A reconstruction that has taken hold more and more
What will remain of the 80s? Raf asked this question back in 1989, a question that, in hindsight, might also have this answer: the decade left us, among other things, an absurd theory. It was precisely from this period, in fact, that the idea that African swine fever and AIDS had much in common, indeed a great deal. PSA It's widely discussed today, but the virus is by no means a recent innovation. The first documented case in history dates back to 1907, while it arrived in Italy in 1978. Five years after this unsolicited "landing," the aforementioned theory began to gain traction, despite having no scientific basis whatsoever.
The role of the CIA
The backdrop to this successful hoax was the Cold War. In 1983, the American intelligence agency, the CIA, was accused of having released the African swine fever virus in Cuba a decade earlier, even featuring an article in a highly respected American tabloid. A Harvard researcher, Jane Teas, added fuel to the fire by publishing in the medical journal "Lancet" the hypothesis that AIDS was nothing more than a variant of the swine virus, spread like wildfire from Haiti. Why link the two diseases? It's widely believed that the American gay movement needed a narrative other than the one that blamed gay people as the sole culprit for AIDS, so it wasn't difficult to convince many people that the disease could have arisen from a secret experiment gone wrong or from genetic testing.
The expert's fake letter
In some newspaper articles one could read crazy reconstructions such as the following: “African swine fever was introduced to the Caribbean by the CIA. Today's AIDS patients are therefore victims of a horrendous act of bacteriological warfare.Then, in July 1983, the theory gained even more support thanks to a new article in an Indian newspaper, the Patriot. This article contained a letter from a mysterious American scientist, convinced that the HIV virus had originated in a Maryland laboratory and been used to infect some blood donations.
Partial admission of guilt
It's now clear that that letter was written by a KGB official, the Soviet counterintelligence agency, to cast the United States in a negative light. The Soviets later defended themselves by explaining that those press reports were simply "sins of youth," invented, however, based on what the Americans had actually done in their laboratories. Fortunately, the theory has gradually deflated, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still have followers: after all, we live in the age of artificial intelligence and fake news, so a story like that linking two completely different viruses could easily gain a lot of traction.
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