I have written about conspiracy theorists and people who believe in them before. Heck, I have made fun of them, let’s be honest. However, there are times when you hear something and look at what is being said and part of you just has to wonder. There are merits to what people are saying and suddenly you have to sit up and take notice and, perhaps, acknowledge that there is something there and you might want to take another look.

I recently watched remarkable documentary on the Sundance channel called “The Origin of AIDS” and it really made me sit up and take notice and really made the hairs on the back of my neck and my arms stand up. I am not saying that this documentary is the truth. No, doing that is just looking at one side of a story. You cannot look really at any documentary and take it as gospel. You really cannot filter the biases of the filmmakers out of documentaries. It’s not the same thing as a news story. Of course, even news stories often show an unintentional (or sometimes intentional) bias. When people are involve in anything then you have to wonder about bias.

Still, the issues brought up in the documentary are worth exploring further. Of course, this was also a very scientific documentary. That means they used a lot of big words that I don’t understand. However, I will do the best I can with my limited knowledge of virology and immunization to convey the possibilities expressed in this film.

Essentially much of the medical community says the first cases of what is known now as AIDS appeared in about 1959 in the area of Africa known as the Congo. It took quite a bit of time before that virus made it to the United States and, therefore, apparently warranted any notice by anyone. The fact that is struck drug users and homosexuals first probably also contributed to the spread of the disease.

At that same time the world was trying to combat another terrible virus known as polio. The virus had been killing and crippling children for years and perhaps centuries. A man named Jonas Saulk discovered the vaccine by using dead versions of the virus and injecting that vaccine into children. Essentially Jonas helped wipe out the entire virus from this planet. It is considered by much of the medical community and the world at large to be the greatest medical achievement of the twentieth century.

There is an interesting thing about how you make a vaccine. When you want to create a vaccine you need to take tissue and chop it up really fine. You then mix various other serums and place the tissue in those serums and you encourage the virus to grow on the tissue cultures. If you want to create a vaccine using a dead virus, which is the kind you inject, then you kill the virus using chemicals and then you bottle it up and start injecting. If you want to create a vaccine that people can take orally you need to keep the virus alive and then use a serum also made from tissue of the animal you got the original tissue from and encourage the virus to grow.

The way scientists have been doing this is by using the issue from monkeys. Monkeys are killed and their kidneys removed and chopped up and used to make tissue cultures. So, all of those polios vaccines that were given out back in the 50s were made from monkey kidneys. Generally what are called “lower” monkeys are used. These are green monkeys and other monkeys that are not chimpanzees. As it turns out, chimps don’t make very good test subjects for vaccines despite their similarity to humans.

So, when Jonas created his injected vaccine there were other guys trying to create an oral vaccine. There were also people trying to test their vaccines using children in Africa. This was not entirely ethical but in certain parts of the world, like the Congo for example, there were ways to get around it because back then the Congo was very well organized and had an excellent universal health care method that made it perfect for testing.

Meanwhile it turns out chimps have been known to contract a virus known as SIV. This is the simian version of the HIV virus. For years the theory has been thrown around that a hunter with a cut on his body killed a chimp and got the chimp’s infected blood all over him and into his cut and this was how HIV made the transition from a primate disease to one in humans. You see viruses have this nasty habit of mutating once they get into a new host. This is the concern most have about bird flu these days.

There were a few folks who wanted to test their oral vaccine. They also decided, for reasons that are still not clear, to start doing tests with chimps and then they started making vaccine cultures with chimp tissue. They used live samples and used kidneys and blood to make these cultures. Then they sprayed this vaccine into over one million children in the Congo during the late 1950s. Lo and behold, in the nearly the same location the first cases of this mysterious disease that destroyed the immune system began to appear.

So, you see, it wasn’t God sending some kind of punishment to the homosexuals. No, it wasn’t mystical beings wreaking havoc upon the world and it wasn’t sinister agents injecting people with this virus. It may simply have been science. It may simply have been that from the greatest medical achievement of the twentieth century that wiped out one of the greatest scourges the world has ever known ended up unleashing something even more terrible and deadly instead.

Much of the medical community has done what it can to debunk this. They may be right. It may be that those chimps were never used to make virus cultures and never turned into vaccine. This is just one documentary with a certain point of view. What does seem to be happening is that the medical community is attacking the theory so viciously that no one dares come forward with an idea about how to explore this further.

Science may not be the answer to everything. Given the way pharmaceutical companies continue to push forward with less control than every before and test in less economically prominent parts of the world who knows what may come next. Science without morality and science without governing is science that can run amok. It may be that AIDS is the price to pay and, perhaps, it should be the final price.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format on his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.