In a new article published this week in the London Review of Books, Hooper discusses what he considers to be new evidence in support of his theory since The River. In April 2001 both Science and Nature published reports of tests on archival CHAT polio vaccine samples Hooper suspected of being contaminated and starting the entire AIDS pandemic. The published reports found nothing and, morphing that absence of evidence into evidence of absence, declared the whole case closed. At that same time, Hooper accumulated new eyewitness reports by African lab workers of the use in Stanleyville of Lindi chimpanzees to prepare the CHAT vaccine used in that area, samples of which were dispensed without ever being archived. Suffice it to say this is equivalent to saying “the butler did it” – an understandable answer to a puzzle you can accept even though you haven’t read the 1100+ page mystery leading to this conclusion.
As Hooper says, “This new information does not prove that CHAT vaccine started AIDS, but it does significantly strengthen the OPV hypothesis. Over the last three years, various ‘disproofs’ have been put forward, but none stands up to scrutiny…The arguments, denials and protestations will continue for some time, but I believe that over the next few years it will gradually come to be realised that the Aids pandemic was sparked by large-scale field trials of an experimental polio vaccine – trials that employed African ‘volunteers’ as guinea pigs.”