several countries to the south of the Congo, who manages to infect basically no one for 20+ years, migrates to the Congo – which is not a trivial matter in that time and place – and only circa 1959 starts a massive wave of infection. That’s highly implausible.

    Or, consider that the Congo OPV vaccination program matches exactly the time and place where HIV/AIDS was first detected in humans, the Congo circa 1959. Moreover, consider that the proposed story even has precedent in SV-40. Moreover, consider all of the additional evidence that Kaprowski used livers and kidneys from 400 chimps from around Africa to amplify his vaccine in the Congo. This story seems at least plausible, unlike the mainstream story.

    It seems much more likely that HIV/AIDS was introduced via the Congo OPV vaccination program. I don’t think it’s proven beyond a doubt, it seems to be the most likely explanation by a substantial margin. The only thing that you have to give up is the accuracy of the phylogenetic dating arguments, and there’s plenty of reason to not entirely trust those arguments. Moreover, when you dig into the history and see how Edward Hooper has been railroaded by just half a dozen people with direct links to Kaprowski, and it’s pretty plausible that there’s a minor conspiracy of half a dozen people who are covering this up.

  43. chrislawson says

    GerrardofTitanServer–

    Thanks for your original post, but you’ve now jumped well past what’s supportabled by evidence.

    SV40 is a very different virus to SIV — as in not even in remotely the same class. SIVs, by the way, have NEVER been found in OPV vaccines. Or Salk IPV vaccines either.

    The Congo OPV theory also fails to explain why the HIV began in the Congo. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the OPV vaccine was contaminated by SIV that somehow evolved into HIV only in the Congo despite the fact that OPV was used worldwide?

    You should also be aware that the monkeys used for the early development of polio vaccines came from India, not Africa, and there is no SIV in India. SV40, yes, but not SIV.

    BTW, Koprowski didn’t have much skin in the game by the time of this purported conspiracy as his vaccine was never licensed. And yes, the testing was done in Africa, but also in Poland. (So why no HIV spike in 1950s Poland if Koprowski’s vaccine caused the HIV epidemic?)

    Finally, are you sure that Hooper has adequately differentiated “railroading” from “I refuse to speak to this journalist who won’t understand what he has already been told a hundred times and is determined to paint me in a bad light”? If there’s evidence of actual suppression of evidence then I’m very interested to hear it.

    I should advise that the evidence I would find persuasive of the Congo OPV hypothesis is isolation of SIV in old OPV samples, especially if those isolated SIVs are phylogenetically close to HIV. Anything else is pretty much noise. Evidence of suppression would require that these studies were done but could not be published, or were proposed but could not get funding AND that the studies were well-designed and run (I don’t consider rejection of a terrible study a sign of suppression).

  44. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    It’s obvious you didn’t even read a proper two paragraph summary of the idea, and yet you’re saying it is false. You’re being intellectually dishonest. Shame. Let me give it to you.

    I forgot whether Koprowski et al unreasonably claim that they flew in all half million vials of vaccine from overseas to the Congo. That would be extremely economically expensive, and contrary to how things were done in that time by other medical practitioners at that time. What very likely happened is that Koprowski et al flew in a few vials from overseas to the Congo, and then used these samples as the base to grow, in the Congo, the half million doses that were administered in the Congo.

    The question is which kind of ape or monkey was used to grow it locally in the Congo. Koprowski et al claim that it was rhesus monkeys from India or whatever. The OPV AIDS model says it was chimps from various parts of Africa. You don’t get to dismiss a claim because the purported malfeasor testifies that a central fact underlying the claim is false. (I’m not saying that Koprowski caused a transfer of SIV into humans purposefully. It was certainly an unwitting, albeit negligent, accident.) Moreover, we have eye witness testimony and IIRC financial records that it was chimps – a lot of chimps – at the compound in the Congo.

    I should advise that the evidence I would find persuasive of the Congo OPV hypothesis is isolation of SIV in old OPV samples, especially if those isolated SIVs are phylogenetically close to HIV. Anything else is pretty much noise.

    An impossible standard, and also a rather unreasonable standard. No one gets to choose the default position and say that some newcomer must meet some impossible burden in order to overthrow it. That’s not how science works. That’s not how reason works. This is how dogmatism works.

    Re the railroading.

    Koprowski suing Tom Curtis and Rolling Stone for defamation for publishing an article on it. One or two editors on IIRC Science and/or Nature on its whatever relevant division being friends or allies of Koprowski, and mostly refusing to allow positive papers to be published in favor of the OPV-AIDS hyopthesis, including by W.D. Hamilton. The Royal Society meeting that W.D. Hamilton called for to discuss the theory also turned into a clusterfuck after Hamilton, the sole scientist promoter of OPV-AIDS hypothesis, died from malaria just before the conference, allowing the detractors to take over the conference and edge out Hooper, a mere journalist. For a good but brief history on this, please see here:

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/politics-of-a-scientific-meeting-the-originofaids-debate-at-the-royal-society/399C222C0A58A4FA2039C719A97B6C9B

    I’d have to dig up stuff from Hooper’s website from archive.org for more information about the claims of relationships between a few particular editors of Science and Nature to Koprowski, and the refusal to publish pro-OPV-AIDS papers. Don’t care enough right now.

  45. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    There’s other strong circumstantial evidence, like this:

    https://www.aidsmap.com/news/mar-2001/dating-hiv-origin-1930-flawed-says-hooper

    CHAT was “fed” at 28 different venues, and 64% of the first cases of AIDS in Africa through 1980 came from the vaccinated towns and villages. So did 82% of the earliest samples of HIV-1-positive blood in Africa, again through 1980. None of these early instances of AIDS or HIV-1(M) infection came from troglodytes territory in west central Africa.

    That’s pretty damn persuasive compared to the historically ridiculous cut-hunter hypothesis which says someone managed to get infected, and keep the infection going in a small group of humans for, what, 40 years, without causing an outbreak, until 40 years later when it finally decided to explode almost simultaneously across a whole country or three, aka the Congo.

    Even if you don’t consider the evidence compelling beyond a reasonable doubt, I don’t see how one can believe that it’s the less likely explanation.

  46. chrislawson says

    There’s too much to unpack here in a comment thread, so a summary.

    Finding SIV in OPV is not an “unreasonable standard” for accepting the OPV-HIV hypothesis. It’s why we accept that SV40 contaminated IPV in the 1950s for instance. It’s also the standard Hooper demanded in his book…until the tests came back negative and suddenly it wasn’t a reasonable standard.

    So let’s look at Hooper’s OPV hypothesis:

    .1. SIV in chimpanzees gets mixed up in Koprowski’s CHAT vaccine.
    .2. The CHAT vaccine is given to people in Congo, Burundi, Rwanda.
    .3. The SIV in the vaccine mutates to HIV in humans.
    .4. HIV now erupts as a new pathogen in humans.

    When Hooper first proposed this, it was not an unreasonable hypothesis. (Hooper wasn’t the first to propose it and acknowledged this.) But then the evidence started rolling in.

    .1. Hooper demands that Koprowski send old CHAT samples to be tested for SIV.
    .2. Koprowski sends old samples to 3 independent labs. No SIV is found.
    .3. Hooper now decides that the SIV must have been in a particular batch of CHAT that wasn’t tested. This is possible. But Koprowski and his senior colleagues insist that they never used chimpanzee tissue in making the CHAT vaccine, so there was no possibility of SIV.
    .4. As per Koprowski, the samples tested also show no sign of chimpanzee DNA.
    .5. So Hooper suggests that chimp tissue was used for some batches of the CHAT vaccine, but not for the samples that were tested. This is possible.
    .6. Koprowski points out that HIV only arose in one part of Africa, not in the other places where CHAT was used, such as Poland.
    .7. Hooper suggests that the different batches can explain it all. He argues that chimp tissue was sent from Africa to the US and Europe and it’s possible that it was diverted into tissue culture lines for CHAT either accidentally or due to lack of concern about the tissue stratum.
    .8. But if chimp tissue got into the CHAT process, why no cases in Poland? It’s a bit of a stretch to think that the one contaminated stream from Africa would go back just to Africa and nowhere else.
    .9. New hypothesis from Hooper. Not only was chimp tissue sent back to the US and Europe, the CHAT researchers came up with a shortcut of collecting tissue from local chimps, culturing polio there, and turning it into the vaccine in a closed loop in Africa.
    .10. Koprowski and colleagues insist again that this did not happen and they did not even have the facilities to run the entire polio vaccine manufacturing process in Africa.
    .11. Hooper’s response is a whole lot of “might haves” and “maybes” to explain why this really happened, with a great deal of emphasis on interviews he did with junior lab techs 40 years later…whose memories he presents as perfectly accurate, while dismissing any memories from the senior scientists as unreliable.
    .12. De Cock points out that the distributions mapped by Hooper follow the population centres and transportation lines up the Congo river and are the expected distributions for almost any sort of communicable epidemic. De Kock puts a lot of work into explaining spurious correlations, for instance that there was a huge correlation between AIDS cases and airline flights in the US, obviously due to population patterns rather than the infectivity of aircraft.
    .13. Hooper responds by going off the rhetorical deep end, claiming that the human HIV cases in Burundi and Rwanda are “between 600 and 1000 miles distant as the crow flies” from Pan trog. trog. populations even though De Cock never mentioned species specifics (other chomps live right on those borders), and even worse, Hooper insists the pattern is unlikely to be due to human movement… because Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi were politically independent from 1960!

    Notice how at no time has Hooper provided a single piece of positive evidence for his hypothesis. He can’t show that SIV got into the CHAT line. He can’t show that the CHAT line ever had chimp tissue in it. He can’t show that HIV-1 is closely related to the SIVs around Kinsanangi. He can’t show that Koprowski started making CHAT in the field in Africa. He can’t show why Poland’s CHAT lines were spared chimp tissue given that he is sure that chimp tissue was sent to Poland as part of CHAT development. He can’t show why the recollections of junior lab techs are perfect but recollections of senior lab scientists are completely untrustworthy.

    At this stage his theory is looking pretty weak. And since then we have collected evidence that the SIV strains in the area Koprowski was doing his research are completely unrelated to the SIV clusters that HIV-1 and -2 evolved from. We also know from more advanced genetic work that the phylogenetic tree of HIV does not fit a single species jump as you’d expect from a contamination event. So now the theory is all of the previous PLUS we just haven’t found the community of chimps in Kinsanangi who have the right SIVs! And that HIV didn’t just evolve from one SIV contaminant but 2-4 SIV contaminants, none of which have ever been found in OPV.

    I mean seriously, you think my standard for accepting the OPV hypothesis is too tough. What’s your standard for rejecting the OPV hypothesis?

  47. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    Ok. I’m not going to engage with you any more. If you cannot be bothered to even read my posts, and the text that I directly include in my posts, there’s no purpose. I’m not going to talk anyone to someone who cannot be bothered to read what I write. At least not without an apology.

    Specifically, you wrote this:

    Hooper suggests that the different batches can explain it all. He argues that chimp tissue was sent from Africa to the US and Europe and it’s possible that it was diverted into tissue culture lines for CHAT either accidentally or due to lack of concern about the tissue stratum.

    That is not what Hooper suggests. Go back to my post 50, and read it again. There, I carefully explained the hypothesis, which is not whatever you just wrote. After reading that, if you have enough integrity to admit your gross incompetence and intellectual dishonesty, then we can continue.

    PS: Didn’t read the rest of your post, and deleted my replies to the earlier parts of your post, because they’re not relevant when I’m talking to a wall.

  48. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To chrislawson
    I’m mad because this is twice in a row that you have grossly misrepresented the idea that you’re confidently dismissing. I’m mad because I even explained to you the idea before the second time that you grossly misrepresented it.

    If you want to say it’s false because the leading scientists say so, then just do that. Don’t pretend to make an informed dismissable on the facts when you haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about. It’s really dishonest.