Upon A Pale Horse

THIRTY-FIVE Aftermath

“But this is speculation on your part. You admit it,” Jeffrey countered.

“Young man, if I put a cat into a black box and theorize whether it’s alive or dead because of a radioactive isotope, that’s speculation. If I see one of my lab creations suddenly appear in two populations that are a world apart, that’s something else again.”

“I just can’t believe that the government would experiment on its own population with something as deadly as a bio-warfare agent.”

“I’m not saying it’s the whole government — I would bet it’s a fringe group that has a lot of power within the government. But I don’t understand your disbelief. The government has a long, documented history of experimenting on the population, in secret, with deadly diseases and substances. Do you not know this? Haven’t you heard of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment? That’s where the Public Health Department allowed syphilis to go untreated in hundreds of black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, for four decades, even after a cure for it was discovered in the forties. The ‘experiment’ went on until 1972, and was only stopped because the New York Times broke the story. At no point were the subjects allowed to be treated for the disease, even though it was killing them, and even though their wives and children got it from them — the government, and its hospitals and physicians, stood by and watched for forty years as it ravaged the community, and for twenty-five years after there was a cure, it prevented the subjects from being treated, because it wanted to study the long-term effects on the patient population, which included, obviously, a painful and hideous death.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “That was before my time. I mean, I think I heard something about it, but I didn’t pay attention. It was ancient history to me.”

“And the same group of American researchers injected Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases without their informed consent between 1946 and 1948. They went outside the U.S. to conduct their secret experiments so it would be harder to track any long-term fallout, and because they correctly understood that few Americans know about or care about what happens in third world countries.”

Schmidt paused, as if to catch his breath. “Shall I go on? The point is that there are plenty of documented examples of the government doing exactly what I’m saying was done in the late seventies — selecting cohort groups for experimentation based on race or sexual preference. So why is it so hard for you to believe that a faction of that same government would do the identical thing with a different disease? Because the ethic had changed so much between 1972, when it was just fine to do it in Alabama, and 1978, when the first AIDS cases began appearing in New York? Young man, what planet are you from? Ethics — no, people — don’t change that fast. And certainly, a history of it being acceptable to conduct secret experiments on groups at the margins doesn’t change overnight.”

Jeffrey rubbed the faint stubble on his chin. “For the record, you believe that HIV was introduced into the gay American and African populations deliberately.” He shook his head. “Fine. How was it done?”

“Vaccines. In the U.S., vaccine trials; and in Africa and Brazil, the massive smallpox vaccination program.”

Schmidt allowed his words to sink in. “Young man, there are two possibilities. The innocent one is that a number of the vaccines created for the African program, as well as those for the U.S. hepatitis B trials, were somehow accidentally contaminated with a simian virus — and in some unknown way, that enabled it to cross over into humans, simultaneously morphing into HIV. Bear in mind that how both the smallpox program and hepatitis B trials could have been accidentally contaminated is a scientific unknown. The other possibility is that HIV was lab-created from simian immunodeficiency virus and then those vaccine programs were contaminated deliberately. I favor the second explanation, largely due to an understanding of statistical probability. There’s no doubt in my mind that HIV was made in a bio-warfare lab,” Schmidt insisted, his voice steady.

“HIV was introduced into humans via vaccines?” Jeffrey echoed incredulously.

“In the U.S., the first AIDS cases began appearing in New York shortly after the hepatitis B vaccine trials there — which were only administered to young, sexually active, Caucasian homosexual men. Then, a year later, the trials moved to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and St. Louis, and again, shortly after the inoculations took place in those cities, AIDS cases began showing up there, as well.”

“But how do you know that—”

Schmidt continued as if Jeffrey hadn’t attempted a question. “They’ve tested the stored blood samples in New York from pre-1978, when the vaccination program began, and there was zero HIV in any — zero. But in 1979, HIV is present in over six percent of blood samples taken from the gay men who participated in the hep B trials. By 1982, one year after the official start of the AIDS epidemic, thirty percent of the recipients of the hep B vaccine were HIV positive. That’s an incredible, explosive infection rate — far, far higher than Africa, and much higher than anything in the literature since.”

His unasked question answered, Jeffrey just sat silently now, both shocked and skeptical.

The old German tried his chilling smile again before dropping his next bomb. “But the most obvious evidence that the vaccine trials introduced HIV into the white, gay U.S. population was the success of the vaccine trial results: Ninety-six percent of the trial participants developed antibodies to hepatitis B!”

Jeffrey scratched his chin. “That’s proof? I don’t understand. Why is the vaccine trial being a huge success proof of no HIV being present at that time?”

“Ach, I keep forgetting you don’t know anything about this. It’s proof because vaccine efficacy drops off to fifty percent in humans that are immuno-compromised with HIV. If the official theory is that the gay population already had HIV simmering in it, why were the hepatitis B vaccine trials the greatest vaccine success ever recorded? Again, it’s impossible that the young men in the trial had HIV before the trials, or the vaccine wouldn’t have worked.”

Jeffrey digested that piece of simple logic with a dry swallow. An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. “But why target gays?” he asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Remember that up until the early seventies, homosexuality was listed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and the World Health Organization defined it as such until 1990. That’s twelve years after AIDS began appearing in the gay population. So to conservative white men, being gay was viewed as a disorder — which perfectly fit the profile of those the government liked to conduct secret experiments on. In the past, prisoners, mental patients, rural black men, retarded children, and its own military were victims of experimentation without their informed consent. Is it such a stretch that homosexuals were lumped into that category back then?”

“But what about earlier patients who died of AIDS? From the fifties or sixties?”

“Most of those have been shown to be either incorrect false positives on tissue samples, or contamination. False positives abound in AIDS research, more than in any other field. Flu shot recipients were testing positive, for Christ’s sake. So how definitive do you think those tests actually are?”

Schmidt paused, as if expecting an answer, but Jeffrey couldn’t think of a thing to say, and the old man continued.

“Probably the most famous, the 1959 tissue sample from Africa, is now conveniently exhausted after being touted as ‘proof’ HIV was there for a long time, so can’t be retested. You just have to believe that it wasn’t yet another false positive, or contamination — something that is also remarkably common in HIV research, and which has affected almost all the American labs. Frankly, I believe the remainder of that handful of cases were carefully manufactured to advance the lie that it’s an old disease. Think of the stakes. Do you really believe that those behind this sort of a cover-up wouldn’t create conveniently discovered tissue samples to test positive in order to advance their agenda? Were you born yesterday? Come on. I already told you the New York stored blood supplies that were tested from pre-1977 were all negative — you can check that yourself.”

“Look, I’m from San Francisco. AIDS is discussed a lot there. There’s evidence — at least, I’m pretty sure there is — that it originated in Africa. Now you’re trying to tell me—”

“Africa is blamed for being the birthplace of HIV, mainly because ‘similar’ viruses were found there, and because simian immunodeficiency virus — SIV — is found in African apes and monkeys — but that’s proof of nothing. Did you know that originally, Africa was implicated because Kaposi’s sarcoma, the cancer that is synonymous with AIDS, is fairly common there? But then, in the mid-eighties, a study found that most of the African Kaposi’s victims tested negative for HIV. It concluded that there was no link between the African Kaposi’s and the same disease appearing opportunistically in Americans.”

“So you’re saying the two weren’t linked?”

Schmidt shook his head. “Simply put, it was unrelated to AIDS. And of course, there’s the massively inconvenient problem of the timeline — Montagnier, the discoverer of the virus, admits that there was no AIDS epidemic in Africa until well after it was well underway in North America — and that the African virus is a different strain. But Africa was already the media scapegoat, primarily because of the debunked green monkey theory that was advanced after the Kaposi’s theory, and nobody remembers they were both a hundred percent wrong. They just know the AIDS epidemic started in Africa, even if it didn’t.”

“Then you’re saying that they’re confusing the origin of the simian virus with the origin of HIV.”

“Correct. I’m saying that the predecessor virus might be SIV from apes; but the origin of the AIDS epidemic isn’t some natural cross-species jumping in Africa. It couldn’t be. AIDS didn’t appear there until after a completely different strain than the African strain appeared in the U.S. and the AIDS epidemic was already well underway.”

He leaned forward and fixed Jeffrey with a penetrating stare. “Do you not understand the significance of that? It’s like blaming a disease that appears in New York in January on something that appears in Africa in late November of the following year — and is completely different in terms of the tissue type it targets. All it takes to debunk that theory is a working knowledge of a calendar. Look, if HIV causes AIDS, which nobody is disputing, why did the epidemic wait to start in Africa until after it was a wildfire in the U.S.?”

“But I read somewhere that they tested the blood supplies in Africa from older samples, and found HIV.”

“Again, false positives. Most of those were retested in Israel and England, and found to have zero HIV. It was malaria and other immune system-destroying diseases that caused the false results. Look, a 1986 study of geriatric Ugandans in nursing homes at the epicenter of the African AIDS epidemic found not one HIV positive, when the general population had a fifteen percent infection rate, so the theory that it had been there for decades or centuries is simply false, predicated on assumptions and tainted lab samples. It couldn’t have happened the way the theories say, and yet they’re parroted as if undisputed fact.”

Jeffrey nodded slowly. “So in Africa, the vaccines were given to everyone, not just one minority.”

“Exactly. And the African strain targets mucous membranes, not rectal tissue. So you have supposedly the same virus appearing after widespread vaccination programs, but which amazingly targets different cell types. I never understood why the medical community never questioned why it was a gay disease on one continent and heterosexual on another. Even better, nobody wants to explore how that happened. It’s one of many scientific taboos in a discipline that isn’t supposed to have any.”

“I always assumed it was lifestyle or something.”

“Lifestyle? Humans have been having sex for millions of years. Why within twenty-four months of the first cases being diagnosed in the U.S. did AIDS suddenly explode in Africa and Haiti? Let’s see. Big vaccination programs in Africa, including fourteen thousand Haitians there who subsequently went back home, big vaccination trials to only gay white men in the U.S., and then bam, there’s an epidemic of a ‘new,’ and yet paradoxically, if you believe the disinformation, a simultaneously ‘old’ disease.”

Schmidt took a sip from a glass of tepid water on the low coffee table. “Look, the vaccine connection in Africa is so obvious to many that some of the accepted theories grudgingly concede that the smallpox vaccine programs might have played a role in the spread… but only because of dirty needles. The only problem there is that there’s no evidence of that. It’s another convenient invention. With AIDS there are so many flights of fancy touted as official explanations, and when one’s debunked, the experts and the media all switch to another, equally absurd theory, absent any evidence.”

Jeffrey’s headache had returned with a vengeance. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you… have any proof?”

“Ah. Proof. No, I’m just an old man who helped create viruses that were almost identical. Working for top secret organizations that would deny their very existence. No, I don’t have a nice, tidy blueprint with “Top Secret” stamped across it articulating that AIDS is a deliberate experiment, as with my old Nazi bosses, to decimate the ‘undesirable’ populations of the world.”

“Then in the end, while it’s compelling on the surface, there’s no motive and no proof,” Jeffrey said.

“Motive? How about the usual twins, power and money? Think about it this way — in 1970, Nixon declared a war on cancer. A decade later, the retrovirologists who were the great hope of that assault, who had devoured impossible-to-envision resources, were no closer to coming up with a cure than they had been when they started. The whole thing was a failure and their credibility was in shambles. Funding dried up. And then suddenly, this new retrovirus appears, and overnight the stars of medicine and science are the same retrovirologists who failed to accomplish anything with cancer. They went from failures to being on the cover of Time.

“And the money? It poured in. Developing treatments, tests, researching. Drug companies made fortunes treating symptoms. Federal money taps were opened and never closed. Here we are, forty-something years after Nixon declared war on cancer, and not one vaccine, not one cure, has resulted from billions and billions of dollars, and two generations of work. Young man, here’s a reasonable question: how can scientists who can’t develop a cure for even simple viral animal diseases after forty years be expected to cure anything substantial in humans? The money’s not in curing. It’s in treating and researching.”

“Then this was all about money.”

“If you look hard enough at most things, you’ll find they’re about money.”

“Genocide. To make money,” Jeffrey repeated in a hushed whisper.

“Don’t act so shocked. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I don’t believe it. More importantly, nobody else will believe it, either. The official position is too entrenched, and people are reluctant to research anything. Whatever the papers say is what most believe, without question.”

“So you understand why it’s awfully convenient that the establishment’s experts all came out of the bio-warfare culture in the sixties and seventies, and that a handful of authorities dictate what will be researched and taken seriously, and what won’t? Authorities, like the one who ‘mistakenly’ claimed he discovered the virus, who apparently couldn’t tell them apart for years — or rather, couldn’t spot that they were identical — and then concocted increasingly absurd hypotheses about simian virus jumping while making it effectively taboo to acknowledge decades of contamination and species-jumping experiments? Carried out by many of those very same scientists, whose pet meal ticket got shut down only two years before fate smiled upon them and HIV miraculously appeared?” Schmidt looked ready to spit. “Those are your experts.”

“They effectively control the dialogue.”

“Which is why nobody dares introduce the words ‘lab-created’ into the discussion. They’d rather conveniently forget they were experimenting in causing simian viruses to species-jump. I don’t blame them. Certainly, there’s nobody with nearly their money or power to take the opposing view. It’s career suicide. So instead, everyone pronounces the origin of the AIDS epidemic ‘irrelevant’ or ‘unknowable,’ and prefers to focus on the origin of HIV — the virus — all the while pretending that biological warfare labs weren’t experimenting with cross-species virus jumping. No wonder they want it ‘unknowable’ and can’t wait to rush the dialogue along. I would, too.”

“Be that as it may, nobody’s going to want to hear it, especially absent hard evidence.”

“You might be right. In your country it’s like everyone has their fingers in their ears rather than simply examining the evidence and calling foul. In that respect it reminds me of prewar Germany — an entire population that so wants to believe in something it will ignore what’s obviously happening before its eyes.”

“You see my problem, then?” Jeffrey asked. “It’s an inflammatory set of allegations, but without proof…”

Schmidt seemed to shrink as the silence stretched between them. Jeffrey decided to change tactics.

“Why haven’t you talked about this before now?” Jeffrey probed.

“I was afraid. That simple. I knew the only way I was safe was if I never spoke about the past, and minded my own business.”

“Then what changed?”

“I’m dying. I’m old. And I’ve participated in many evils. But this one, even I am ashamed of. Something I helped create has been used to kill over thirty million people. That makes World War II seem tame. And it will kill hundreds of millions more. I can’t go to my grave in silence. It’s that simple.”

Jeffrey shifted, studying the old German’s wizened face, and made a snap decision. He reached over and shut off the recorder.

“I was recently shown a document that made no sense to me. But it might to you. It was a diagram with some kind of a bar chart and a random string of letters beneath it. And pages of numbers. The person who showed it to me was afraid for his life, and felt it might be related to your story somehow. Connected to the animal mutilations. Which you say were experimentation…”

Schmidt’s face froze. “A diagram with bar charts and a letter string? What kind of a diagram? Where did the document come from?”

“It was classified, so I presume it was stolen from some government database. As to what kind, if I drew it, do you think you might be able to place it?”

“You can draw it from memory? This thing?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I can look at it. Why not?” said Schmidt, trying to be nonchalant, but failing.

Jeffrey sat in silence, sketching the diagram and charts in detail, and after a few minutes handed the notebook over to the German. Schmidt squinted at what he’d drawn, then retrieved a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket. An eternity passed, and then he looked over the rims at Jeffrey, his face pale.

“Lieber Gott. It’s a virus. One of the most lethal in history.”