The Sturm und Drang around the competing claims obscured the fact that both cancer researchers produced scientific papers that did nothing more than suggest their retrovirus might cause AIDS. Montagnier always moderated his own claims that HIV was proven the sole cause of AIDS and would eventually disavow the theory.
Recalling how public revelations about Bob Gallo’s acrobatic chicanery during his efforts to link leukemia to HIV had nearly destroyed Gallo’s career, Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis—who, unfortunately, died in August 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic—noted, “HIV didn’t suddenly pop out of the rain forest or Haiti. It just popped into Bob Gallo’s hands at a time when he needed a new career.”28 Duesberg later said, “He stole the fake diamonds from Luc Montagnier.”29
Pouring Concrete on Confirmation Bias
But, like Dr. Fauci, Gallo had both the PIs and press in his pocket. NIH’s mythical prestige lent Heckler’s statement a near-religious authority. The medical establishment quickly embraced Gallo’s scientific hypothesis. Suspending traditional skepticism toward government pronouncements, the press ordained Gallo’s theory as indisputable doctrine and beatified Gallo as a saint.
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. In 1988, a veteran NIH awardee, Seymour Grufferman, had his first experience with the new regime. Grufferman, the former chairman of NIH’s Review Committee, had submitted a proposal to study the phenomenon of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—a touchy subject potentially threatening to the dominant cosmology, since many of Dr. Fauci’s critics believe that CFS is non-HIV AIDS. “I never got scores like that before,” Grufferman told Hillary Johnson, author of Osler’s Web. “My data sheets were ATROCIOUS.” When he protested to Dr. Fauci, he recounted, Dr. Fauci was “nasty.”31
Dr. Fauci’s tsunami of research money poured the concrete of confirmation bias onto Gallo’s hypothesis. NIAID’s PI army welcomed the fierce new bug hunt around this novel medical mystery. “Thousands of health science PhDs seeking government grants rushed to study the virus,” historian Terry Michael recounts.32 Dr. Fauci’s PIs became the fierce guard dogs of the pervasive HIV orthodoxy.
Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis knew the effect of NIH funding on cementing official dogma. “All the old virus hunters from the National Cancer Institute put new signs on their doors and became AIDS researchers. [US President Ronald] Reagan sent up about a billion dollars just for starters,” noted Mullis, who in 1993 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technique. “And suddenly everybody who could claim to be any kind of medical scientist and who hadn’t had anything much to do lately was fully employed.”33
The End of Science
According to Mark Gabrish Conlan, “The Department of Health and Human Services decided from now on we are only going to fund AIDS research that assumes that Robert Gallo’s virus is the cause. Dr. Fauci will not fund research into any other possibilities. Therefore, those scientists who might have wanted to critique Gallo’s papers would not be able to do so, at least not with anything supported by the federal government, which is virtually all science in this country today, from that moment on.”34
For thirty-six years, Fauci targeted all federal grants toward the single pathogen theory of AIDS. The “little emperor” made NIAID the go-to agency for AIDS research grants and spent lavishly 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. He used his awesome leverage to discourage inquiry into any multi-factorial hypothesis. The PIs that he funded became his ideological commissars; the growing enterprise became the launch platform for his career as the most successful medical science bureaucrat in American history.
One of the inevitable outcomes of this “confirmation-biased” research was the rapidly expanding definition of “AIDS.” Dr. Fauci’s battalion of scientists implemented a wide-ranging HIV testing program using indiscriminate PCR tests capable of amplifying tiny strands of long-dead genetic debris billions of times. 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. Researchers naturally found harmless HIV DNA detritus in people with a constellation of other diseases. 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 in individuals who had no HIV infection.35,36