AS REPORTED BY SEASONED JOURNALIST, PATRICK BROWN, IN HIS BOOK, BUTTERFLY MIND ~ REVOLUTION, RECOVERY, AND ONE REPORTER’S ROAD TO UNDERSTANDING CHINA

Over many months and many social media platforms I’ve heard people claim that some vaccines contain the AIDS virus. Since I had no way to verify their assertions I put that information in the “possibly true, possibly fear-mongering” file. Then I read Brown’s book.

DIRECT QUOTE:

“Dr. Gao Yaojie came to my office one afternoon in 2004 to talk about HIV-AIDS. A small-town gynecologist, [she] sounded the alarm in 1996 when many of her patients began to show symptoms that she was shocked to recognize as HIV infection. Her patients were poor villagers with no exposure to intravenous drugs, prostitution, or other common routes of HIV transmission. She realized that they had been infected while selling their own blood. When she reported the outbreak to the provincial health department, instead of shutting down the blood-collection industry that was spreading the disease, officials tried to shut up Dr. Gao.

“There is no HIV-AIDS in Henan Province,” the head of the Henan public health department, Liu Quanxi, told local journalists who asked about an outbreak of “a strange illness”. As head of the department, Liu Quanxi had organized the spread of for-profit blood-collection stations in Henan, and many of them were owned and run by members of his family. He also set up a private company, Wanda, to deal in blood products. The health department encouraged farmers to sell their blood, and boasted that the sale of blood plasma was providing revenue for the department.

“The blood-collecting stations were filthy, and the way they were run guaranteed that enormous numbers of people would be infected. The end product was blood plasma that was sold to large pharmaceutical companies. Eight hundred cubic centimeters of blood was drawn from each donor and mixed with other donors’ blood [!!!!!!] in a large centrifuge. The machine separated the blood plasma from the red and white blood cells, which then were re-injected into the donors, so that they could give blood more frequently.

“It is, perhaps, understandable that poor peasants in a remote inland province of China were unaware in the 1990s of the dangers of being injected with other people’s blood. It is inconceivable, however, that the head of the Department of Health and other officials did not know how HIV-AIDS was transmitted, and how dangerous the re-injection of commingled blood cells was. Indeed, their whole business model was based on the notion that seventy million peasants, isolated from the normal channels of infection, represented an enormously valuable reservoir of safe blood.”

“”In China the very biggest problem is telling lies,” said Dr. Gao. Low-level officials lie to high-level officials to protect themselves, and high-level officials lie to their superiors. It’s a frightening problem. The liars are promoted.” Dr. Gao has won national and international awards for her work, but in Henan she is treated like a criminal, and members of her family are harassed and persecuted.”