Demystifying the HIV/AIDS supply chain in Africa

By Gugulethu Hughes 

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV. 

Africa is known in almost all corners of the world as the home to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus otherwise known as HIV. This positioning of Africa is not a cause of natural and organic evolution, nor is it a product of combined African sex drive. HIV/AIDS was specifically developed and rolled out to Africa as a tool of population control while ensuring that the pharmaceutical industry profits from the pandemic. In other words, HIV is an extremely profitable business venture for the pharmaceutical industry and affiliate laboratories. The same way that the advocates of Western hegemony create instability in African countries and respond by sending so-called UN Peacekeeping missions to further infiltrate African countries is the same modus operandi used in HIV rollout. As a result of HIV being the flagship African epidemic, African governments have been infiltrated by big pharma heads who now inform the health policies of African countries. The scourge goes beyond HIV-related programs but extends to the entire health supply chain. 

Before we investigate the pharmaceutical companies making profit from HIV, it is important to delve into the non-mainstream views of different principles on origins of the virus. The mainstream or rather scientifically accepted view is that HIV has its roots in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s most raped country. The scientific argument is that HIV is borne of monkeys and chimpanzees of the Congo. It is said that HIV occurred after people ate chimps that were carrying the Simian Immunodeficiency Syndrome. HIV is therefore defined as a lentivirus which attacks the human immune system like how SIV attacks the immune system of apes and monkeys. 

This theory suggests that SIV made a crossover from apes to humans and became HIV, according to the National Institute of Health, The National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). By 1985, NIAID was the lead NIH Institute sponsoring HIV/AIDS research. However, HIV/AIDS posed many challenges which exceeded the mission of any one institute, as it is a multi-system and multi-organ disease involving malignancies, opportunistic infections, and cardiovascular, neurological, gastrointestinal, and other complications. HIV/AIDS also affects people across the lifespan. Furthermore, behavioral and biomedical interventions are needed to prevent new infections. Thus, nearly every NIH institute, center, and office (ICO) became involved in conducting or supporting HIV/AIDS research. As the expanding pandemic required increased coordination, the Office of AIDS Research (OAR) was established in 1988. The Office was first established by the assistant secretary for health and later codified in the Health Omnibus Extension of 1988 (Public Law 100-607). 

The National Cancer Institute receives funding from the U.S. Congress as part of the federal budget process. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is not a fundraising organization but is authorized by Congress to accept donations in support of its scientific mission. Such donations are kept in a gift fund account separate from the funding NIAID receives from Congress. 

The National Institute of Health was born out of the Hygienic Laboratory formed in 1891 by Dr Joseph J. Kinyoun, at the time a young medical officer with the Marine Hospital Service. Congress authorized the Hygienic Laboratory to investigate “infectious and contagious diseases and matters pertaining to public health.” Dr Kinyoun held racial bigotries, some of which were well-documented in the University of Edinburgh research document titled “Plague of Kinyounism. Caricatures of Bacteriology in 1900 San Francisco.” The abstract of the document reads as follows, “The arrival of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 has become a pivotal case study in the history of American public health. The presence of plague remained contested for months as the evidence provided by the federal bacteriologist Joseph Kinyoun of the Marine Hospital Service was rejected, his laboratory methods disputed, and his person ridiculed. Before the disease diagnosis became widely accepted, Kinyoun had been subjected to public caricature; his expensive and disruptive pragmatics for containing the epidemic were ridiculed as a plague of ‘Kinyounism.’ Not only does this history offer insight into the difficult and contradictory ways in which bacteriology became an established science, it also provides an early twentieth century example of ‘politicized science.’ This paper revisits the controversy around Kinyoun and his bacteriological practice through the lens of caricature to sharpen the historical understanding of the shifting and shifty relationships between science, medicine, public health and politics.”  

The Bubonic plague became one of the major events in unearthing confluence between science, business, and governance. The World Health Organization defines the Bubonic Plague as “the most common form of plague caused by the bite of an infected flea. Plague bacillus, Y. pestis, enters at the bite and travels through the lymphatic system to the nearest lymph node where it replicates itself. The lymph node then becomes inflamed, tense and painful, and is called a ‘bubo’.” 

In 2022, a film by Li-Shin Yu titled “Plague at the Golden Gate” shows how Dr. Kinyoun blamed the Bubonic Plague on Asian immigrants in San Francisco whom he deemed as unclean and therefore responsible for the spread of the plague. This diagnosis from Kinyoun led to San Francisco health authorities embarking on a wide crackdown on Asians where quarantines became a feature limited to Chinese immigrants. As enunciated by the Washington Post, Li-Shin Yu’s film showed how discrimination and scapegoating can spread as quickly as the plague itself. There are similarities in how Asians were profiled during the Bubonic Plague and how Africans continue to be profiled when it comes to the HIV epidemic. 

The National Institutes of Health collaborates heavily with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2014, Bill Gates was the NIH keynote speaker. In introducing Bill Gates, the NIH Director referred to Gates as “one of the makers of the modern world” and a “visionary” in global health. “Bill Gates sees what is absent. And he sees what should exist in that space,” Collins said. “He sees solutions from the micro to the macro level that no one envisioned before him. More than that, he has the energy and the perseverance to give concrete form to his visions and so transform the world.” 

Bill Gates is allegedly a population control enthusiast who continues to invest heavily in HIV-related interventions in Africa. In 2016, on his GatesNotes blog, Bill Gates wrote the following, “…But we have not turned the corner. The infection rate has essentially stopped declining. That’s a particular problem in sub-Saharan Africa, which has a growing population of young people, who are most susceptible to the disease. If the infection rate stays the same while the at-risk population rises, then the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa who contract HIV each year could start going up instead of down…” 

This was classic Bill Gates at pains to strike a balance between his profit interests and population control. He has a problem with the growing youth population in Africa, but at the same time, HIV presents him with a massive opportunity to make profits out of HIV management and birth control mechanisms.  

The Bill Gates Foundation focuses on six different areas when it comes to HIV, mainly vaccine research and development, antiretroviral prevention methods, HIV program management, diagnostic methods, and scalability of HIV programs. Almost yearly, the foundation issues millions of U.S. dollar grants to African countries for the management of HIV in Africa, thereby ensuring that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation enjoys monopolistic power in Africa’s HIV response. This gives the foundation the edge in influencing government policies as seen in the case of South Africa where the influence of the foundation at a policy level extends to water, hygiene, sanitation, and agriculture. All these elements are critical for population health and present opportunities for Bill Gates to influence South Africa on a larger scale. 

Antiretroviral therapy perhaps presents the main players in the HIV business with the best profit opportunities. Several Western companies have had the drugs approved for use in the management of HIV. GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol Myers Squibb, Hoffman La Roche, Gilead Sciences, and more have had their drugs approved by the FDA for HIV management. All these companies have realized massive profits by venturing into the HIV business sector, and most of them have had investments from the likes of Bill Gates who have influence on both health policies and government spending strategies. Boehringer Ingelheim even got more creative and developed NNRTIs which stop the activity of HIV’s reverse transcriptase enzyme, which is needed to copy the genetic code of HIV into a form that can be inserted into human cells. Nevirapine is manufactured by Boehringer Ingelheim under the trade name Viramune. Nevirapine is used to prevent mother-to-child transmission. 

In 2005, Boehringer, which has collaborated with Bill Gates on many vaccine development projects, made sales of more than $325M from nevirapine. There is now a new drive to encourage sexually active people to use pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to avoid contracting HIV. Two of the common PrEP drugs are Truvada and Descovy, both developed by Gilead Sciences which was in 2016 ranked as the top global corporate funder of HIV/AIDS programs. Bill Gates has investments in Merck which has partnered with Gilead in developing HIV management drugs.  

What has become increasingly clear is that the pharmaceutical industry has identified HIV as both a cash-cow. This is the reason why any persons who critique the source of HIV and the drugs that gradually get phased in are dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Jakob Seagal, a Russian-German biology professor at Humboldt University, was in 1985 dismissed as a Soviet disinformation agent for arguing that HIV was manufactured at a U.S.A military laboratory at Fort Detrick. Jakob stated that HIV was created between 1977 and 1978, tested on prison inmates who had volunteered as participants, and then used the prisoners to spread the virus to the larger population. For the inquisitive mind, Fort Detrick is the CIA’s center for mind control. It’s also a cutting-edge laboratory which became a center for the U.S. government’s darkest experiments during the 1950s and ‘60s. 

Allen Dulles ran the CIA covert operations directorate, and in 1951, hired chemist Sidney Gottlieb to design and oversee a systematic approach to mind control. It was in his freezers that Gottlieb kept biological agents that could cause diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis, and anthrax as well as a number of organic toxins, including snake venom and paralytic shellfish poison. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. In 2012, on Modern Ghana, Thomas C. Mountain wrote about dengue fever, whose vaccine was developed at Fort Detrick, funded by the Bill Gates Foundation, and administered in Thailand by GSK. Thomas argued that “to not be alarmed and very suspicious when the U.S. army medical research scientists based at Fort Detrick are involved in creating something with such deadly potential as a vaccine for use almost exclusively in the developing world against the world’s no1 and fastest growing infectious disease would be to invite charges of criminal complacency. Add to this history of U.S. Army medical research scientists leaving Fort Detrick and turning up at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a prominent member of the international drug cartel, which is funded by the Gates Foundation (which sees African babies as guinea pigs) to carry out the Dengue vaccine trials you have more reason to worry…” 

The Fort Detrick laboratory leads research into “defense mechanisms” for viruses like Ebola which have also been allocated to Africa. 

Kenyan-born Nobel laureate Wangari Mathai, who has been rewarded by the dark forces for her “activism” on environmental matters, got herself in trouble for arguing that the biological agent responsible for causing AIDS is not natural. Dr. Alan Cantwell, author of “AIDS and the Doctors of Death: An Inquiry into the Origin of the AIDS Epidemic and Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot,” believes that HIV is a genetically modified organism developed by American scientists. Further, he argues it was introduced into the population through hepatitis B experiments performed on gay and bisexual men between 1978-1981 in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, St. Louis, Denver, and Chicago. Cantwell claims these experiments were directed by Dr. Wolf Szmuness, and that there is an ongoing government and media cover-up regarding the origin of the AIDS epidemic. Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, author of “Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola. Nature, Accident or Intentional?” and “Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare,” has advanced the theory that the AIDS virus was engineered by such U.S. defense contractors as Litton Bionetics for the purposes of bio-warfare and “population control.” Dr. Horowitz believes that Jews, blacks, and Hispanics are prime targets in these attempts. He cites the historical preoccupation with eugenics on the part of the American medical establishment as evidence of a greater conspiracy to commit genocide. 

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki, on the other hand, argued that HIV came as a result of poverty, chronic diseases, and malnutrition. When his Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang advised citizens to eat more beetroot to strengthen their immune systems, she was mocked and received strong outlash from big pharma players who also have great influence on mainstream media narratives on health matters. 

Edward Hooper wrote the book “The River” which investigates Polish virologist Dr. Hillary Koprowski, who allegedly used a chimpanzee kidney from Stanleyville Research Laboratory to create oral polio vaccination doses for a mass vaccination program in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then known as the Belgian Congo. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated millions of U.S. Dollars to the Wistar Institute for the development of “new synthetic DNA vaccines encoding designed CSP antigens to provide a new generation advanced CSP component for a prophylactic malaria vaccine.” 

There is absolutely no scientific and logical basis for the dark forces obsessed with profits to advance the argument that HIV miraculously spread from apes to humans and somehow Africans became the most hit. The undertones of this argument are also insulting to Africans who today are seen as a reminder by the “finer” races that there exists a disease called HIV. The same Western institutions who allegedly created the virus know exactly how to treat it since it was developed in their laboratories, but they will never release the treatment because that will affect their profits. Instead, they release HIV management techniques in the form of drugs which come with scores of side effects to keep the HIV supply chain going. The approval of HIV management drugs rests on the FDA which itself is indebted to pharmaceutical companies for financial donations. 

Any other persons who develop or suggest alternative treatment methods are dismissed as mentally ill. The narrative must be kept under control at all costs. Medical schools have been reduced to churning out medical professionals who mostly become pharma salespeople wielding stethoscopes. It is indeed a rewarding career to not use one’s own brains but operate within the confines of the syllabus. Any research into HIV is funded by the same organizations reaping monetary benefits from HIV management drugs – and this is what keeps the HIV supply chain going. 

The likes of Bill Gates are still working on developing HIV vaccines. The whole HIV supply chain is a network of scammers whose dismantling ought to be the focus of all people who care about the health of Africans.