Both Redfield and Birx were former Army medical officers who, in the 1980s and 1990s, led the military’s AIDS research, a specialty that seems like a magnet for hucksters and quacks. US military documents12 show that in 1992 Redfield and Birx, his then-assistant—both serving at Walter Reed in Washington—published inaccurate data in the New England Journal of Medicine, claiming that an HIV vaccine they helped develop and tested on Walter Reed patients was effective.13 They both must have known the vaccine was worthless.

