Experimental Oral Polio Vaccines and AIDS

were often extracted from primates for tissue culture work back in the 50s. In
those days, to minimise possible contamination, the kidneys were frequently
extracted after the anaesthetic had taken hold, but before death.
There was just one small problem with Antoine's very precise recollections.
Perhaps because there are not different words for different internal organs in
Lingala, his native language, he could not recall for sure which organs had been
extracted. At one point, he did say that the doctors had been taking kidneys,
and he also mentioned that sometimes they had taken just one kidney - a
comment on which I failed to follow up properly. But we had three interviews in
all, and when I checked with him about kidneys the following day, he said he
could not be certain.
In July this year, I called once more on Louis Bugyaki, the vet who had worked
in Stanleyville from 1956 to 1959, and who had helped look after the Lindi
chimps when they had got sick. He gave an even more precise interview than he
had given back in 1994 - and, at the end, he agreed to sign a statement
encapsulating some of the major points in that interview.
Here is part of the final paragraph of that statement. "I was told by two of the
Belgian doctors working at Lindi (Gaston Ninane and Paul Osterrieth) that
chimp organs - mostly kidneys - were being sent from Stanleyville to the United
States, at the request of Dr Koprowski. It is possible that the main purpose of
sending the kidneys was to provide cells in which the Koprowski polio vaccines
could be grown. I was told by the aforesaid doctors that the sending of chimp
kidneys abroad was to be kept a secret. I think there is a strong possibility that
this was a commercial secret, and that the vaccine-makers did not want the role
that the chimps had played in the production of the vaccine to be known by
competitors, such as Sabin and Salk."
Please note that with this statement, Dr Bugyaki calls into question the evidence
of each of the three doctors, Ninane, Osterrieth and Koprowski, who we know to
have been directly involved with this research, and who insist that chimp kidneys
were not sent abroad to make vaccine. I would submit that the fourth scientist
mentioned previously, Stanley Plotkin, does not appear to have first-hand
evidence of which type of kidneys were used, at least in the early days of CHAT
production. His direct involvement with CHAT seems to have begun only in
1958, and the statements he makes about these events are based on deduction,
not - it would seem - on personal memory.
Antoine's eye-witness account, supported by Dr Bugyaki's unequivocal
statement, constitutes the first really powerful evidence that chimp kidneys, in
large numbers, were being sent from the Congo to the U.S., and probably to
Belgium: the first smoking gun, if you like. But there are at least two other
smoking guns, both of which come Africa.
In the past two months I have been twice to Burundi, and once to Rwanda, the
two former Belgian colonies which were most heavily vaccinated with CHAT.
Our one lead in Burundi was the fact that the vaccines used for the mass CHAT

vaccine trial in the Ruzizi valley in 1958 had been stored in a deep freeze in