In their effort to develop a vaccine, and because humans cannot be injected with either HIV or "mock" virus, Bess and his colleagues first injected macaques with the "mock" virus. (This is culture fluids from the uninfected H9 clone of the human HUT78 cell line "purified" as it would be to obtain "HIV" or "SIV"). After the initial immunisation, the animals were given boosters at 4, 8 and 12 weeks. At fourteen weeks, the the monkeys were challenged with intravenous SIV prepared from the same human cells as "mock" virus and then monitored for seroconversion with the SIV Western blot. According to the authors, the animal immunised with "mock virus" "did not seroconvert to viral proteins after intravenous challenge with SIV", and "These results are the first demonstration that immunisation with purified cellular protein can protect from virus infection...It has recently been suggested that immunisation with alloantigens might serve as a vaccine to protect against HIV infection. Our demonstration...support this concept".

The underlying principle of immunisation is its specificity. That is, to protect against microbe ‘X’, the person or animal must be exposed to material from ‘X’ in order that the immune system generates specific antibodies. For example, immunisation with hepatitis vaccine does not protect agains poliomyelits. Since monkeys immunised with proteins derived from uninfected human cells are protected from infection with ‘SIV’ prepared from the same uninfected human cells, "mock" virus and "real" SIV must be identical. If such "mock" virus and "SIV" are one and the same we would expect that when "SIV" is prepared in antigenically different cells, for example, monkey cells, there will not be "protection". This is in fact what Bess and his colleagues proved in another experiment. The only logical explanation of these data is that they reflect immune responses to cellular proteins. Thus and SIV proteins, and thus by inference, HIV proteins, are nothing else but cellular proteins.

Interestingly, so far the only evidence of an animal model for AIDS has been obtained by allogenic stimulation, a procedure which leads to the appearance of "type C particles". Since individuals belonging to the AIDS risk groups are repeatedly subjected to alloantigenic insult, one would expect these individuals to have a positive antibody test, and not be surprised if they developed AIDS, without ever coming in contact with a retrovirus, HIV.