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Researcher Ed Haslam authored a remark­able book enti­tled Mary, Fer­rie and the Mon­key Virus: The Story of an Under­ground Med­ical Lab­o­ra­tory (soft-cover, Wordsworth Press, copy­right 1995.) In this pen­e­trat­ing work, Haslam devel­ops fas­ci­nat­ing con­nec­tions between the milieu appar­ently involved with the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy and med­ical research that may have been con­nected to a soft-tissue can­cer epi­demic that is sweep­ing the United States. In addi­tion, this med­ical research may have led to the acci­den­tal or delib­er­ate cre­ation of AIDS. This six-part inter­view presents an exten­sive and detailed view of Haslam’s argument.

The cen­tral fig­ure in the book is Dr. Mary Sher­man, one of the most impor­tant (and sadly neglected) fig­ures in post-World War II Amer­i­can med­i­cine. Prior to her mur­der in 1964, Sher­man was involved in a clan­des­tine med­ical lab­o­ra­tory in New Orleans, that also employed right-wing polit­i­cal extrem­ist and U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tive David Fer­rie — the cen­tral fig­ure in New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Garrison’s inves­ti­ga­tion of the Kennedy assassination.

The cen­tral focus of the work per­formed in this lab­o­ra­tory was can­cer research—specifically, the inject­ing of mice with mon­key viruses to deter­mine if the viruses cause can­cer. Haslam skill­fully devel­ops con­nec­tions between Fer­rie, the lab­o­ra­tory, Mary Sher­man, the Guy Ban­nis­ter detec­tive agency (an appar­ent intel­li­gence front that is widely believed to have fig­ured in Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion) and Dr. Alton Ochsner, a very pow­er­ful fig­ure in Amer­i­can med­i­cine and politics.

Ochsner was the head of a right-wing pro­pa­ganda out­fit and pos­si­ble intel­li­gence front called “The Infor­ma­tion Coun­cil for the Amer­i­cas,” or INCA, that recorded inter­views with Lee Har­vey Oswald, in which Oswald pro­claims his Marx­ist sympathies.

This inter­view received much pub­lic­ity in the wake of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and con­vinced many Amer­i­cans that com­mu­nists were respon­si­ble for the assas­si­na­tion. Many researchers believe that this per­cep­tion con­tributed to the offi­cial cover-up of the assas­si­na­tion, because indi­vid­u­als who knew what had actu­ally hap­pened cov­ered up the truth out of fear that that the sit­u­a­tion could have led to a Third World War. Haslam presents his the­sis that Sher­man was prob­a­bly involved in this under­ground med­ical lab­o­ra­tory in order to research the con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the polio vac­cine with SV40, a mon­key virus that causes can­cer in humans.

Haslam feels that Sher­man was involved with using a lin­ear accel­er­a­tor to cre­ate genetic muta­tions in the SV40. This was being done as an effort to cre­ate harm­less strains of the virus for use in a vac­cine to guard against a can­cer epi­demic. This viral con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the polio vac­cine may very well be the cause of a soft-tissue can­cer epi­demic cur­rently sweep­ing the United States, as well as the delib­er­ate or acci­den­tal cre­ation of AIDS. The inter­view also con­tains infor­ma­tion, not con­tained in Haslam’s book, con­cern­ing the pos­si­bil­ity that Oswald may have been spy­ing on this clan­des­tine research and that this work may have been cen­trally involved in the cover-up of Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion. (Recorded in June of 1996.)