This was a stunning development, because KS was the initial and defining symptom of AIDS. Prior to 1981, KS was a disease limited to very old people. Its sudden appearance in young men was the identifying signal that launched the AIDS crisis. It was fundamental doctrine within the medical establishment that KS was the diagnostic signal of the AIDS pandemic. The very existence of AIDS was inextricably linked to KS. If HIV was not responsible for the outbreak of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, then there had to be another culprit. That insurmountable logic raised the question of whether poppers might also be causing the other symptoms of AIDS— particularly the other major manifestation, immunosuppression, which science also linked to amyl nitrite.
While publicly cleaving to Dr. Fauci’s official HIV/AIDS orthodoxy, Robert Gallo himself privately signaled doubts about his own theory that HIV alone can cause either Kaposi’s sarcoma or AIDS. At a high-level meeting of US health authorities in 1994—titled “Do Nitrites Act as a CoFactor in Kaposi’s Sarcoma?”—Gallo made some astonishing confessions to his trusted colleagues. HIV, he acknowledged, might only be a “catalytic factor” in Kaposi’s: “There must be something else involved.” Then he added a breathtaking concession, which could have been taken from the very research in Duesberg’s article: “I don’t know if I made this point clear, but I think that everybody here knows—we never found HIV DNA in tumor cells of KS. So this is not directly transforming. And in fact, we’ve never found HIV DNA in T cells although we’ve only looked at a few. So, in other words we’ve never seen the role of HIV as a transforming virus in any way.”89
One attendee of that meeting was Harry Haverkos, by then director of the AIDS department at National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Haverkos observed to Gallo that not a single case of Kaposi’s sarcoma had been reported among blood recipients where the donor had Kaposi’s sarcoma. If blood transfusions couldn’t spread the disease, Haverkos said, then semen exchanges could hardly be a plausible culprit. In response, Gallo allowed: “The nitrites (poppers) could be the primary factor.”90
To fully appreciate the seismic implications of Gallo’s statement, we must recall that, in wealthy nations like the United States and Germany, Kaposi’s sarcoma was— along with PCP—the signature disease for diagnosing patients with “AIDS.” In 1987, for example, Der Spiegel described AIDS patients as the “sarcoma-covered skeletons” from the “same-sex scene.”91
By 1990, government regulators were already scrambling to drop Kaposi’s sarcoma from the AIDS definitions. “At present, it is accepted [even by CDC scientists] that HIV plays no role, either directly or indirectly, in the causation of Kaposi’s sarcoma,” wrote Australian biologist and AIDS expert Eleni Papadopulos in 2004.92 This was a momentous “bait and switch.” Kaposi’s was the AIDS-defining illness. “In the beginning,” says Farber, “AIDS was Kaposi’s sarcoma.”93 Because its association with AIDS was so well established, the official concession that the two conditions are distinct has never penetrated the reigning orthodoxy. Kaposi’s sarcoma remains part of the official AIDS definition in industrialized countries (anyone with KS and a positive test result counts as an AIDS patient)—and, contrary to the facts, mainstream media outlets like the New Yorker still report that “Kaposi’s sarcoma is a sign of AIDS” (i.e., HIV causes KS).94
AZT as Culprit
After 1987, Dr. Duesberg and his followers argue, the vast majority of “AIDS deaths” were actually caused by AZT—Dr. Fauci’s radical “antiretroviral” chemotherapy purposefully concocted to kill human cells. Duesberg describes the syndrome as “AIDS by AZT.” Ironically, he argued AZT, the highly toxic medication that Dr. Fauci was prescribing to treat AIDS patients, actually does what the virus cannot—that is, it causes AIDS itself.
In a rational universe populated by critical thinkers, Duesberg’s suspicion that AZT causes immune collapse should never have seemed revelatory. The FDA, after all, had deemed AZT too toxic to use for even short-term cancer therapy. AZT is highly mutagenic, meaning that it destroys the genes themselves. It causes cancer in rodents. It targets the bone marrow where blood cells called lymphocytes are made. These are the very cells that an AIDS patient needs most for immunity. AZT randomly destroys bones, kidneys, livers, muscle tissue, the brain, and the central nervous system.
Cancer patients typically take chemo drugs for only two weeks. Thanks to Tony Fauci’s Fischl study, doctors were now prescribing AZT for life! “Chemotherapy,” says Duesberg, “is restricted to a few months. The hope is that the cancer dies before you die.”95
Duesberg believes that AZT was not only causing AIDS, it was killing more people than had previously been dying from autoimmunity caused by recreational drugs. “AZT is causing AIDS and its defining diseases. It doesn’t cause Kaposi’s sarcoma. But it does cause immune deficiency. It was designed to do that. In fact, the manufacturer says specifically that it can cause ‘AIDS-like diseases.’” Burroughs Wellcome’s insert warns that it is “often difficult to distinguish adverse events possibly associated with administration of RETROVIR (AZT) from underlying signs of HIV disease or intercurrent illnesses.”96 In other words, even the company acknowledges that AZT causes the diseases that define AIDS.
“If you start taking any other chemotherapeutic agent for the rest of your life, it would be that agent probably to kill you,”97 Kary Mullis observed. “When you give chemotherapy to somebody with cancer, you give them a round of it for maybe fourteen days or a few days. Hopefully, you’re not going to kill the patient. You’re going to kill the cancer. Patient’s going to survive. But you don’t keep giving it to him until he dies, because he certainly will.”98 Luc Montagnier makes this same point about HIV: “Any drug active on HIV will be toxic because it’s not 100 percent specific of the HIV enzymes.”99
If Duesberg is right, AIDS is an iatrogenic (doctor-caused) pandemic, and Dr. Fauci would be its author. It wouldn’t be the first one. Historically, there are many examples of prescribed medicines causing worse injuries than their target disease. The notorious Tuskegee Experiment (1932–1973), which my uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, exposed and ended in 1973, began as an effort by public health regulators to unravel which syphilis symptoms were from the spirochete bacterium and which were from the mercury “cure” that doctors had, by then, been prescribing for more than 500 years. As it turned out, the most deadly and debilitating symptom of syphilis—the lethal second-stage neuropathy—was actually acute mercury toxicity, not surprising since mercury is nature’s most toxic substance.