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November 14, 2023 - May 11, 2024
The Reagan administration made it unlawful for persons with AIDS to enter the United States. The Cuban government quarantined AIDS victims in modern leper colonies. AIDS activists charged Dr. Fauci with causing the “irrational, punitive” response that followed his hysterical statements.32
A year later, growing furor over his assertion forced Dr. Fauci to acknowledge that health officials had never detected a case of the dis...
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Melisa Wallack and Craig Borten, who received Oscar nominations for their script, Dallas Buyers Club, intensively researched NIAID’s institutional hostility to patient care and repurposed drugs during the 1986 AIDS crisis. Dr. Fauci’s campaign to sabotage therapeutic remedies played a key role in precipitating the emergence of the organized underground medical network. So-called “Buyers Clubs”
“Dr. Fauci was a liar,” recalls Wallack, who researched Dr. Fauci intensively for her film. “He was utterly beholden to pharmaceutical companies and was hostile to any product that would compete with AZT.
wanted more attention for existing therapeutic drugs that seemed to reduce the worst of AIDS’s most agonizing and deadly symptoms.
According to Callen, “We asked him—no, we begged him—to issue interim guidelines urging physicians to prophylax those patients deemed at high risk for PCP (pneumonia) [with Bactrim or aerosol pentamidine]. Although it would not have cost the government much to have done so, he steadfastly refused to issue such guidelines. His reason: no data. So, the Catch-22 was complete and many people died of PCP who didn’t have to.”43
Following that meeting, a group of frustrated community doctors raised money from their own AIDS patients to collect data for a randomized trial on Bactrim. It took them two years, and their results strongly supported Bactrim’s effectiveness against pneumonia.
AIDS activists lamented that two years of stalling by Fauci on aerosol pentamidine and Bactrim had cost seventeen thousand people their lives.45
reticence
cavalcade
bonhomie
kabuki
subterfuge.
sandbagging
In 1987, Dr. Fauci’s team declared the human study a success and terminated it after four months of a proposed six-month study—a record-setting speed for chemotherapy approval. That four-month observation period was far too short for researchers to detect side effects that would occur in patients taking AZT for years, or even a lifetime. But Dr. Fauci argued that his decision to abort the study was the only ethical choice: after sixteen weeks, nineteen trial subjects in the inactive placebo group and only one participant from the AZT group had died—an outcome that could be hailed as an
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Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, this practice would become a routine vehicle for extreme abuse in the COVID-19 era, when vaccine companies habitually disclosed cherry-picked highlights of their clinical trials in press releases weeks before publishing far less bullish study results. Those tactics drew criticism as “pump and dump” enterprises with company executives simultaneously unloading stock timed with deceptive announcements that drove up share prices.
There was only one problem: Dr. Fauci’s entire clinical trial for AZT had been an elaborate fraud.
intrepid
These documents showed that the “double-blind, placebo-controlled” trials had become unblinded almost immediately, which alone rendered them invalid. Internal FDA communications with the research team revealed rampant falsification of data, sloppiness, and departure from accepted procedures.94
In one of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents, Harvey Chernov, the FDA analyst who reviewed the pharmacology data, recommended that AZT should not be approved. Chernov noted many serious toxicities of AZT, especially its effect on the blood: “Although the dose varied, anemia was noted in all species (including man) in which the drug has been tested.” Chernov further noted that AZT is likely to cause cancer: “[AZT] induces a positive response in the cell transformation” assay and is therefore “presumed to be a potential carcinogen.”95
Most seriously, FDA investigators found a great many instances of cheating in the Boston center where they began their review. Dr. Fauci’s decision to terminate the trials prevented the inspectors from investigating the other eleven centers, which were, presumably, just as dreadful as Boston. After agonizing over whether to exclude data from the delinquent Boston center or from patients with protocol violations, the FDA decided to exclude nothing: “False data were retained. Garbage was thrown in with the good stuff.” The FDA argued that if all the false data were excluded, there would be an
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Pharma PIs know that their careers and paychecks depend on their ability to consistently produce study outcomes that will win FDA approval for the subject drug. Such perverse incentives naturally drive research bias, confirmation bias, data tampering, strategic laziness, and deliberate falsification and cheating.
The rules of the trials clearly stated that the PIs must record all adverse reactions on their CRFs and report immediately to the FDA. The Boston PIs did neither.
Researchers began by placing the sickest patients in the placebo group. The researchers then bent over backward to coddle the group that took AZT, giving them more supportive medical services than the placebo subjects. For example, individuals taking AZT during the four-month study received six times more blood transfusions than the placebo group.
Of those who got AZT, all suffered from its unspeakable toxicity. “A number of them . . . would very definitely have died from anemia,” had the PIs not given the blood transfusions to keep them alive, says Lauritsen.
Dr. Willner, who died in 1995, accused Dr. Fauci of using transfusions and other artifices to systematically conceal AZT’s horrendous toxicity. “What do we have to say about the National Institutes of Health, when a private, independent laboratory, found AZT to be 1,000 times more toxic than the laboratory of the NIH? We can understand a 5 percent error in a laboratory, even a 10 percent error, but a 10,000 percent error or a 100,000 percent error? That’s fraud.”99
Even in that innocent era, the United States mainstream media heavily censored journalistic criticism of Dr. Fauci and the corruption in the AZT studies. Most Americans were therefore unaware of any dissent from the AIDS orthodoxy. This was less true in Europe and the UK. On February 12, 1992, Channel 4 Television in London broadcast a documentary, “AZT: Cause for Concern.” Produced by Meditel, the film described the material from the FOIA documents, exposed the crooked AZT trials as rank fraud, and chronicled the terrible toxicities of the drug.
AZT is the most toxic drug ever approved for long-term use. Molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg has explained AZT’s mechanism of action: It is a random terminator of DNA synthesis, the life process itself. Dr. Joseph Sonnabend stated simply: “AZT is incompatible with life.”103
canard
By September of 2021, Dr. Fauci’s power to muzzle his critics had achieved a mastery over free expression unprecedented in human history. That month, with a single phrase, Dr. Fauci silenced pop icon Nicki Minaj after she questioned whether COVID vaccines might be causing problems involving testicular swelling.
The vaccine manufacturers acknowledge that the products are not tested for effects on fertility.109
Nevertheless, based upon Dr. Fauci’s word alone, Twitter immediately evicted Minaj from its platform, censoring her communication with her 22 million followers. Pharma’s obedient attack dogs CNN, CBS, and NBC rushed on to the dog pile to defame and discredit the rapper and to assure the public that Minaj was wrong. Dr. Fauci, after all, had spoken!
Only thirty-three years later did Dr. Fauci finally concede that AZT’s performance in his ballyhooed clinical trials—ostensibly saving lives at a 19-1 ratio—was actually less than stellar.
118The New York Times’s Philip J. Hilts uncritically reported that everyone should now get tested: “Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases . . . said that now people who are at risk for AIDS, even if they have ‘absolutely no symptoms,’ it behooves them to get themselves tested.”119
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.
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 that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.1
axiomatic
fissures
etiology
Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson meticulously documents Gallo’s brazen flimflam, perhaps the boldest, most outrageous, and most consequential con operation in the history of science. The book exposes Gallo as a mountebank who built his career poaching discoveries from other scientists and claiming them as his own.8
Both Dr. Gallo and Dr. Montagnier, who had devoted their careers to studying retroviruses, were cancer researchers. Before the appearance of AIDS, both men had vainly strived to implicate retroviruses as the culprit in leukemia. In 1975, before he ever published a paper on the subject, Gallo gained national headlines when he publicly announced his discovery of a human retrovirus HL-23 that he claimed caused leukemia.13
Other scientists complained that they could not reproduce Gallo’s success. Subsequently, two groups of US researchers literally made a monkey out of Gallo’s discovery—if not Gallo—by proving his HL-23 virus was actually a humiliating laboratory contamination consisting of a mélange of three viruses from a gibbon, a woolly monkey, and a baboon.16 Instead of a Nobel laureate, Gallo became a laughing stock.
For thirty-six years, Fauci targeted all federal grants toward the single pathogen theory of AIDS.
so long as grant writers toed the official line about the purported viral cause of AIDS, the only hypothesis for which NIAID would provide funding.
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.
All those unrelated ailments soon became incorporated beneath the umbrella definition of AIDS. Individuals with Candida or Kaposi’s sarcoma and a positive PCR test had AIDS. Those same individuals with a negative PCR would have Kaposi’s sarcoma or Candida. Under this rubric, the AIDS definition rapidly metastasized to encompass a galaxy of some thirty separate well-known diseases, including Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), Hodgkin’s disease, herpes zoster (shingles), Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), Burkitt’s lymphoma, isosporiasis, Salmonella septicemia, and tuberculosis, all of which also occur
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In the hands of Dr. Fauci’s opportunistic PIs, AIDS became an amorphous malady subject to ever-changing definitions, encompassing a multitude of old diseases in hosts who test positive for HIV.
No one has ever explained how a disease largely confined to male homosexuals in the West is a female heterosexual disease in Africa.
“AIDS in Africa looks nothing like AIDS in North America or Europe,” observed Duesberg to me. “Africans were rarely tested with expensive PCR tests, so every unexplained death became ‘AIDS.’”
“AIDS is huge business, possibly the biggest in Africa,” says James Shikwati in a 2005 interview with Der Spiegel.
