The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

chemotherapy. Horwitz recounted that the drug’s “extreme toxicity made it ‘so worthless’ that he ‘didn’t think it was worth patenting.’” Former BusinessWeek journalist Bruce Nussbaum recounted that Horwitz “dumped it on the junk pile” and “didn’t [even] keep the notebooks.”3 Soon after NIH’s team identified HIV as the probable cause of AIDS in 1983, Samuel Broder, head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI)—another sub-agency of the NIH—launched a project to screen antiviral agents from around the world as potential treatments. In 1985, his team, along with colleagues at Duke University, found that AZT killed HIV in test tubes.4 NCI’s study inspired Burroughs Wellcome to retrieve AZT from Horwitz’s scrap heap and patent it as an AIDS remedy. Recognizing financial opportunity in the desperate terror of young AIDS patients facing certain death, the drug company set the price at up to $10,000/year per patient—making AZT one of the most expensive drugs in pharmaceutical history.5 Since Burroughs Wellcome could manufacture AZT for pennies per dose, the company anticipated a bonanza.