1978-1980 THE GAY HEPATITIS B VACCINE EXPERIMENT Volume 2 Issue 1 28 December 2004 Salt Lake Metro

The Gay Hepatitis-B Vaccine Experiment”.

An Hepatitis-B vaccine experiment involving thousands of healthy young Gay men occurred in major metropolitan areas in the United States from 1978 to 1980. The Gay Hepatitis-B Vaccine Experiment was the project of Dr. Wolf Szmuness, who became an authority on hepatitis after he defected to America from Poland. Within a few years he appointed Professor of Public Health at Columbia University and in 1978 Dr. Szmuness was awarded millions of dollars to undertake the “most important mission of his life: the Hepatitis-B vaccine experiment. “

When these hepatitis B experiments began, Gay men were arguably the most hated minority in America, more despised than Blacks and Jews. Numerous straight conservative Americans under the leadership of Anita Bryant were attempting to roll back gains made by the Gay Civil Rights Movement. The religious right infuriated with Gay demands for social reform even claimed that the Bible condemned homosexuals to death.

For most of the 20th century, homosexuality had been diagnosed as a mental illness. Under pressure from Gay activists, the American Psychiatric Association removed this stigma in 1974. However soon afterwards the physical health of homosexual men came to the attention of the medical authorities. According to public health statistics provided by epidemiologists across the nation, the Gay community was infested with venereal diseases. The most shocking rates of infection according to the government were for hepatitis B.

Nazi doctors were the first to prove that hepatitis was infectious. In their medical experiments, physicians forced concentration camp prisoners to eat material scraped out of the stomachs of people who had turned yellow from liver disease. When the prisoners subsequently sickened with yellow jaundice, the Nazi doctors determined that hepatitis was most likely caused by an infectious agent, and was probably a virus. Later when hepatitis B was also proven to be a sexually transmitted disease, it was considered a serious health threat.

The groundwork for the Gay hepatitis experiment began in 1973 when the Gay Men's Health Project in Manhattan provided blood samples for hepatitis B testing at the New York City Blood Center. The results were that one out of every two Gay blood samples was positive for hepatitis B. By contrast, only 5% of the blood samples from straights were positive. Half the Gay population was infected with the hepatitis B virus according to New York health clinics. Epidemiologists then determined that homosexual men were a potential public health menace not only to themselves, but to the larger public as well.

In the 1970’s the burgeoning Gay communities wanted to show that they were good citizens, deserving all the right and privileges of American citizenship. Gays volunteered for blood drives, and were willing to help test this new experimental vaccine, which offered the hope of eradicating hepatitis B. Even in Salt Lake City, Gay blood drives were regularly promoted as a civic duty.

After much debate, Dr. Wolf Smuness decided that young promiscuous Gay men would be the best group to test the vaccine. He gained the confidence of Gay professionals by adding homosexual physicians and activists to his staff.

In November 1978 a bloodmobile began canvassing Greenwich Village, in NYC, looking for homosexual volunteers. They flocked to him. Dr. Szmuness’ experiment continued until October 1979. Over ten thousand men signed up and donated blood samples for his upcoming experiment with one thousand men from Manhattan being injected with the vaccine, some with a suspected contaminated batch.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were all involved in the study, as well as big pharmaceutical companies, such as Merck, Sharp & Dohme Inc., and Abbott Laboratories. Merck Laboratories was given the governmental contract to primarily manufacture the experimental Hepatitis-B vaccine. During the course of experiment, Dr. Szmuness voiced his concern about possible vaccine contamination. He even suspected that one vaccine batch made by the National Institutes of Health was contaminated.

In January 1979, only two months after Dr. Wolf Szmuness began his hepatitis experiment, purple skin lesions began to appear on the bodies of healthy young white Gay men in NYC. Doctors were not sure exactly what was wrong with these men. During the next thirty months, Manhattan physicians encountered dozens of cases of a new disease characterized by immunodeficiency, Kaposi's sarcoma, and a rapidly fatal lung disease, known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. All the men were young and Gay and promiscuous. Almost all were white. All died horribly.

Dr. Szmuness, however unconcerned or unaware of the purple lesions on a small percentage of his volunteers, was thrilled with the tremendous success of his hepatitis B experiment. By the beginning of the 1980s, Dr. Szmuness was awarded millions of dollars for his research, and his hugely successful hepatitis B vaccine was hailed as having tremendous implications. The medical community now had a vaccine for hepatitis B.

 In March 1980 the Center of Disease Control supervised additional Gay hepatitis B experiments in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis and Chicago. By the fall of 1980 the first West Coast case of purple lesions appeared in San Francisco. Six months later, in June 1981, the Gay (HIV) epidemic became "official." One year after this disease was officially recognized as Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease (GRID), Dr. Wolf Szmuness suddenly died of lung cancer in June of 1982. 

At the time of his death, 30% of the men in the Dr. Szmuness experiment were HIV positive. This rate of 30% far exceeded the rate for any African population, where later Dr. Robert Gallo and others claimed the HIV disease has been around "for decades". Coincidently or not where ever Dr. Szmuness hepatitis tests were conducted became the epi-centers for the transmission of the HIV virus.