“AIDS is a chronic long-term breakdown of the immune system that can be caused by multiple factors,” says Mark Gabrish Conlan, gay historian, publisher, “generally more than one of them operating within any particular person with AIDS or with what has been described as AIDS. And at the top of that, in the west would be recreational drug use, also pharmaceutical drug use and repeated infections, including with diseases that are genuinely sexually transmitted, repeated antibiotic treatments for these: a lifestyle that involves a lot of partying, lack of nutrition, and in the less-developed world, AIDS is primarily disease of malnutrition, starvation, and the endemic infections that have been part of those environments for years.”100
Drs. Duesberg, Willner, and others believed that AZT killed tens of thousands of Americans between 1986 and 1996 before less toxic chemotherapy drugs were introduced, causing far more fatalities than the immune deficiencies associated with the recreational drugs during the first wave of the AIDS pandemic. A scientific study in the New England Journal of Medicine article in late July 1987 headlined “The Toxicity of Azidothymidine (AZT) in the Treatment of Patients with AIDS and AIDS-Related Complex,”101 and a comprehensive investigation by The Independent of London in May 1993, “The rise and fall of AZT,”102 both supported Duesberg’s theory that AZT was a deadly killer of dubious efficacy against amorphous AIDS.
Rudolf Nureyev and Arthur Ashe
Rudolf Nureyev, greatest ballet dancer of all time, was friends with my parents. He visited our family home in the 1960s and ’70s. Against his doctor’s advice, he began taking AZT. Nureyev was HIV-positive, but otherwise in robust health. His personal physician, Michel Canesi, recognized the deadly effects of AZT and warned Nureyev not to take the drug. But Nureyev insisted, “I want that drug!”103 He became sick soon after commencing treatment and died in Paris in 1993 at age fifty-four.
That year, former Wimbledon champion Arthur Ashe also died at age forty-nine. Ashe was also a family friend and a regular fixture at our family home at Hickory Hill and Hyannis Port. A heterosexual, Ashe learned he was HIV-positive in 1988. His doctor prescribed an extremely high AZT dose.104 In October 1992, Arthur wrote a column for the Washington Post voicing his extreme misgivings about AZT. “The confusion for AIDS patients like me is that there is a growing school of thought that HIV may not be the sole cause of AIDS, and that standard treatments such as AZT actually make matters worse,” Ashe acknowledged, adding, “There may very well be unknown cofactors, but the medical establishment is too rigid to change the direction of basic research and/or clinical trials.” Ashe wanted to stop taking AZT, but he didn’t dare: “What will I tell my doctors?” he asked the New York Daily News.105
If Arthur Ashe’s suspicions and Duesberg’s suppositions are correct, Dr. Fauci would be the father of the AIDS pandemic and responsible for prolific deaths. So that story must never be found to be true.
Is AZT Mass Murder?
There is little question that the character of AIDS changed dramatically in the early 1990s with the proliferation of AZT. Kaposi’s sarcoma uncoupled from the disease and AIDS cases began to look increasingly like AZT poisoning. “Then at a certain point, when really that sort of AIDS virtually ceased to exist, there came a new type of AIDS,” says John Lauritsen.106 “So they expanded the definition, and also they began giving the anti-HIV drugs to people who were in fact not even sick, but merely positive on the HIV test. And in that case, of course, when they finally became sick enough from the AIDS drugs they were called ‘AIDS patients.’ I would simply have to say that my main concern is the gay men, who have been murdered,” Lauritsen observed. “I don’t think ‘murder’ is too strong a word to use when you have a drug like AZT and all the nucleoside analogues that followed, more or less on its coat tail, approved on the basis of fraudulent research, and where, as you know, Joseph Sonnabend said, ‘AZT is incompatible with life.’ Well, if it’s incompatible with life, it’s a poison and if it’s a poison that kills people, in context like that, it is murder.”107
Concurring with Sonnaband’s assessment, John Lauritsen accuses Dr. Fauci of conducting genocides against gay men and Black Africans. The evidence seems to indicate that the proliferation of AZT increased death rates from “AIDS” dramatically.108
The annual mortalities from so-called AIDS during the early years of the pandemic for 1983–1987—prior to AZT’s approval—were lower, perhaps ten to fifteen thousand people in a country of 250 million.109 It wasn’t until the late 1980s, when Dr. Fauci’s AZT came along, that the number of deaths attributed to AIDS shot up.
According to the CDC, in the fifth full year of AIDS, 1986, 12,205 people “with” AIDS died in the United States. At that time, CDC—in a now-familiar scheme to stoke pandemic fears—used deceptive protocols to inflate the body counts. The CDC’s mortality numbers include anyone with an HIV positive antibody “status,” even if the deceased had no “AIDS defining illness,” and instead succumbed to suicide, a drug overdose, a car accident, or a heart attack.
The death rate climbed precipitously after the commercial introduction of AZT. In 1987, “AIDS” deaths rose by 46 percent with 16,469 people dying. In 1988, as more and more people received AZT, the death toll rose to 21,176, and then to 27,879 in 1989. Death rates rose to 31,694 in 1990, and 37,040 in 1991.110 At the end of the 1980s, HHS’s standard prescription for AZT was 1,500 mg a day. In 1988, the average survival time for patients taking AZT was four months.111 Even mainstream medicine couldn’t overlook the fact that the administration of higher doses led to much higher death rates.112 At the beginning of the 1990s, health officials lowered the daily dose to 500 mg. The average lifespan of AZT patients rose to twenty-four months in 1997, as deaths attributed to AIDS plummeted. Afterwards. CDC changed its counting metrics to make it difficult to count annual AIDS deaths.113
In his history of the era, historian Terry Michaels wrote, “. . . the CDC, for the years between about 1986 and 1996, created the illusion that tens of thousands in America died from AIDS or HIV in that decade, rather than AZT and other ‘monotherapy’ nucleoside analog drugs.”114
According to Dr. Claus K?hnlein, MD, a German internist and coauthor of Virus Mania, “Most of the deaths attributed to AIDS, or HIV disease as eventually it would be called, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s were the result of iatrogenic illness, resulting from prescription of high dose, toxic, DNA chain-terminating chemotherapy, specifically, azidothymidine (AZT) ending in premature death for scores of thousands of ‘HIV positive’ gay men, plus many hemophiliacs, IV drug users, Sub-Saharan Africans, and a few heterosexuals unlucky enough to have taken the specious HIV test, like the late tennis star, Arthur Ashe, who died in 1993.” K?hnlein observes, “The treatment causes a very similar condition we would expect from an AIDS patient. That’s why nobody noticed that there was something wrong with the treatment.”115
The HIV dissent movement, propagandistically rendered the HIV “denialist” movement by the AIDS research establishment and media, was somewhat less under siege in Europe than in the United States.