Even the AIDS Junta are sharply divided over the use of an anti-’HIV’ vaccine. One section are realistic enough to admit that there can never be a vaccine. The other group want to waste time and treasure in raising hopes whilst lining their own pockets. This latter group are getting ready to attempt the old vaccine scam. According to Nature (15.1.’98) San Francisco-based veteran AIDS researcher Don Francis is embarking on a Phase III trial using some 7500 "healthy" volunteers in the USA and Thailand in a $20 million three year project using a vaccine based on glyco-protein 120, an alleged component of ‘HIV’. John Moore, of New York’s Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Centre, rightly describes this trial as a "total waste of time and money."(Nature 15.1.’98)

The vaccine scam works like this. Identify and magnify an ‘epidemic’ disease, whip up world panic, and devise a vaccine against the supposed causative agent. Administer the vaccine, preferably just before the epidemic starts to wane naturally, and then, when the cases of the disease start to diminish, claim the vaccine has worked and the pharmaceutical company who manufactures it will get the credit for saving mankind. There will be bouquets and Nobel prizes all round and every one makes a lot of money. One has only to look at the cases of the anti-poIio and anti-smallpox vaccine campaigns to see the classic modus operandi in taking credit for ending epidemics, which in the manner of all self-limiting phenomena, were already dying out before the vaccine was introduced.

In the USA during the late ‘forties, there was a noticeable increase in polio cases. This prompted the authorities to pay a bounty of $25 to GP’s reporting any suspected case of polio, treating it as a notifiable disease. The numbers of cases of ‘polio’ shot up, causing a national panic. Any stiff neck or slight limp was reported. Curiously, at the same time, the official number of cases of aseptic meningitis, which shares some symptoms with polio, and previously reached some 25,000 annually nationwide, disappeared completely. A whole disease just vanished. Subsequently, when the polio epidemic had abated, the credit being given to Salk and Sabin’s polio vaccines (which frequently caused polio ! ) the numbers of meningitis cases returned to their previous level. Professor Gordon Stewart explained to me that the same thing happened in India when people were paid a few rupees to report cases of smallpox during the WHO’s anti-smallpox campaign As a result, official figures for chickenpox disappeared during the campaign, but reappeared with a bang after smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. The trick is to make sure you get in with the vaccine just before the numbers of cases of the disease start to diminish. In the case of polio, the definition of the disease was later tightened up to exclude illnesses with similar symptoms - meningitis, encephalopathies etc. - and presto, there was a dramatic drop in the official polio cases. Hooray, the vaccine worked. Unfortunately for the AIDS Junta, the epidemic is clearly already on the wane, at least in the West, and there is the worrying little detail of the ten year incubation period. The latest official German annual AIDS- deaths figure for 1997 is 35 (thirty-five!) out of a population of some 81,000,000 (eighty one million!) so does Germany really need a vaccine? Does anyone? Indeed, will it ever be possible to devise a single vaccine against a syndrome which seems to vary in intensity, incidence and symptoms throughout the world and even from city to city? Watch out for the inevitable redefinitions of AIDS, either to make the threat seem more widespread than it is, or to have just the reverse effect, by diminishing the number of AIDS-related illnesses and make it look as if AIDS is on the wane, thanks to a vaccine or the latest ‘miracle’ drugs.

In April 1984, the world was told that the ‘probable’ cause of AIDS had been found - a novel ‘human’ retrovirus called variously LAV, ARV, and HTLV-III. Subsequently, despite a complete lack of convincing scientific evidence, which persists to this day, that such an organism causes immunosuppression, in a pre-emptive move the claimed novel retrovirus was named ‘HIV’ (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) by an international committee (1986). It was accepted that after a period of latency, some infectees start to manifest symptoms of AIDS, and the average length of asymptomatic infection was some ten years. Therefore, any trial of an ‘anti-HIV’ vaccine must run for at least ten years to show whether the vaccine will prevent disease after infection with the alleged viral cause of AIDS. To date, none of the vaccine trials has run for more than a few months, and Francis’ trial is scheduled to run only three years.

Vaccination will be a singularly inappropriate method of countering ‘HIV’/AIDS. A vaccine uses either a killed pathogenic micro-organism or a specially weakened (attenuated) live form to induce a prophylactic antibody response. However, vaccination is primarily used to protect against pathogens which cause diseases of rapid onset. Organisms which replicate very rapidly to high titre may cause a disease before the body can mount a successful antibody response. Vaccination against a pathogen primes the body by tricking it into generating antibodies in advance of a natural infection. This antibody titre then subsides, but leaves behind memory cells which can mount an almost instantaneous response on subsequent exposure, as opposed to having to wait for the body’s humoral immune system to analyze the intruding pathogen and then synthesize an appropriate antibody. However, according to the orthodox view of ‘HIV’/AIDS, disease only develops after the body has already been generating neutralizing antibody against ‘HIV’ for roughly a decade. Indeed, it is these antibodies which are alleged to show infection with ‘HIV’ in the first place. All those rapacious AIDS researchers seem to be unaware of the irony that the very clue which reveals ‘HIV infection’ protects from any ill-effects allegedly caused by the ‘virus’. As Peter Duesberg explained eleven years ago (Cancer Research, 1.3.’87) once you are producing the antibodies which give an ‘HIV’+ diagnosis, you are already vaccinated. However, we are now constantly being told of the lightning-fast mutability of ‘viral strains’, usually to explain why the latest miracle drugs cease to work. This has excused the failure of AZT, other nucleoside analogue drugs and protease inhibitors, and will no doubt be used to explain the failure of anti-’HlV’ vaccines, including Don Francis’. Once again, the brilliant ‘HIV’ will have mutated to outwit the vaccine.

The difficulties surrounding the production of a vaccine against ‘HIV’ are too horrendous for it ever to be a possibility. The putative virus is alleged to mutate so rapidly that a single individual is said to produce many different strains of virus simultaneously. Which one do you vaccinate against? How could any vaccine protect against a constantly moving target? Should one use an attenuated live viral strain or a killed fully pathogenic one to generate an antibody response? It is also supposed, since a group of eleven ‘HIV’ infected people were found in Australia who have failed to develop AIDS after some 13 years, that not all strains of ‘HIV’ are pathogenic. Would a vaccine-derived antibody raised by using such a non-pathogenic strain in a vaccine afford protection against a fully virulent strain of ‘HIV’? What of those scientists like Montagnier, who as early as 1985/6 was suggesting that the antibodies against ‘HIV’ were autoimmune antibodies and may themselves be the cause of the decline of the immune system. Could a vaccine cause AIDS, as the polio one undoubtedly did? Even in the more than unlikely event of a successful vaccine being devised, the implications are alarming for a country’s blood supply. If there is nothing to distinguish vaccine-generated antibodies from an acquired infection, and antibody-positive blood is screened out of the blood supply, this suggests that countries with widescale vaccination, i.e. in the Third World, will have large shortfalls in blood supplies for transfusion. Will vaccinees be told not to donate blood, setting up a form of ‘positive’ discrimination?

What of the "healthy volunteers" in Francis’ study? Are they from the ‘high risk’ groups? The AIDS epidemics in the USA and Thailand have entirely different profiles, cases being more evenly distributed between the sexes in the latter area, but the linking factor amongst heterosexuals in both countries seems to be drug addiction, especially in sex workers. How will the volunteers be encouraged to challenge the vaccine? Will they be encouraged to have unsafe sex and indulge in heavy recreational drug use with shared needles in the hope that they will become infected with ‘HIV’, thereby challenging the vaccine to protect them against AIDS ten years - not the planned three years - down the line? This would obviously be stupid as well as completely unethical, but the fact remains that a vaccine trial must challenge the vaccine to protect the recipient. When Walter Reed wanted to demonstrate the efficacy of his yellow fever vaccine, he vaccinated himself and then deliberately infected himself with the mosquito-borne arbovirus which causes the disease to demonstrate that his vaccine worked. Are Francis’ "healthy volunteers" in ‘high-risk activity’ groups, or just Mr. and Mrs. Average? Mr. and Mrs. Average do not get AIDS. A recent feature article in the Sunday Times Magazine (14.12.’97) made much of a group of celebrity and other volunteers for an anti-‘HIV’ vaccine trial, with varying degrees of risk behavior, but short of using deliberate injection with a strain of ‘HIV’, what risk do they have of ‘infection’? These people obviously mean well, but their altruistic gesture is as futile as nuns volunteering for a vaccine trial against syphilis. The fact remains, ‘HIV’ is not highly infectious like the polio or measles viruses, yet another reason why a vaccine is wholly irrelevant.