Hilary Koprowski - AIDS Hypothesis

AIDS Hypothesis

British journalist Edward Hooper publicized a hypothesis that AIDS was inadvertently caused in the late 1950s in the Belgian Congo by Koprowski's research into a polio vaccine. The OPV AIDS hypothesis has been rejected by some in the scientific community. The journal Science wrote of Hooper's claims, "...it can be stated with almost complete certainty that the large polio vaccine trial... was not the origin of AIDS." Koprowski also rejected the claim, although he has declined to sue Hooper. In a separate case, he won a clarification and $1 in monetary damages in a defamation action against Rolling Stone, which had published an article making similar allegations. A concurrent defamation lawsuit that Koprowski brought against the Associated Press was settled several years later, but the terms were not publicly disclosed.

Koprowski's original reports from 1960–61 detailing part of his vaccination campaign in the Belgian Congo are available on-line from the World Health Organization.

The OPV AIDS hypothesis asserts that the oral polio vaccine was developed in chimpanzee tissues contaminated with a strain of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), and that an experimental mass vaccination program introduced the virus into the human population. The oral polio vaccine was not developed using chimpanzee tissue. A large trial of an oral polio vaccine took place near Kisangani in the late 1950s, but the strain of SIV present in local chimpanzees is phylogenetically distinct from all strains of HIV. HIV has been present in human populations since before the oral polio vaccine was developed, most likely since the 1930s.