Upon A Pale Horse (Bio-Thriller)

by Russell Blake

  “But…where do the cattle come in?”

  “We needed hosts we could use to culture our little germs. And we wanted to see how they would spread in the wild – in populations that were interacting normally, not lab animals in pens.”

  “Back to Pneumocystis pneumonia…and AIDS.”

  “Yes. And now we get to the real meat – the reason anyone will care about my sordid history. I’m an expert on retroviruses, and as such, I’m one hundred percent convinced that HIV is a lab-created pathogen, an engineered variant of simian immunodeficiency virus, and that AIDS is a man-made disease. I worked on similar pathogens. I should know.”

  Jeffrey was speechless. In his wildest dreams, he’d never thought the cattle mutilations would lead to…this. His mind raced as he fought to find words.

  “But why? Why would a lab-created bio-warfare virus be released into the world?”

  “Ah. Finally, a good question. The answer to that, my friend, has nothing whatsoever to do with science, and everything to do with politics and social engineering.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “One of the problems we had should be obvious from the cattle mutilations: We needed real-world data on how our creations would spread, and how lethal they would be in humans. Sure, we had models, and we could extrapolate, but that’s not the same – one mistaken assumption and all the models turn out wrong. It’s always an issue. A big one. I believe that HIV was deliberately introduced in Africa in order to obtain data on how a new weaponized retrovirus would mutate and flourish in a general population, and at the same time potentially solve, or at least moderate, the global overpopulation problem.”

  “In America, it served a dual purpose. It was inserted into a control group that could be easily followed and that was a troublesome minority, so data could be obtained on its spread in that community; a cohort group that didn’t seem to be at risk of transmitting it to the general population. Also, though, it was a group that was emerging as a troubling political force based in sexuality – sexuality that was not just dangerous on a political level, but also threatened to undermine the values of conservative America.”

  “You’re saying that HIV was deliberately spread in the U.S. to decimate the gay community? And that Africa was some kind of population control exercise?”

  “There’s no other explanation for how it was released in both the U.S. and Africa around the same time–”

  “Well,” corrected Jeffrey, “it started in Africa first, so that–”

  “Is that what you think?” Schmidt chuckled slightly. “Well, of course. That’s what you’ve been told so many times you accept it as fact. But actually, it appeared in Africa after it did in the U.S.” He held up a hand to silence Jeffrey’s objections before continuing.

  “And there’s no question that it was released. The explanations about cross-species jumping from monkeys to humans in Africa via bush meat was always ludicrous, and was first advanced by a scientist who falsely claimed to have discovered the virus, and whose staff were later shown to be perpetrators of fraud. It was a stupid theory that stretched the limits of scientific credulousness to new levels, and relied upon hypothesis on top of speculation on top of guess – never mind that AIDS is a disease of the cities in Africa, and hardly ever occurs in the bush, where bush meat is made and consumed. But it was a convenient bit of theater that took the focus off a lab-created possibility.”

  The German stared at a faraway spot on the wall for a moment, and then returned to the discussion as though he hadn’t missed a beat. “Through repetition, it became the prevailing accepted explanation, which is now trumpeted and repeated as fact – with the original green monkeys now changed to chimps after the Japanese proved that HIV wasn’t closely related to the monkey virus. That HIV came from chimps or gorillas, jumping species in the wild, is repeated like gospel, with the weight of fact. Only it isn’t fact. It’s an invention. A post hoc explanation designed to befuddle and confuse. Because the other explanation is too horrible to contemplate – that factions within the U.S. government singled out whole populations based on race or sexuality, and earmarked them as expendable, part of a big experiment that was both financially and ideologically driven.” Schmidt glowered at Jeffrey, and then a tight smile cracked his sagging face.

  Jeffrey’s eyes drifted over to the recorder, confirming that it was catching everything. His head was swimming with the density of the information the old scientist was reciting as if reading from his notes.

  The German coughed and cleared his throat again. “Damned bug is running around here. Be careful, or you might catch a cold.”

  Jeffrey tried to formulate a response, but words eluded him.

  “Back to my role in all this. Remember I told you about infecting chimps with a virus that destroyed their T cells and caused them to die from Pneumocystis pneumonia? I was working on creating a virus that would do the same in humans – weaken the immune system and kill the host from opportunistic afflictions. I made great strides in doing so, as the chimp experiments should tell you. Then I was pulled off the project in the mid-seventies and moved to another operation, with no warning. Several years later the first cases of AIDS began to surface out of New York, and then later, in Africa. I didn’t have to be a genius to recognize my own handiwork.” The German reached to his side and lifted a plastic bottle of water to his lips, drew a few swallows, then set it back down.

  “But a bigger question than whether it had been released into targeted subsections of the population, was how. How had a laboratory-created, contagious bio-weapon made it into the gay population of New York, and into Haiti, and Africa, and even more interestingly to me, how had the perpetrators managed to get the entire scientific community to be comfortable with it being a gay disease on one continent, but a heterosexual one on another? As a scientist, I found it impossible that nobody seemed puzzled by that, and that the possibility of the virus being lab-created was never seriously examined. Maybe because I was familiar with the bio-weapons ability we’d developed that allowed us to target pathogens specifically for different cell types – some for blood, others for mucous membranes. To me it was as plain as day what had happened, and I thought there was no way that the world would blindly go along with the official explanations – that monkey virus had spontaneously jumped species in Africa, and made it to the U.S. as a completely different strain, getting into a time machine in the process.”

  Schmidt leaned forward and fixed Jeffrey with a hard stare. “Turns out I was wrong.”

  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 th
e 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 nobo
dy 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.”