OPV AIDS hypothesis OPV AIDS hypothesis The oral polio vaccine (OPV) AIDS hypothesis posits that the AIDS pandemic originated from live polio vaccines prepared in chimpanzee tissue cultures and then administered to up to one million Africans between 1957 and 1960 in experimental mass vaccination campaigns. Data analyses in molecular biology and phylogenetic studies contradict the OPV AIDS hypothesis; consequently, scientific consensus regards the hypothesis as disproven. The journal "Nature" has described the hypothesis as "refuted". Two vaccines are used throughout the world to combat poliomyelitis. The first polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, is an "inactivated poliovirus vaccine" (IPV), consisting of a
Jonas Salk "I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so." In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the laboratory of Thomas Francis at