Such scathing rebuffs infuriated Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis. In 2004, he said, “All we have is Bob Gallo saying, ‘Gentlemen, this is the cause of AIDS.’ That’s all we have. That’s all we had. That’s not enough. That is not sufficient to publish even a meager little scientific paper somewhere [much less a basis to spend] millions [or] billions of dollars a year and the cost of a lot of lives and anguish . . . lives have been totally ruined on the basis of some flimsy little statement made by a guy who’s known to be a crook in lots of other ways. He lied about a whole lot of other stuff. Why are we trusting him? If he was a witness in a courtroom, we wouldn’t trust his testimony. We’ve caught him in too many lies. [We] don’t trust him anymore.”52
Some twenty years after Gallo’s announcement, circumstances finally forced Dr. Fauci to defend his thesis. In 2009, documentarian Brent Leung persuaded Dr. Fauci to submit to a sit-down interview for Leung’s feature-length film on the history of AIDS, House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic. Leung asked an uncomfortable, chafing Dr. Fauci for his best evidence linking HIV to immune deficiency disease. With two decades and ten billion dollars to prepare his answer, Dr. Fauci’s best explanation was the classic Fauci soft shoe. Contemporary Americans will recognize the familiar refrain of double-talking and dissembling that we all now recognize from the NIAID Director’s COVID-19 interviews:
When you put the combined findings of the initial characterization as a distinct retrovirus isolated by Montagnier and his group together with Gallo linking the virus to being the cause of AIDS, and they put those things together, that’s how we have a confirmation of the causative agent of AIDS, namely HIV.53
“Translating all that into regular English,” which Charles Ortleb remarked to me with a laugh, “takes just three words: Gallo says so. That’s what Fauci calls ‘a confirmation.’”
Among Dr. Fauci’s skeptics were numerous Nobel laureates, including geneticist Barbara McClintock and chemist Walter Gilbert, who added their voices to the chorus complaining about the lack of scientific proof supporting the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and the inability or unwillingness of health officials to answer fundamental questions. “It is good that the HIV hypothesis is being questioned,” Gilbert told the Oakland Tribune in 1989. Gilbert acknowledged it “is absolutely correct . . . that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And [Duesberg] is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS.”54
Mullis, one of the most significant Nobel laureates of the twentieth century, died in 2019. “People keep asking me,” he explained in 1994, “‘You mean you don’t believe that HIV causes AIDS?’ And I say, ‘Whether I believe it or not is irrelevant! I have no scientific evidence for it!’55 If there is proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document.”56
Mullis observed in 1994 that the financial and career incentives for advancement to any researcher who could demonstrate a formal proof of Dr. Fauci’s proposition are so monumentally enormous that the inability of anybody to produce this demonstration is itself compelling evidence that HIV alone does not cause AIDS: “If a postdoc were to write a review of the literature that showed without much doubt that HIV was the cause of AIDS, that guy would be famous. There are a hundred thousand guys out there who had the opportunity. Ten years have passed; we’ve been waiting for this star postdoctoral fellow to distinguish himself forever and get a lifelong grant from Tony Fauci but he hasn’t shown up. No one has bothered to write a definitive review. Any journal would take it. That right there proves that HIV does not cause AIDS.”57
Duesberg’s most surprising convert was Luc Montagnier, the man who first discovered the virus.
At the San Francisco International AIDS Conference in 1990, Dr. Montagnier made a startling confession about HIV that was clearly against his own interest: “HIV might be benign.”58 Montagnier was the father of the AIDS theory. He is also a scientist of integrity. That was his surrender flag. Montagnier’s discounting of the HIV/AIDS association should have been earthshaking. Instead, the conventioneers—content with the orthodoxy that was paying off handsomely for so many of them—ignored Montagnier’s momentous confession and went right on talking about exciting new antiviral drug treatments.
Kary Mullis was astonished that Fauci’s dogma had such a powerful hypnotic force that acolytes would ignore its public retraction by the genius who invented it. “Years from now, people looking back at us will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find the leaders who excommunicated Galileo, just because he insisted that the Earth was not the center of the universe,” predicts Mullis. “It has been disappointing that so many scientists have absolutely refused to examine the available evidence in a neutral, dispassionate way, regarding whether HIV causes AIDS.”59
All about the Money
Today, the presumption that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS is the central presumption of a multibillion-dollar industry. Everyone agrees that at least part of the explanation for its stupefying resilience is Dr. Fauci’s relentless flow of cash. Charles Ortleb observed to me, “Science costs money and he who dispenses the money can control the science.”
“Look, there’s no sociological mystery here,” observed Mullis. “It’s just people’s income and position being threatened by the things Peter Duesberg is saying. Their personal income and positions are being threatened and that’s why they’re so nasty. In the 1980s, a lot of people started being dependent on Tony Fauci and his friends for their livelihood. All these people really wanted success in the sense of lots of people working for them and lots of power.”60
Bialy agrees: “First of all, there are tremendous financial and social interests involved. Billions of dollars in research funding, stock options, and activist budgets are predicated on the assumption that HIV causes AIDS. Entire industries of pharmaceutical drugs, diagnostic testing, and activist causes would have no reason to exist.”
The 2004 documentary The Other Side of AIDS includes a remarkable scene in which Canadian PI, Mark Wainberg, MD, president of the International AIDS Society (the world’s largest organization of AIDS researchers and clinicians), angrily calls for Duesberg and others who “attempt to dispel the notion that HIV is the cause of AIDS” to be “brought up on trial.” He considers HIV/AIDS skeptics “perpetrators of death.”61
“I suggest to you that Peter Duesberg is the closest thing we have on this planet to a scientific psychopath.”62
Then he declares the interview over, rips the microphone from his lapel, and storms off.
What happened next was revealing.
The audience erupted in laughter, which turned to boos as the screen flashed a list of Wainberg’s patents and other financial ties to the HIV industry.