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

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

During his battle to win FDA approval for AZT, Dr. Fauci pioneered the strategies upon which he would build his career and then showcase for the world during the COVID epidemic. These include: • pumping up pandemic fears to lay the groundwork for larger budgets and greater powers, • incriminating an elusive pathogen, • fanning hysteria by exaggerating disease transmissibility, • periodically stoking waning fear levels by warning of mutant super-strains and future surges, • suggesting substantial changes in how people live, ostensibly to save their lives, • keeping the public and politicians engaged through confusing and contradictory pronouncements, • using faulty PCR and antibody tests and manipulating epidemiology to inflate non-verifiable case and death numbers, to maximize the perception of an imminent calamity, • ignoring and dismissing effective off-the-shelf therapeutic remedies, • directing energy and money toward profitable new patented drugs and vaccines, • championing dangerous and ineffective drugs originating in government laboratories as the only winning solution to end the pandemic, • funding and orchestrating confirmation-biased research to validate his chosen remedy, • partnering with large pharmaceutical companies and giving his partners advantages in the race for approval, • allowing preferred companies to skip key testing metrics, • curtailing clinical trials to conceal severe safety and efficacy problems, • sabotaging, discrediting, and sweeping aside ...

Mark Twain once observed that “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

AIDS activist Christine Maggiore lamented this feature of human gullibility when she assessed the mendacious fifty-year travesty of corrupted public health research that Tony Fauci put in motion during the 1984 AIDS crisis: “Commercial interests are definitely part of the problem here, and it’s also our collective inability or challenge to say, ‘All this time, all these years, all these lives, all these billions and billions of dollars. Can we just stop a second and go back to the very beginning and make sure we got this right?’ I mean, that is so hard to do. People don’t even know it’s a lie. It’s not so much a lie as business as usual.”

I include this history because it provides an important case study illustrating how—some four hundred years after Galileo—politics and power continue to dictate “scientific consensus,” rather than empiricism, critical thinking, or the established steps of the scientific method. It is a hazard to both democracy and public health when a kind of religious faith in authoritative pronouncements supplants disciplined observation, rigorous proofs, and reproducible results as the source of “truth” in the medical field. While consensus may be an admirable political objective, it is the enemy of science and truth. The term “settled science” is an oxymoron. The admonishment that we should “trust the experts” is a trope of authoritarianism. Science is disruptive, irreverent, dynamic, rebellious, and democratic. Consensus and appeals to authority (be it CDC, WHO, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, or the Vatican) are features of religion, not science. Science is tumult. Empirical truth generally arises from the tilled, agitated, and upturned soils of debate. Doubt, skepticism, questioning, and dissent are its fertilizers. Every great scientific advance in history, every transformative idea, from evolution to heliocentrism to relativity, met initial ridicule from the panjandrums of “scientific consensus.” As novelist and physician Dr. Michael Crichton observed, Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means th...

Science for real

I include this history because it provides an important case study illustrating how—some four hundred years after Galileo—politics and power continue to dictate “scientific consensus,” rather than empiricism, critical thinking, or the established steps of the scientific method. It is a hazard to both democracy and public health when a kind of religious faith in authoritative pronouncements supplants disciplined observation, rigorous proofs, and reproducible results as the source of “truth” in the medical field. While consensus may be an admirable political objective, it is the enemy of science and truth. The term “settled science” is an oxymoron. The admonishment that we should “trust the experts” is a trope of authoritarianism. Science is disruptive, irreverent, dynamic, rebellious, and democratic. Consensus and appeals to authority (be it CDC, WHO, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, or the Vatican) are features of religion, not science. Science is tumult. Empirical truth generally arises from the tilled, agitated, and upturned soils of debate. Doubt, skepticism, questioning, and dissent are its fertilizers. Every great scientific advance in history, every transformative idea, from evolution to heliocentrism to relativity, met initial ridicule from the panjandrums of “scientific consensus.” As novelist and physician Dr. Michael Crichton observed, Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means th...

Chriton

The many thoughtful critics of Dr. Fauci’s central canon offer various plausible, but wildly divergent, alternatives to the official orthodoxy that HIV alone causes AIDS. There is one issue upon which they all agree: During the thirty-six years since Dr. Fauci and his colleague, Dr. Robert Gallo, first claimed that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, no one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs. The fact that Dr. Fauci has obstinately refused to describe a convincing scientific basis for his proposition, or to debate the topic with any qualified critics, including the many Nobel laureates who have expressed skepticism, makes it even more important to give air and daylight to dissenting voices.

No proof HIV causes AIDS and Fauci won't debate it

While HIV may be sexually transmittable, Duesberg argues, AIDS is not. Duesberg famously offered to inject himself with HIV-tainted blood “so long as it doesn’t come from Gallo’s lab.”4 For starters, Duesberg points out that HIV is seen in millions of healthy individuals who never develop AIDS. Conversely, there are thousands of known AIDS cases in patients who are not demonstrably infected with HIV. Dr. Fauci has never been able to explain these phenomena, which are inconsistent with the pathogenesis of any other infectious disease.

That journey pulls the curtain back on a shockingly corrupt NIH culture distinguished by lacunae that most Americans associate with politics, not science: cutthroat ambition, backstabbing duplicity, and moral bankruptcy.

Corrupt and political NIH, not scientific

“Good afternoon,” she told the world, “Ladies and gentlemen, first, the probable cause of AIDS has been found—a variant of a known human cancer virus.” She pointedly added, “Today we add a new miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science.”12 Heckler’s participation at Gallo’s press event was important stagecraft because it gave the imprimatur of NIH’s institutional gravitas to a theory that had not been subject to peer review.

Says journalist and editor Mark Gabrish Conlan of Gallo’s big press event, “The Conference was held before any of Robert Gallo’s papers were published. Therefore, before any other scientists had a chance to review them and look at the evidence and ask, has he got it right or wrong?”30 Gallo’s announcement was a windfall for Anthony Fauci. Pinning the AIDS epidemic on a virus allowed him to divert the cascading river of AIDS money from the National Cancer Institute into NIAID’s overflowing coffers. Dr. Fauci opened the floodgates of NIAID cash to develop new antivirals against HIV. He unleashed his kennel of grant-hungry PIs to concoct and test new drugs that would kill the virus. Remarkably, Dr. Fauci never funded to completion a single grant to explore whether HIV actually caused AIDS.

Federal law requires that NIH’s grant-review committee be composed of true peers—independent outside scientists knowledgeable about a given proposal’s subject matter—to assess the application on its scientific merit. Ignoring those laws, Dr. Fauci began populating these committees with his own PIs. Researchers who reliably supported Dr. Fauci’s orthodoxy watched their applications sail through the approval process. But scientists seeking to research ideas that departed from official doctrine encountered impenetrable obstacles.

The PCR test could not identify active HIV infection. Mullis, who invented the tests, pointed out that the PCR was capable of finding HIV signals in large segments of the population who suffered no threat from HIV and had no live HIV virus in their bodies.

PCR and AIDS

“Most people consider it blasphemous when you point out AIDS is not a disease, it’s a syndrome,”37 Paul Philpott, MS, Editor, Rethinking AIDS, explained. “It’s a collection of diseases and those diseases get called AIDS if they occur in a patient that the doctor somehow concludes is HIV-positive.”38 “All of the diseases in the category called AIDS occur to people who are HIV-negative. None of them are exclusive to people who test HIV-positive. And all of them have causes and treatments that are well-known; they’re completely unrelated to HIV. So any of the diseases, when they happen to somebody who tested HIV-negative, are called by their old name; but when they occur in someone who tested HIV-positive, then they’re called AIDS.”

AIDS when HIV+, old disease names when HIV-. AIDS is a syndrome.

It’s undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS. Whereas AIDS in Western countries continued to be a disease of drug addicts and homosexuals—with women reporting only 19 percent of US and European AIDS cases—in Africa, 59 percent of AIDS cases are in women, with 85 percent of cases occurring in heterosexuals, and the remaining 15 percent in children. No one has ever explained how a disease largely confined to male homosexuals in the West is a female heterosexual disease in Africa.

Wide disparity in infected people between western AIDS and African AIDS

Former epidemiological director of WHO, Professor James Chin, in his 2006 book, The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology and Political Correctness, admits unambiguously that the AIDS case figures for developing countries were massively manipulated in order to maintain the flow of billions of dollars.46 Dr. Rebecca Culshaw, PhD, a former HIV researcher and professor of Mathematical Biology and Population Dynamics at the University of Texas at Tyler, admits that “The paradox of how a disease could cause both vastly different epidemiologies and symptomatic progressions in the First and Third World”47 was one of the irreconcilable problems that sowed her initial disillusionment with the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy: “The African epidemic looks suspiciously nothing like the American and European epidemic, and closer inspection reveals it likely that this African epidemic is pure fabrication.”

African AIDS is a fabrication

Dr. Fauci has since routinely claimed that HIV was “proven definitively to be the cause of AIDS by Bob Gallo here when he was at NIH.”55 But critics argue that evidence in Gallo’s article is far too anemic to support Dr. Fauci’s characterization. Neither Gallo nor Dr. Fauci has ever demonstrated, using any of the conventional scientific proofs, that the HIV virus alone actually causes AIDS. Rather than allowing his HIV hypothesis to triumph in the marketplace of ideas, Dr. Fauci sent clear signals to the American press that debate on this theory could no longer be tolerated. In September 1989, Dr. Fauci broadcast an angry threat about journalists who dared to give a platform to Peter Duesberg. He ended with this warning: “And they should realize that their accuracy is noted by the scientific community. Journalists who have made too many mistakes or who are sloppy are going to find that their access to scientists may diminish.”56

Weak proof. Fauci censors Duesberg ans puts press on notice about covering him

In the decade preceding the AIDS crisis, a wave of new technologies, including PCR and super powerful electron microscopes, had opened windows on teeming new worlds containing millions of species of previously unknown viruses to scientists. Molecular genetics not only revolutionized biological science, but also made that science fabulously profitable. The lure of fame and fortune ignited a chaotic revolution in virology as ambitious young PhDs scrambled to inculpate newly discovered microbes as the cause of old malignancies. Making such connections could be a profitable pursuit for enterprising young biologists and pharmaceutical companies. Under this new rubric, every theoretical breakthrough, every find, became potentially the basis for a new generation of drugs.

It was often unclear that the new viruses they found in ailing tissues were actually causing the diseases, whether the tiny microbes were free riders colonizing decayed tissue, or altogether innocent bystanders. Harvard’s Jim Watson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the molecular structure of DNA, fretted that the “gold rush” mentality was likely to “scare off the sensible and leave the field to a combination of charlatans and fools.”58 In 2001, alarmed by the precipitous decline in scientific discipline, fourteen renowned virologists of the “old guard” published an appeal to the young high-technology–focused generation of researchers in Science. The gray-beards warned the young scientists against attributing culpability to a microbe based upon correlation without first understanding how a newly discovered virus actually causes the disease: Modern methods like PCR, with which small genetic sequences are multiplied and detected, are marvelous [but they] tell little or nothing about how a virus multiplies, which animals carry it, how it makes people sick. It is like trying to say whether somebody has bad breath by looking at his fingerprint.59

Virus as free riders versus actually causing illness

since it is unclear whether Gallo or any other researcher was ever able to isolate HIV,60 he took from his AIDS patients a sample of antibodies that he found in great abundance in their blood and made a leap of faith that they were HIV antibodies. Geneticists have pointed out that these antibodies may have been associated with tuberculosis or herpes, or any of the many other pathogenic illnesses that multiply in collapsing immune systems.61 Indeed, Gallo’s HIV antibody test also reacts to people with fever, pregnant women, and individuals who have overcome a tuberculosis infection.62 Therefore, it is unclear if the antibodies detected by his kit are really HIV antibodies.63 Neither Gallo’s test nor any of the later-developed antibody tests have ever proven that these proteins they identify as HIV antibodies have anything to do with HIV, or any other retrovirus.

1986, Thomas Zuck of the FDA warned that the HIV antibody tests were not actually designed specially to detect HIV. “Rather, numerous other germs or contaminants, including TB, pregnancy, or simple flu, also produce false positives.” Zuck made that admission at a World Health Organization meeting but conceded that stopping the use of these HIV tests was “simply not practical.” He explained that “Now that the medical community has identified HIV as an infectious sexually transmitted virus, public pressure for an HIV test was just too strong.”

Throughout all of medical history, a high antibody level indicated that a person had already successfully battled against an infectious pathogen and was now protected from the disease. With all other viral diseases, the presence of antibodies signals a welcomed immunity from the disease. But Gallo and Dr. Fauci’s PIs suddenly began informing people that the positive antibody test was a death sentence. How could this be so? Dr. Fauci has never explained this inexplicable paradox. It gets even weirder when one contemplates Dr. Fauci’s $15 billion-dollar HIV vaccine enterprise.67 Usually, regulators measure a vaccine’s success by its ability to produce robust and durable antibodies. Now, for the first time in history, Dr. Fauci and Bob Gallo were asking the world to believe that antibodies were a sign of active, deadly disease. This begs the question, “What is the HIV vaccine supposed to do?”

Mullis added, “Now, is there a test that can definitively tell you if you’re infected with the virus? What is that test?”

Gallo claimed that he found HIV virus in fewer than half of the ailing AIDS patients from whom he drew blood.78,79 Furthermore, every one of the thirty discrete illnesses we now call AIDS occurs also in persons uninfected by HIV. In fact, AIDS commonly occurs in people who test HIV negative. If HIV is truly the only cause of AIDS, this should not be possible.

doctors around the country and CDC officials started seeing patients with low CD4 counts and signature AIDS diseases like PCP and immune system dysfunction, but who tested negative for HIV. Many of the victims were white heterosexual women. Dr. Fauci and the CDC kept this awkward information secret. Fauci-funded AIDS researchers—Dr. Fauci’s PIs— also kept mum when they encountered such patients. By 1992, media science writers also knew about these HIV-free AIDS cases, but they dutifully self-censored while awaiting signals from Dr. Fauci and the medical cartel. Lawrence Altman, the chief medical writer for the New York Times, confessed to Science magazine that he did not break the story because he didn’t think it was his paper’s place to announce something without the CDC’s go-ahead.

Cowley’s report almost precipitated the collapse of Dr. Fauci’s entire carefully fortified HIV-only theology. “The patients are sick or dying, and most of them have risk factors,” Cowley reported in Newsweek.81 He described a dozen such cases of non-HIV patients with AIDS-like symptoms, including brain lesions, corresponding cognitive deficits, chronic aggravation of herpes viruses, depleted C4 cells, PCP pneumonia, and immune system collapse. “What they don’t have is HIV.”82 The Newsweek article shattered the taboo. Conferees took the public disclosure as a signal that they could now discuss the previously verboten subject of AIDS patients without HIV. Dr. Fauci’s researchers, gathered in Amsterdam an ocean away from his heavy hand, suddenly began sharing their own stories of AIDS without HIV across the United States and Europe.

“more than 2,200 HIV-free African AIDS cases.”86 Duesberg afterward identified more than four thousand documented AIDS cases in the peer-reviewed scientific literature in which there is no trace of HIV or HIV antibodies.87 This number is impressive because Dr. Fauci had cultivated strong institutional deterrents to such descriptions, and because formal scientific papers never described the vast majority of AIDS cases. In an editorial for the Los Angeles Times, Steve Heimoff allowed that reports of “AIDS without HIV” would “appear to signal at least partial, temporary vindication” of Duesberg.88 Describing Duesberg as “the unofficial leader of the revisionists,” “an international star of virology long before anyone heard of AIDS,” and “not just another conspiratorialist,” Heimoff observed that Duesberg’s arguments “have the ring of common sense.”89 “If there is even a remote chance that Duesberg is correct—and the latest reports increase that possibility—then the powers that be must leap into action.”

In a brazen move to explain away the anomaly of AIDS without HIV, Dr. Fauci declared that the unexplained AIDS cases represented a new disease. To avoid suspicion that his “new disease” was, after all, CFS, Dr. Fauci labeled his discovery “idiopathic CD4+ lymphocytopenia,” or “ICL.” In this tongue-twister, “idiopathic” means “of unknown source.” It might also have been Dr. Fauci’s ironic play on the word “idiot.” But such was his wizardry that everyone just swallowed it without questions. The press meekly nodded at his circular reasoning like religious zealots jotting down the words of an infallible pope. (For the record, I believe that HIV is a cause of AIDS, but Dr. Fauci’s acknowledgment of non-HIV AIDS shows that causation is more complex than the official theology.) Dr. Fauci had somehow resuscitated his theory from certain death by erecting an arbitrary wall between AIDS with and sans HIV.

“Fauci’s good on television, as long as he’s being touted as President George Bush’s hero or patted on the back for rushing toxic drugs through the approval process without adequate safety testing. But when reporters start acting like reporters, as they have since the non-HIV cases came to light, Fauci’s thin skin gets him into trouble; he becomes defensive, condescending and sarcastic.”101

Dr. Fauci has also taken energetic precautions to ensure that nobody study the prevalence of healthy HIV-infected people. In July 1996, Newsday reported that Dr. Fauci had suddenly aborted a $16 million, five-year study of the phenomenon midstream. According to journalist Laurie Garrett’s July 11 story in Newsday, “Key HIV Contract Is Killed: Some See Retribution at Hands of NIH Official,”106 was the largest study on HIV AIDS ever commissioned, involving research from over 100 scientists from leading institutions, including Harvard, the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center (in Manhattan), Northwestern University (Chicago), Duke University (North Carolina), and the University of Alabama. One of the study’s central purposes was to examine the question that Dr. Fauci apparently didn’t want answered, why some HIV infected individuals never succumb to AIDS.

Newsday reported that the shocking cancellation was a retaliation against a group of younger scientists among this group who had signed a report (the “Levine Report”) that criticized NIH’s policy of only funding research that supported Dr. Fauci’s HIV/AIDS orthodoxies. “This is payback time for Tony Fauci,”108 said AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves of Treatment Action Group, the offshoot of ACT UP formed to openly receive Pharma funding. He told Newsday, “It was an act of retribution by Tony Fauci, plain and simple.”109 In reporting the incident, the New York Native quoted NIAID insiders (New York Native, July 22, 1996), complaining that Dr. Fauci had fostered a reprisal culture at NIH. They said that their boss’s favorite expression was “What goes around comes around.”110 Gonsalves called the cancellation a “vendetta” against the young scientists in the group who dared to ask for science-based funding strategies. It’s just as likely that Dr. Fauci was searching for an excuse to terminate a study that threatened the entire HIV/AIDS paradigm.

Djamel Tahi’s 1996 documentary AIDS—The Doubt, Professor Luc Montagnier admitted that after years of trying, no one had succeeded: “There is no scientific proof.” Montagnier therefore concludes, “that HIV causes AIDS.”119 Koch’s principles are still taught to every student of epidemiology, but his name is now a source of embarrassment rather than admiration and affection among AIDS researchers. From cases I have litigated, I know that entire court cases hinge on the capacity of the attorneys and scientists to persuade a fact finder that the proponent of causation has satisfied Koch’s postulates. It is the standard protocol for proving the causative relationship of a pathogen to a particular disease. Therefore, it came as a shocking revelation for me to learn that there remain possibly viable arguments that the HIV/AIDS hypothesis had consistently failed that standard. In the American judicial system, that evidence would normally be sufficient to close a case. I am not opining on the science here.

HIV has proven barely to be found in AIDS patients even in the final throes of illness. HIV can be detected, but only with difficulty, because even the sickest AIDS patients simply don’t have much virus to be found. And even more baffling, neither Dr. Fauci nor Gallo has ever credibly explained the fact that viral load from HIV is always at its greatest in the days immediately following infection. Logically, it would be during this period that the virus is most likely to cause devastating illness. And yet, the onset of AIDS symptoms almost always arrive decades later (an average twenty years following exposure)—when viral loads are at their lowest. In 2006, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) once again shook the foundation of the past decade of AIDS science to its core and incited apoplexy among many HIV/AIDS advocates.120 A US nationwide team of orthodox, mainstream AIDS researchers led by doctors Benigno Rodriguez and Michael Lederman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland strongly challenged the claimed legitimacy of viral load testing—the standard method since 1996 for assessing patient health, predicting disease progression, and winning grant approval for new AIDS drugs.

Gallo and Dr. Fauci originally claimed that HIV causes immunodeficiency by killing CD4+ T-cells. But even the most faithful acolytes no longer believe that HIV kills T-cells in any way. Instead, they make what might seem to an outsider like a desperate pitch, that HIV primes T-cells to commit mass suicide at some later date. Dr. Fauci’s followers have advanced this “Jim Jones” hypothesis to explain the lack of evidence for any cell-killing mechanism that can be attributed to HIV. Duesberg laughs at this explanation: “No virus has ever behaved that way.” “There are many shortcomings in the theory that HIV causes all signs of AIDS,” admits Luc Montagnier.

In Western countries, AIDS has never broken away from its original core pool of homosexual men and drug addicts. That limit defies the pattern of every infectious and sexually transmitted disease throughout history. By definition, there can be no viral disease that does not break out of risk groups (poppers-consuming gays and those addicted to and frequently using hard drugs). This is especially true for HIV, because, as Dr. Fauci’s acolytes claim, this is supposed to be “the most infectious virus that has ever existed.” Assuming that is true, it is baffling that the virus did not frquently spread to women through sexual contact and did not affect all people all over the world equally.134 It is especially baffling that AIDS does not spread to prostitutes except those who use intravenous drugs.

‘I agree totally with your viewpoint that there are probably other things involved, that HIV can’t cause AIDS by itself, that maybe you can get AIDS in the absence of HIV, but I’m not going to risk my million dollars of funding by saying that.’”

Interested readers may find much more eloquent and thorough investigations in a number of books by various authors. Perhaps the best of these is mathematician Rebecca Culshaw’s Science Sold Out. Culshaw was an AIDS researcher who slowly became disillusioned by the gaping chasms in the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and by government corruption in maintaining the orthodoxy. Her book offers a sociological explanation as to how the theory was anointed by the media and scientific community. Other important books are Dues-berg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus, Lauritsen’s book The AIDS War, Osler’s Web by Hillary Johnson, and Harvey Bialy’s Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS. I also recommend “The Deconstruction of the AIDS” article by Yale mathematician Serge Lang, and an insightful chapter titled “Fear and Lawyers in Los Angeles” in Kary Mullis’s Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.

Books on AIDS dissent

As Lancet editor Richard Horton has observed, “The journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”4 Dr. Fauci exercises direct influence on the content that appears in their journals. Control of peer-reviewed publishing is a vital ingredient for constructing orthodoxies.

Even the medical journals are corrupted by pharma

When Nature rejected the letter, Thomas and Bialy subsequently organized a consortium, The Group for Scientific Reappraisal of HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, and in 1992, Thomas called it “. . . tantamount to criminal negligence”6 for scientists to remain silent. “Of the fifty-three who had signed by June 1992, twelve had M.D.’s and twenty-five had Ph.D.’s. Twenty of the fifty-three gave academic affiliations with departments like physiology, biochemistry, medicine, pharmacology, toxicology, and physics.”7 Over 2,600 people, including three Nobel laureates, Walter Gilbert, Kary Mullis and two-time winner Linus Pauling, and 188 reputable PhDs, added their signatures. (“Rethinking-AIDS” website lists more than two thousand distinguished members: www.rethinkingaids.com.)8, 9 But the steady flow of money from NIAID was already annealing Gallo’s viral hypothesis into ironbound orthodoxy, and those dissenting voices met the hardened steel of fortified institutional resistance.

rethinkingaids.com

A retrovirus is a primitive life form that has no capacity to replicate on its own, as is true of all viruses. The retrovirus injects its RNA into an existing cell, where an enzyme called reverse transcriptase converts viral RNA into DNA, which is then inserted (or spliced) into the host cell’s DNA. Virologists generally believe that retroviruses are harmless, even beneficial, in a symbiotic relationship with humans during three billion years of evolution, providing mobile DNA blocks in the human genome. In fact, many of our genes first entered our genome as retroviruses.13,14 Some 8–10 percent of human DNA is retroviral,” says Dr. David Rasnick, “That’s a hell of a lot.”15 By

With official and commercial encouragement, researchers were blaming newly discovered viruses as the culprits in an assortment of ancient diseases. NIAID and pharmaceutical companies readily funded this research, which often opened a straight path to patentable antivirals. A virologist who convincingly linked a “new” virus to an existing cancer or disease could enjoy relevance, rich financial remuneration, and professional glory. Pharmaceutical companies were minting profits from a pharmacopoeia of patented antivirals devised by isolating these viruses and identifying compounds that could kill them. Every research scientist was aware of the Nobel committee’s bias toward breakthroughs that boosted Pharma’s profit potentials. From the outset, Duesberg had nagging doubts about Robert Gallo’s findings.

Bialy points out, “We all have tens of thousands of retroviruses in our germline and yet none of them has ever been demonstrated to be pathogenic.” Bialy told Celia Farber that Gallo, Dr. Fauci, and the thousands of researchers that Dr. Fauci funded to develop ways to kill HIV have never explained how Montagnier’s virus could possibly be responsible for all the harms and diseases attributed to it: “It would have been the major single explanation that [Gallo’s] hypothesis would have had to provide in order to be taken seriously. How do you account for the pathogenicity of this sleepy virus that has not a single pathogenic relative and in fact has 98,000 relatives quietly residing in the human germline? Fuck. 98,000 in the germline! Not in your body cells! In your ovaries! Getting passed on from generation to generation for as long as human beings have been on this goddamn planet. Every single one of them is clearly not only not pathogenic but totally harmless. This is the most powerful proof that what Peter has been saying for twenty years now is absolutely correct.”

Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis expressed his astonishment at the credulousness of the scientific community. For him, it defied common sense that, after hundreds of years of scientific research, one medical scientist, Bob Gallo, had suddenly discovered the true cause of thirty ancient diseases in the United States and Europe, and a retinue of at least thirty more in Africa, and traced them all to a simple creature with a hundred thousand relations, none of them known to cause any disease. “Things don’t happen that fast in science. You don’t suddenly notice that one new organism is causing every problem. I mean, it was a bizarre thing that happened. It really was. It didn’t really have any precedents in terms of medicine before that. Unless perhaps you could think of the ‘possession by the devil’ stuff, right? In that once you’re possessed by the devil, anything that happens to you? [. . .] So it makes it easier for you to get tuberculosis, and it makes it easier for you to get uterine cancer. It makes it easier for you to get candida albicans. And so all those things can now be called AIDS; why would anybody do that? Why would any reasonable doctor start lumping together various symptoms into one pile and think all this is caused by HIV?”22 Christine Maggiore adds, “We have a test, but it’s not a test for AIDS; and it’s called an HIV test, but it’s not a test for HIV; and we have a series of problems that we are calling AIDS, but that doesn’t elevate AIDS into a disease.”

Thirty years later, many, if not most, virologists have come to grudgingly accept— in some part, at least—Duesberg’s skepticism of the Gallo/Fauci claim that HIV, alone, could cause AIDS. Most research scientists now—quietly—assume that AIDS must have a multifactorial etiology. Significantly, Dr. Robert Gallo and Dr. Luc Montagn...

Dr. Fauci summoned the entire upper clergy of his HIV orthodoxy—and all of its lower acolytes and altar boys—to unleash a storm of fierce retribution on the Berkeley virologist and his followers. The dispute became one of the most sensational, vicious, and personalized battles in the history of science. Dr. Fauci had a strong stake in the controversy. Blaming AIDS on a virus was the gambit that allowed NIAID to claim the jurisdiction—and cash flow—away from NCI. Dr. Fauci’s career depended on the universal belief that HIV alone causes AIDS. The dispute, for him, was existential. Led by Dr. Fauci’s college of cardinals, the medical cartel—the emerging highly profitable drug, research, testing and nonprofit charitable HIV-AIDS enterprise—attacked Duesberg and the other dissidents as “flat-earthers”25 and Holocaust-type “denialists,”26 or, in Dr. Fauci’s estimation, murderers.27 The AIDS establishment, down to its lowliest doctor, publicly reviled Duesberg, NIH defunded him, and academia ostracized and exiled the brilliant Berkeley professor. The scientific press all but banished him. He became radioactive. From his perch at HHS, Dr. Fauci controlled all the levers of power and public opinion. Shortly after Duesberg’s Cancer Research paper’s publication, the office of the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent out a memo under the heading “MEDIA ALERT.” HHS announced the imposition of message discipline harking back to the agency’s military roots. The HHS directive...

“Duesberg’s problem was one that transcended science: It was career protection to partake in his bullying and degradation,” said Farber. “The Fauci serf scientists were driven by fear that if they did not denounce Duesberg in sufficiently disgusted tones, and very publicly, they would themselves soon be punished by Fauci, possibly de-funded, or worse.”

Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis. In 2004, he said, “All we have is Bob Gallo saying, ‘Gentlemen, this is the cause of AIDS.’ That’s all we have. That’s all we had. That’s not enough. That is not sufficient to publish even a meager little scientific paper somewhere [much less a basis to spend] millions [or] billions of dollars a year and the cost of a lot of lives and anguish . . . lives have been totally ruined on the basis of some flimsy little statement made by a guy who’s known to be a crook in lots of other ways. He lied about a whole lot of other stuff. Why are we trusting him? If he was a witness in a courtroom, we wouldn’t trust his testimony. We’ve caught him in too many lies. [We] don’t trust him anymore.”

Dr. Fauci for his best evidence linking HIV to immune deficiency disease. With two decades and ten billion dollars to prepare his answer, Dr. Fauci’s best explanation was the classic Fauci soft shoe. Contemporary Americans will recognize the familiar refrain of double-talking and dissembling that we all now recognize from the NIAID Director’s COVID-19 interviews: When you put the combined findings of the initial characterization as a distinct retrovirus isolated by Montagnier and his group together with Gallo linking the virus to being the cause of AIDS, and they put those things together, that’s how we have a confirmation of the causative agent of AIDS, namely HIV.53 “Translating all that into regular English,” which Charles Ortleb remarked to me with a laugh, “takes just three words: Gallo says so. That’s what Fauci calls ‘a confirmation.’”

Mullis, one of the most significant Nobel laureates of the twentieth century, died in 2019. “People keep asking me,” he explained in 1994, “‘You mean you don’t believe that HIV causes AIDS?’ And I say, ‘Whether I believe it or not is irrelevant! I have no scientific evidence for it!’55 If there is proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document.”56 Mullis observed in 1994 that the financial and career incentives for advancement to any researcher who could demonstrate a formal proof of Dr. Fauci’s proposition are so monumentally enormous that the inability of anybody to produce this demonstration is itself compelling evidence that HIV alone does not cause AIDS: “If a postdoc were to write a review of the literature that showed without much doubt that HIV was the cause of AIDS, that guy would be famous. There are a hundred thousand guys out there who had the opportunity. Ten years have passed; we’ve been waiting for this star postdoctoral fellow to distinguish himself forever and get a lifelong grant from Tony Fauci but he hasn’t shown up. No one has bothered to write a definitive review. Any journal would take it. That right there proves that HIV does not cause AIDS.”

If HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, one is bound to ask, then what does? Leading scientists have advanced multiple credible theories to account for AIDS’s pathogenesis. I will examine three of the most compelling, beginning with Duesberg’s theory, since his explanation arrived first chronologically and inspired the largest and most influential following. Subsequent theories—including hypotheses promoted, ironically, by Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier—have equal persuasive power but enjoyed meager public interest or support. Duesberg’s battle royal had demonstrated Dr. Fauci’s sizable power to destroy careers, and no one after Duesberg had the courage and appetite to challenge the “Little Director” by advancing new theories.

(Those interested in exploring the debate should read Chapter 3, Virus Hunting Takes Over, of Duesberg’s riveting book Inventing the AIDS Virus.) Suffice it to say that Duesberg makes a compelling case, and his arguments deserve to be aired and civilly debated. Dr. Duesberg observed that critical AIDS cases in the 1980s were among men engaged in behaviors then commonplace in the post-Stonewall, drug-charged gay party scene. Risk factors included promiscuous sex with multiple partners and cumulative toxic exposures from psychoactive drugs including methedrine, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and a cocktail of antibiotics prescribed to treat ubiquitous sexually transmitted diseases. On average, the early AIDS patients had been on at least three antibiotics courses in the year preceding diagnosis.

Duesberg: AIDS caused by immune depleting drug use, STDs and antibiotic treatment, running down a gay party animal's one immune response