This post is 19 minutes to listen at 2 x speed or about 10 minutes to read. The material took years to compile.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus
I SPENT MY PROFESSIONAL CAREER ambling along, secure in the belief that the medical mythology I had memorized had integrity. But over the past few years I have had many “lightning bolt to the forehead” moments when I was proven wrong about some cherished illusion or another. A recent stunner was when I realized that what I had been taught about AIDS was a pack of lies.
I had my first chance to learn this several years ago when a brilliant friend and editor of Butchered by "Healthcare" advised me to read more. (Thanks for everything, M!) She said that the HIV theory of AIDS was concocted and promoted along with the worthless, toxic AZT treatments. But I could not face another red pill after all the horrors I had uncovered.
To explain the truth for you, I excerpted the following from RFK Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci. This is a flagrant violation of copyright law, but like the other authors I “repost,” I know that he and his publisher would not mind.
Patent law has no exact standard for the amount of a written work another author can quote. Less than 500 words is usually permissible, and I was careful about that when I wrote my two books. There are other standards such as not profiting from the citation, and I always pass that test easily.
Kennedy describes how the HIV virus link with AIDS is questionable, how AZT treatments killed far more patients than they saved, and how Fauci perpetrated these frauds to make money for industry and further his career.
You can still buy The Real Anthony Fauci ebook on Amazon Kindle for only $3. I advised RFK to leave it permanently at this price. He told me that Tony Lyons, his publisher at Skyhorse, had already decided to do this, sacrificing millions of dollars in profits to get the word out. The book has now sold over 1.1 million copies. It is the number one worldwide bestseller for the past year despite being censored by mainstream media.
KENNEDY WILL TELL THE STORY from here on, but the following excerpts are fragments. You must buy the book to access the rest of the narrative, to check the footnotes, and to draw firm conclusions.
FROM CHAPTER 3: THE HIV PANDEMIC TEMPLATE FOR PHARMA PROFITEERING
[Harvey Bialy says AIDS has] been a closed book for fifteen years. It has been clear for fifteen years that this is a non-infectious condition that has its cause in a whole variety of chemicals.” His voice rises. “Doesn’t the book demonstrate very clearly that scientifically, nothing happened between 1994 and 2003? Zero. Absolutely nothing except one wrong epidemiological prediction after another, one failed poisonous drug after another. 0.000.000 cured. No vaccine, or even a fake vaccine. It’s a total failure. We’ve turned virology inside out and upside down to accommodate this bullshit hypothesis for seventeen years now. It’s enough.
—From Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS, by Celia Farber
The AIDS pandemic proved a launch pad for Dr. Fauci’s stellar rise. The lessons he learned from orchestrating regulatory responses to the AIDS crisis would become familiar templates for managing subsequent pandemics. Tony Fauci spent the next half-century crafting public responses to a series of real and concocted viral outbreaks40,41—HIV/AIDS42 in 1983; SARS43 in 2003; MERS44,45,46 in 2014; bird flu47,48 in 2005; swine flu (“novel H1N1”)49 in 2009; dengue50,51 in 2012; Ebola52 in 2014–2016; Zika53 in 2015–2016; and COVID-1954 in 2020. When authentic epidemics failed to materialize, Dr. Fauci became skilled at exaggerating the severity of contagions to scare the public and further his career. Even all those years ago, Anthony Fauci had already perfected his special style of ad-fear-tising, using remote, unlikely, farfetched and improbable possibilities to frighten people. Fauci helped terrify millions into wrongly believing they were at risk of getting AIDS when they were not.
For Pharma and its NCI regulators and enablers, the AIDS crisis looked like another ATM machine. But in 1984, NIH scientist Robert Gallo linked AIDS to his virus, HTLV-III, which in time would be renamed the “human immunodeficiency virus” (HIV).
FROM CHAPTER 4: THE PANDEMIC TEMPLATE: AIDS AND AZT
When Dr. Fauci entered the principal investigator (PI) drug-testing universe, only one pharmaceutical company, Burroughs Wellcome (predecessor to GlaxoSmithKline), had a drug candidate teed up to test as an AIDS remedy—a toxic concoction, azidothymidine, known popularly as “AZT.” US government–financed researchers developed AZT in 19641 as a leukemia chemotherapy. AZT is a “DNA chain terminator,” randomly destroying DNA synthesis in reproducing cells. AZT’s developer, Jerome Horwitz, theorized that the molecule might inject itself into cells and interfere with tumor replication.
FDA abandoned the toxic chemotherapy compound after it proved ineffective against cancer and breathtakingly lethal in mice.2 Government researchers deemed it too toxic even for short-regimen cancer 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.
But all did not go smoothly. Even with Burroughs Wellcome holding the reins, progress at NIAID was glacial. AZT’s horrendous toxicity hobbled researchers struggling to design study protocols that would make it appear either safe or effective. With AZT devouring his bandwidth, Dr. Fauci failed to populate clinical trials for any competing drug. After three years and hundreds of millions spent, NIAID had not produced a single new approved treatment.
Meanwhile, bustling networks of community-based AIDS doctors mushrooming in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas had become specialists in treating the symptoms of AIDS. As Dr. Fauci swung for the fences—the miraculous new antiviral “cure” for AIDS—these community doctors were achieving promising results with off-label therapeutic drugs that seemed effective against the constellation of symptoms that actually killed and tormented people with AIDS.
These included off-the-shelf remedies like ribavirin, alpha interferon, DHPG, Peptide D, and Foscarnet for retinal herpes; and Bactrim, Septra, and aerosol pentamidine for AIDS-related pneumonias. Despite years of pleading by the HIV community, Dr. Fauci refused to test any of those repurposed drugs, which had older or expired patents and no Pharma patrons.11
One of the most promising of these “street drugs” was AL 721, an antiviral that was far less toxic than AZT. Two of Dr. Fauci’s top scientists, Robert Gallo and Jeffrey Laurence from NCI, had found AL 721 effective in reducing HIV viral loads—but, under pressure from his phalanx of Burroughs Wellcome PIs, Dr. Fauci refused to follow up.12 Big Pharma and its PIs were loath to test any drug with patents they didn’t control. None of the big pharmaceutical companies were interested in cultivating rivals for their high-margin blockbusters like AZT.
One of NCI’s top virologists, Dr. Frank Ruscetti, who worked directly under Robert Gallo, recalls of that era, “We could have saved millions of lives with repurposed and therapeutic drugs. But there’s no profit in it. It’s all got to be about newly patented antivirals and their mischievous vaccines.”14
By 1988, Nussbaum recounts, “several hundred million tax dollars had somehow disappeared into the nation’s biomedical establishment and not one new drug had been produced.” Tony Fauci’s incompetence was frustrating the national response to the pandemic.
AIDS activists and public health officials were wondering, “Where did all the grant money go? Did NIAID keep the money? Who benefited? Certainly not the tens of thousands of people with AIDS who grew angrier and angrier with each wasted, passing day.”19 Activists complained that Dr. Fauci was not being forthcoming about the status and enrollment of his clinical trials. He was stonewalling inquiries and had veiled the entire process in secrecy.
It was a hardwired reflex at NIAID to exaggerate public fears of pandemics, and Dr. Fauci’s first instinct as national AIDS czar had been to stoke contagion terror. He made himself a villain among AIDS activists with a fear-mongering 1983 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association warning that AIDS could spread by casual contact.20
At the time, AIDS was almost exclusive to intravenous drug users and males who had sex with other males, but Dr. Fauci incorrectly warned of “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” Given that “nonsexual, non-blood-borne transmission is possible,” Fauci wrote, “the scope of the syndrome may be enormous.”
In his history of the AIDS crisis, And the Band Played On, author Randy Shilts reports that the world’s leading AIDS expert, Arye Rubinstein, was “astounded” at Fauci’s “stupidity” because his statement did not reflect the contemporary scientific knowledge.21 The best scientific evidence suggested the infectivity of HIV, even in intimate contact, to be so negligible as to be incapable of sustaining a general epidemic.
Nevertheless, Dr. Fauci’s reflexive response was to amplify the widespread panic of dreaded pestilence that would naturally magnify his power, elevate his profile, and expand his influence. Amplifying terror of infectious disease was already an ingrained knee-jerk institutional response at NIAID. In 1987, the Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of an HHS scheme its writers characterized as a deliberate campaign by officials to misrepresent AIDS as a general pandemic to secure greater public funding and financial support.22
The flimflam worked. Terror of pestilence, it turns out, is a potent impulse, and Fauci was adept at weaponizing it—and he quickly learned that other “respected authorities” would follow his lead. Following Dr. Fauci’s fear-mongering prophecy, Theresa Crenshaw of the President’s AIDS Commission made the astonishing forecast that within fourteen years, double the number of people then on the planet would be dying from lethal infections: “If the spread of AIDS continues at this rate, in 1996 there could be one billion people infected; five years later, hypothetically ten billion.” Crenshaw asked, “Could we be facing the threat of extinction during our lifetime?”23
Crenshaw’s dire soothsaying never materialized. In 2007, WHO estimated only 33.2 million people worldwide were HIV-positive.24 The HIV prevalence curves based on CDC’s own data show that at least in the US, HIV has not spread at all since testing was first available, stubbornly remaining at the same levels relative to population.
Dr. Fauci’s embellishments quickly made HIV-positives the modern equivalent of lepers. Paranoia of AIDS from nonsexual contact persisted for years. In New York in 1985, for instance, 85 percent of schoolchildren at one public elementary school stayed home during opening week, while hundreds of parents demanded the school system bar any HIV-positive children from attending classes.
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” filled the vacuum by providing treatments that community doctors and their patients considered effective against AIDS, but that FDA refused to approve.
“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. He was the real villain of this era. He cost a lot of people their lives.”36
By 1987, thousands of AIDS activists from organizations like amfAR and ACT UP—many of them dressed in burial frocks—began mounting mass protests against Dr. Fauci at NIH’s Bethesda, Maryland, research complex and demanding that he, at last, meet with them. Carrying signs that read, “Red Tape Kills Us,” and “NIH— Negligence, Incompetence and Horror,” protesters were met by a line of police officers in riot gear.37 The protestors objected to Dr. Fauci’s narrow focus on Wellcome’s single patented antiviral and wanted more attention for existing therapeutic drugs that seemed to reduce the worst of AIDS’s most agonizing and deadly symptoms.
A Moment of Truth, Uncovering the Fraud
In July 1987, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) finally published Burroughs Wellcome’s official report on the Phase II AZT trials—the so-called “Fischl study”— which was the basis of the FDA’s approval of AZT.89 Outside scientists finally had the chance to scrutinize the study’s details for the first time.
Many had earlier expressed shock at its abbreviated duration, but now they began to uncover evidence of fatal methodological flaws—some attributable to confirmation bias, but others clearly the product of corruption and deliberate falsification. Within days, reporters, researchers, and scientists began lobbing aspersions on Dr. Fauci’s Pollyannaish and self-serving interpretation of the data. European scientists complained that NIAID’s raw data showed no benefit of reducing symptoms, a finding that threatened Glaxo’s biggest anticipated profit pool. The Swiss newspaper Weltwoche termed his AZT trials a “gigantic botch-up.”90,91
Investigative journalist and market research analyst John Lauritsen, who had covered the AIDS crisis since 1985, became the first intrepid journalist to critically analyze the details of the AZT trials. When he saw the NEJM reports, he quickly realized that the research was invalid. In his first AZT article, “AZT on Trial” (19 October 1987), he wrote: “The description of methodology was incomplete and incoherent. Not a single table was acceptable according to statistical standards—indeed, not a single table made sense. In particular, the first report, on ‘efficacy,’ was marred by contradictions, ill-logic, and special pleading.”92
He telephoned the nominal authors of the report, Dr. Margaret Fischl and Douglas Richman, and spoke to each for half an hour: “Neither one of them could explain the tables in the reports that they themselves had allegedly written.” They could only say that he should call Burroughs Wellcome for answers to his questions. The New York Native published Lauritsen’s reports beginning in 1987. These reports later appeared in two books, Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story (Poison) (1990) and The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex (TAW) (1993).93
Eighteen months after AZT’s approval, FDA conducted its own investigation of the study. For many months, the FDA, cowering before Fauci’s bullying, kept its damning reports secret. The most shocking revelations about Dr. Fauci’s systemic conduct would emerge after Lauritsen finally obtained some five hundred pages from the FDA investigators’ trove of documents, using the Freedom of Information Act. Those papers clearly demonstrated that the Fauci/Burroughs Wellcome research teams had engaged in widespread data tampering, which some have viewed rose to the level of homicidal criminality.
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.”
Pharma PI [primary investigators] 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. PIs routinely covered up adverse events, violated protocols, falsely reported AZT patients as being placebo patients, and lost control of the test product.
The FDA documents showed that the PIs knew very well which patients were on AZT and which were on placebo, that they were skewing safety results in AZT’s favor to give advantage to the AZT participants. 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.
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. AZT causes anemia in every animal species ever studied, including human beings. In his book, Poisoned by Prescription, Lauritsen explains how “[p]atients taking AZT became anemic, and suffered low white blood cell counts accompanied by vomiting.” FDA’s documents showed that everyone in the AZT group suffered severe toxicities and anemia, yet NIAID’s official report listed no adverse effects among AZT recipients. Some of the AZT patients suffered adverse reactions so deadly that they needed multiple blood transfusions just to keep them alive. Dr. Fauci’s crooked researchers pumped these individuals with regular blood transfusions and then neglected to record their multiplicity of health problems. In the AZT group, thirty patients—over half the total—clung to life until the end of the study only with help from multiple transfusions. Why do those on AZT need six times more transfusions in a four-month period than the individuals on placebo? Because you’re dealing with a killer drug. . . .”98
“Many of the patients would have died from the toxicities of AZT if they had not been given emergency blood transfusions,” reports Lauritsen. “This is a serious adverse effect. That means literally that they would have died from the poison. And yet the case report forms that showed up eventually would report no adverse effects. I mean, this is a type of dishonesty. It’s hard to go any further than that.” 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
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 On January 27, 1988, NBC News broke the censorship blockade to broadcast the first of reporter Perry Peltz’s three-part exposé on the AZT Fischl trial.104,105 Peltz reported additional evidence of widespread tampering with the rules and the pervasive cheating, which she discovered had started on day one. Peltz learned that Fauci’s claim that the study was double-blind was a wholesale canard and reported that most volunteers knew who was on the drug and who wasn’t. Since everyone was desperate for the “miracle drug,” the volunteers on AZT admitted to sharing their drug with placebo group members. This practice assured that researchers would get no clean results from either cohort. Furthermore, Peltz learned that both placebo and study subjects were taking other drug regimens they obtained by purchasing remedies from buyers’ clubs. Peltz was practicing understatement when she branded NIAID’s AZT experiments as “seriously flawed.”
Among all the American journalists covering the AIDS beat, only Celia Farber showed curiosity about the particulars of this milestone debate. In 1989, she quoted from the FDA transcript in an article titled “Sins of Omission,” in SPIN: Everybody was worried about this one. To approve AZT, said Ellen Cooper, an FDA director, would represent a “significant and potentially dangerous departure from our normal toxicology requirements.” One doctor on the panel, Calvin Kunin, summed up their dilemma. “On the one hand,” he said, “to deny a drug which decreases mortality in a population such as this would be inappropriate. On the other hand, to use this drug widely, for areas where efficacy has not been demonstrated, with a potentially toxic agent, might be disastrous.” “We do not know what will happen a year from now,” said panel chairman Dr. Itzhak Brook. “The data is just too premature, and the statistics are not really well done. The drug could actually be detrimental.” A little later, he said he was also “struck by the facts that AZT does not stop deaths. Even those who were switched to AZT still kept dying.” “I agree with you,” answered another panel member, “There are so many unknowns. Once a drug is approved there is no telling how it could be abused. There’s no going back.”120
By invoking the “people are dying argument” to rush through AZT’s licensing for healthy Americans, the FDA’s drug approval process was decimated. Farber told me “the idea that complying with the normal safeguards of the regulatory process and taking time to prudently study a drug for safety or efficacy was artfully conflated with murder.”
In that sense, an unbroken devolution of FDA’s regulatory function leads from AZT to the fraud-fueled “Emergency use approvals” of remdesivir and the Moderna mRNA vaccine during the COVID pandemic. “The death blow to FDA’s safety function was AZT,” says Farber. “After that, any potentially deadly disease became an excuse for curtailing clinical trials. Death by medication was normalized as an inherent part of progress.” All those poisoned Americans were just unfortunate casualties in Little Napoleon’s noble war against the germs.121
Dr. Fauci’s fraud persuaded hundreds of thousands of people to take AZT. For many of them, it was a lethal choice. In 1987, AZT became the AIDS “therapy” even though in the recommended dosage of 1,500 mg/day, it was absolutely fatal.122 Throughout the 1980s, the average lifespan of a patient on AZT was four years. The life expectancy only began to increase in 1990, when the FDA lowered the recommended dosages from 1,200 mg/day to 600.123 The quality of life on AZT was universally pretty miserable. Many credible scientists argued that AZT was killing more people than AIDS. Lauritsen estimated that AZT killed 330,000 gay men between 1987 and 2019.124 Many of the dead were perfectly healthy before beginning the AIDS regimen. Absent AZT, Lauritsen says, the vast majority of those men would not have died.
On the surface of AIDS, what the public sees, is a benevolent exterior, devoted to ‘saving lives,’ of originally mostly gay men in the west, then, since they shifted the narrative, primarily Africans. A global apparatus now worth over $2 trillion and composed of more NGOs, more organizations than anybody could count, obliterates all dissent, all real language, history and truth,” says Celia Farber, author of Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. “It’s a Beast system, and Fauci created it. It’s not ‘capitalism,’ at all. It detests merit, standards, and all the values of Western Civilization. It uses the violence of the ‘woke’ economy to re-cast lies as truth, and to proudly crush and block any and all dissenting voices. It does this always in the name of ‘saving lives.’
Only now, with COVID, are Americans able to see Fauci’s cold, ruthless face behind the mask. Americans have tried to follow what that man has said for a year and a half now, and we who have been dealing with him for so long, we feel like: Welcome to our nightmare. Nothing he says makes sense, yet nobody stands over him, to reign him in. Tower of Babble. Americans are trying to make him into a benign figure, but more and more, they feel a sinking feeling. Is he a madman? Why can’t we understand what he is actually saying, what he means? This is very unsettling, when people are as afraid as people are now, since Covid.
The loudest, most influential, and persistent challenge to the thesis that HIV might not be the only cause of AIDS came from Dr. Peter Duesberg, who in 1987 enjoyed a reputation as the world’s most accomplished and insightful retrovirologist. Specifically, Dr. Duesberg accuses Dr. Fauci of committing mass murder with AZT, the deadly chemical concoction that according to Duesberg causes—and never cures—the constellations of immune suppression that we now call “AIDS.” But Duesberg’s critique goes deeper than his revulsion for AZT. Duesberg argues that HIV does not cause AIDS but is simply a “free rider” common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures. 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. Many other prominent and thoughtful scientists have offered a variety of well-reasoned hypotheses to explain these baffling fissures in the HIV orthodoxy. Most of these alternative conjectures accept that HIV plays a role in the onset of AIDS but argue that there must be other cofactors, a qualifier that Dr. Fauci and a handful of his diehard PIs stubbornly deny. Prior to advancing his own theory for the etiology of AIDS, Duesberg methodically laid out the logical flaws in Dr. Fauci’s HIV/AIDS hypothesis in a ground-breaking 1987 article in Cancer Research.5 Dr. Fauci has never answered Duesberg’s common-sense questions.
FROM CHAPTER 5: THE HIV HERESIES
The first time that someone—Dr. Tom Cowan, a physician from Northern California—suggested to me [RFK, Jr.] that HIV was not the sole cause of AIDS, I dismissed the comment as ridiculous. I had watched many HIV-positive friends die of AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s. I personally knew two of the celebrities—Arthur Ashe and Rudolf Nureyev—whose pioneering deaths from “AIDS” shocked the world at the epidemic’s dawn. It seemed self-evident that HIV was the culprit. I had no idea that the supposition was controversial. I have since learned that today, a disturbing number of virologists quietly doubt the theory that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS.
To understand the skepticism by many of the world’s leading scientific minds, we need to venture back through history and briefly down a very deep rabbit hole. 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. In July 1981, CDC reported a unique outbreak of immune deficiency–related health problems in a group of highly promiscuous gay men in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. A May 1983 Science article by French Institut Pasteur virologist Luc Montagnier first identified a retrovirus that would later earn the name HIV.7
Montagnier believed he had detected signals of HIV in the lymph nodes of some of the AIDS victims he had sampled. After hearing a lecture by Montagnier, Dr. Robert Gallo, a blustering, ambitious National Cancer Institute (NCI) researcher, entrepreneur, and homophobe, persuaded the Frenchman to send him a sample of the newly discovered retrovirus, promising to use his considerable influence with the journal Science to get Montagnier’s work published expeditiously. Instead, Dr. Gallo stalled the publication to give himself time to cultivate and steal Montagnier’s virus.
With the help of other HHS officials, Gallo then claimed Montagnier’s pilfered virus as his own discovery and used an imaginative and cunning retinue of subterfuges and intricate frauds to obscure his larceny. In his book, 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
Scientists who worked for Gallo described his NIH lab, where he presided over some fifty scientists and a budget of $13 million, as a “den of thieves.”9 One of Gallo’s scientists told Crewdson, “It’s hard to be an honest person in this place.” She said she knew three employees who committed suicide.10 Gallo confided to a henchman that he liked to hire foreigners “because if they don’t do what he wants, he can deport them.” Gallo’s former mistress and lab employee, Flossie Wong-Staal, reported that Gallo voiced his craven need for the Nobel Prize and his bitterness at being denied the honor so frequently that it was practically a “rhetorical device.”11
It was natural that Gallo found a powerful and reliable ally in Tony Fauci. Gallo’s “proof” that the cause of AIDS was a virus—as opposed to toxic exposures—provided the critical foundation stone of Dr. Fauci’s career. This claim allowed Dr. Fauci to capture the AIDS program and its attendant cash flows from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and launch the project of building NIAID into the world’s leading drug-production empire.
For more related information, I recommend Kennedy’s podcasts HERE.
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