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 rebuked the NIH for allowing Duesberg’s paper to reach publication in the first place. “The article apparently went through the normal pre-publication process and should have been flagged at NIH,” it read. “This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy,” it added ominously, “I have already asked NIH public affairs to start digging into this.”28
By questioning the official government theology, and especially by clashing with HHS’s reigning technocrat, Duesberg would soon see his generous stream of NIH research grants run dry. When Duesberg’s seven-year Outstanding Investigator grant came up for renewal, it was D.O.A. As usual, Dr. Fauci had stacked the board. The NIH review committee included one AIDS researcher with deep financial ties to Glaxo, which manufactured AZT, a drug Duesberg ferociously criticized for its extreme toxicity; and another was Gallo’s mistress, a scientist in his lab who had mothered his child.29 Three reviewers never even read Duesberg’s proposal. NIH pulled the grant and never again gave Duesberg a single research dollar.
Prior to 1987, NIH had never rejected a single one of Peter Duesberg’s proposals. After 1987, Duesberg wrote over thirty research proposals; NIH refused every one.
“The US military industrial complex—HHS, NIH, NCI, DAIDS—all of it, is designed along military command structure because it is,” says Celia Farber. “It is the military. It’s not ‘science’ and it’s not ‘merit.’ Fauci understands this and has mastered the elimination of both dissent and any mercy for the destroyed. It’s a sin as he has now openly said, to question him—to question ‘science.’ He’s so far gone that he has actually come out and said he is science.”
“I would like Americans to learn who Peter Duesberg is,” Farber continues, “what his achievements were, on cancer genetics, on aneuploidy, and what became of it. I want them to demand answers. Why did Anthony Fauci set out to defund, bully, censor and destroy America’s premier cancer virologist? How do we feel about that? We know how the AIDS activists feel—but how do we feel about it? Most of us have lost at least one family member to cancer, and none to AIDS. Anthony Fauci should be brought before a criminal court and stand trial for destroying American science, and virology, and cancer science. A lot of the destruction was done through the wildly personal destruction of Peter Duesberg, and anybody who tried to ‘take him seriously,’ or even, for that matter, interview him. The true history is emerging now, and will emerge. Fauci will go down as a very dark figure. A travesty. He was obsessed with AIDS—why? America needed this obsession like a hole in the head. All it was was a money trough, a global apparatus of colonial parasitism. We buckled under to Fauci and a handful of shrieking activists. It’s truly a tragedy.”
“They just took him out,” agrees Richard Strohman, a retired UC Berkeley biologist. “Took him right out.”30
A frenzy of anti-Duesbergism swept the field like grass fire. Duesberg’s name became so degraded that debasing him became a means of career advancement. Being seen with him was career suicide for aspiring scientists.
“The system works. It’s as good as a bullet to the head,” said Dave Rasnick.31
In a 1988 interview laced with poison and enraged profanity, Gallo denounced Duesberg for questioning his HIV/AIDS hypothesis: “HIV kills like a truck!” he hollered. “HIV would kill Clark Kent!”32
Duesberg’s riposte, at the time, was that he wouldn’t mind being injected with HIV—so long as the sample didn’t come from Gallo’s lab.33
The scientifically illiterate mass media largely ignored Duesberg’s evidence-based arguments as dangerous apostasies. Dr. Fauci showcased his easy capacity to control his servile media toadies and mobilize the public health cartel to punish skepticism and dissent. It was a tour de force and an extraordinary preview of his later censorship campaigns. This was a decade before FDA’s 1997 consequential decision to allow pharmaceutical advertising on television, so Dr. Fauci’s urgency in quickly summoning the media to obediently fall in line was all the more impressive. Subsumed in the received orthodoxy, fawning media outlets parroted the official caveat of the NIAID inquisition: to even acknowledge Duesberg’s arguments was itself dangerous because it deflected valuable time from the business of “saving lives” and lent credence to deadly heresy. To mention Duesberg’s name was irresponsible journalism.
AIDS organizations posted warnings about Duesberg and his fellow “denialists” on their websites. Project Inform’s Martin Delaney, living fat, by then, on Dr. Fauci’s payroll, conducted letter-writing and phone campaigns vowing to get every journalist who interviewed Duesberg fired. (Delaney would later come around to Duesberg’s view that HIV could not solely cause AIDS.) It wasn’t a particularly time-consuming project; very few journalists wanted to undertake the risk. As noted earlier, Anthony Fauci personally made sure Duesberg almost never appeared on national television. Dr. Fauci demonstrated his mastery at intimidating TV networks. In one case, Good Morning America34 had already booked Duesberg and flown him to New York. On the night preceding his appearance, a GMA producer called to say the show was canceled. In the morning, he turned on his hotel TV and saw Anthony Fauci himself on the show. Similarly, Larry King35 asked Duesberg for a televised interview in 1992 and then abruptly canceled the night before. Dr. Fauci took Duesberg’s place at King’s table. In 1987, when President Reagan invited Duesberg and Dr. Fauci to the White House for a friendly debate in front of the president, Dr. Fauci forced Reagan to cancel. A member of President Reagan’s administration told Duesberg that “Anthony Fauci, far from reacting as . . . anticipated, threw a ‘small fit’ when he was invited, and demanded to know why the White House was interfering in scientific matters that belonged to the NIH and the Office of Science and Technology Assessment.”36
Anthony Fauci’s uninterrupted flow of millions of dollars to its labs and med school had by the 1980s transformed Berkeley—a mecca for free speech in the 1960s— into an omphalos of reaction and medical heterodoxy. In a pioneering template for “cancel culture,” the university unceremoniously stripped Duesberg—then at the very top of his field—of everything: government funding, grad students, a proper lab, and invitations to conferences. Only his tenured position prevented Berkeley from ridding itself of the iconoclastic researcher altogether. The university refused to endorse Duesberg’s appeal to the NIH of his grant revocation; without university support, he could not legally proceed. Duesberg has had to hire a lawyer to fight for his standard annual merit pay increase, which usually comes automatically to professors of his stature. UC Berkeley denied Duesberg his raise for over a decade, claiming his work was “not of high significance.”37