Polio, Cancer and HIV

[Roger Barr]

A new edition of the book Dr Mary’s Monkey was released recently.
In it the author talks about how antibiotic use damages the intestinal biota which allowed polio (which had previously been a relatively rare disease; maybe 4000 deaths per year) to become a serious epidemic in the 1940s, several 10s of thousands of deaths per year.
In response, rather than manage antibiotic use, they developed the polio vaccines, using Rhesus monkey tissue.
After they released 100 million doses of live polio vaccine, they realized it was contaminated with many monkey viruses including SV40 (Simian Virus) which caused many soft tissue cancers and a a simian virus that is a close relative of HIV! And now we are dealing with an epidemic of cancer.
The politics around it are very interesting also. When they realized the mistake they created a program to try to develop a cancer vaccine, but it morphed into a program to create a bio-weapon for the purpose, among others to kill Castro. Lee Harvey Oswald was involved as part of the security for the operation. When Jack Ruby was interviewed by the Warren Commission he warned that he would be killed with cancer, so he needed to be debriefed asap. They never did and he did die of cancer not long after.
Dr Mary Sherman was a famous orthopedic surgeon and cancer researcher who was killed in such a way as to cause the virus research program to be shut down without publicly revealing it. Her "monkey" was a male human subject who was given one of the experimental doses of the cancer bio-weapon to see if it was effective. Oswald was tasked with delivering the bio-weapon to the agent who was going to deliver it to Cuba.
The law of unintended medical consequences.
Dr Saulk retires to La Jolla. Big Pharma gets big and we pay the consequences.