He feebly protested, “These are not cases of AIDS,” reasoning, with circular gymnastics, that they couldn’t be AIDS since the definition of AIDS requires the presence of HIV.84 Dr. Fauci weakly reassured the gathering that he would soon resolve the crisis. The New York Native reported that Dr. Fauci, “the little man with the compensatory ego . . . looked like he was going to have a nervous breakdown in Amsterdam. We kept waiting to see him curled up in a fetal position and crying hysterically— desperate for forgiveness, desperate to create a smokescreen to make everyone forget how he has elbowed every critical question about HIV out of the way.” Dr. Fauci was trying to sell himself as an open-minded scientist. He was telling people, “Don’t panic, don’t panic.”85
In the weeks following the Amsterdam conference, the number of cases identified in the United States alone continued to grow, almost daily. Within a few weeks, the escalating cascade forced CDC to admit to eighty-two certified cases in fifteen states. It was a pitiful underestimate. Duesberg sent a letter to Science, offering to provide “a list of references to more than 800 HIV-free immunodeficiencies and AIDS-defining diseases in all major American and European risk groups,” along with references to “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.”90
New York Native publisher Charles Ortleb commented, “It should have been the end of the HIV theory and absolute proof that the CDC had gotten the definition and cause of AIDS wrong. The fact that HIV-negative AIDS was also occurring in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) patients fortified suspicions of many virus experts that AIDS and CFS were part of the same neuroimmunological epidemic.”91
A large contingent of HIV/AIDS critics (although not Peter Duesberg) had been clamoring that CFS and AIDS were a single disease—neither caused by HIV. To derail this lethal heresy, Dr. Fauci had set the compass for the medical community’s reprehensible dismissal of CFS as a “psychosomatic illness.”92 Following Dr. Fauci’s lead, doctors dubbed CFS as “Yuppie Flu,” characterizing it as a neurotic affliction among women genetically unequipped for high-pressure corporate jobs that suddenly opened to them in the 1980s, coterminous with the lockstep pandemics of AIDS and CFS.93
A September 6, 1992 Newsweek article94 by Geoffrey Cowley asked “AIDS or Chronic Fatigue?” Though Cowley took some heat for the article, he was merely voicing the quiet suspicion among many of Dr. Fauci’s own PIs that “non-HIV AIDS” was actually CFS, and that CFS was simply another name for AIDS when it occurred in heterosexuals who tested negative for HIV. “As more cases come to light,” Cowley observed, “it’s becoming clear that the newly defined syndrome has as much in common with CFS as it does with AIDS.”95
Tony Fauci moved quickly to silence this existential threat. Three weeks after the Amsterdam riot, the CDC sponsored a special meeting at its Atlanta headquarters, inviting the scientists reporting HIV-free AIDS cases. In attendance was a doleful Cowley, the Newsweek journalist, by now on a short leash with a choke collar.96
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. Because there was no evidence the mystery illness was contagious, Dr. Fauci hazarded a guess, to the tractable reporters, that the blood supply was probably safe. He offered no evidence to support this assurance, and the kowtowing media requested none. That was more than enough for Cowley. “Cowley, the Newsweek reporter, almost lost his career,” Charles Ortleb told me. Newsweek published a remorseful article, and Cowley stopped reporting on AIDS cases without HIV, or even Dr. Fauci’s new disease, ICL.
Then, on August 18, New York Newsday revealed that two of the “non-HIV AIDS” patients had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, reigniting the dangerous controversy.97
Dr. Fauci rushed to appear on CNN’s Larry King Live to reassure the general public that the new illness was not a threat to people outside the AIDS “risk groups.”98
Writing in the New York Native, Neenyah Ostrom described Dr. Fauci’s interview with King:
King began by asking Fauci to describe what he thought was happening in the “mysterious AIDS” cases in which patients develop severe immunodeficiency and types of infections suffered by “AIDS” patients—but are not infected with HIV. Fauci kept saying that between twenty and thirty such cases had been identified [Dr. Fauci knew that CDC had already confirmed eighty-two cases in fifteen states, and Duesberg had found thousands documented in PubMed: The NIH official peer-review archives] and because such a small number of people were affected, it really was nothing to worry about. Fauci said it wasn’t clear that these cases represented a new type of “AIDS”; these patients’ immunodeficiency could, he stressed, be caused by something other than an infectious agent. Fauci speculated that the cases might not even represent a new illness, but that increasingly sophisticated testing of people’s immune systems was turning up what could be “background” immunodeficiencies (whatever that is).99