DR. FAUCI, MR. HYDE: NIAID’S BARBARIC AND ILLEGAL EXPERIMENTS ON CHILDREN
“The Nazi medical experiments are an example of this sadism, for in the use of concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war as human guinea pigs very little, if any, benefit to science was achieved. It is a tale of horrors of which the German medical profession cannot be proud. Although the ‘experiments’ were conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks— albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world—their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physicians of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest.”
—William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
“Science advances one funeral at a time.”
—Max Planck
During the nearly four decades since Dr. Anthony Fauci took the agency’s reins, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has often treated America’s most vulnerable children as collateral damage in its director’s single-minded pursuit of profitable pharmacological solutions for steadily declining public health. AZT’s sketchy and corrupt path to regulatory approval in 1988 blazed a trail for a multibillion-dollar boom in new HIV drugs, and Dr. Fauci gave broad leeway to his pharmaceutical partners and their PIs to conduct unethical human experimentation that exposed both children and adults to toxic compounds.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its predecessor agency, the Public Health Service, already had a long history of morally repugnant experiments on vulnerable subjects, including imprisoned convicts, institutionalized adults with intellectual disabilities, and orphaned children in hellholes like Staten Island’s Willowbrook and the Fernald School in Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1973, Dr. Stanley Plotkin penned a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in which he justified his experiments on vulnerable intellectually disabled children, saying they “are humans in form but not in social potential.”1 Those sorts of prejudices did nothing to damage his lofty reputation among his colleagues. Vaccinologists consider the annual Stanley Plotkin Award the Nobel Prize of vaccinology. In 2019, the British Medical Journal called Plotkin “the Godfather of vaccines.”2 These homegrown American medical Mengeles most often targeted impoverished American Indians and Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and in the United States as their laboratory rats. I am proud that my uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, played a key role in ending the government’s forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (begun in 1932), another notorious medical research assault on a vulnerable population, when he learned about it in 1972 from a CDC whistleblower.3
Government regulators and their pharmaceutical industry partners often combined racial discrimination with child abuse in HHS’s drug and vaccine development campaigns. During the government/industry polio vaccine experiments of the 1950s–1960s, US vaccinologists like Hilary Koprowski and Stanley Plotkin worked with Belgian colonial authorities in the Congo to recruit millions of Black African child “volunteers” for dozens of mass-population trials with experimental vaccines that were perhaps considered to be too risky to test on white children. As late as 1989, the CDC conducted lethal experiments with a hazardous measles vaccine on Black children in Cameroon, Haiti, and South-Central Los Angeles, killing dozens of little girls before halting the program.4 CDC did not tell “volunteers” that they were participating in an experiment. In 2014, another CDC whistleblower, the agency’s senior vaccine safety scientist, Dr. William Thompson, disclosed that top CDC officials had forced him and four other senior researchers to lie to the public and destroy data that showed disproportionate vaccine injuries—including a 340 percent elevated risk for autism—in Black male infants who received the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine on schedule.5 So it was only natural that Dr. Fauci and his Pharma partners employed Black and Hispanic foster children for cruel and barbaric treatments in their efforts to develop their second-generation antivirals and chimeric HIV vaccines that provided the initial stepping-stones for his career.
In 1989, Dr. Fauci declined President George H. W. Bush’s offer to become NIH director, explaining, “I was training for the AIDS epidemic before it even happened. My being involved with it has been my passion and my life’s work.”6, 7 Dr. Fauci’s philanthropic demurrer might have been disingenuous. By then, his power as NIAID director dwarfed the authority wielded by his nominal boss at NIH. His successful early machinations during the AIDS drug boom had won NIAID a massive discretionary budget and global influence over scientific research and international health policy, including de facto control over its sister HHS agencies, FDA and CDC. The NIAID directorship also offered dizzying publicity opportunities and lucrative partnerships with pharmaceutical companies as NIAID became Pharma’s chief incubator and collaborator in new drug development and promotion. Biocontainment handling expert and trainer Sean Kaufman, who designed and built mock biosafety level (BSL) laboratories for NIAID in the mid-2000s, is a longtime admirer of Dr. Fauci and trained hundreds of BSL workers in safety protocols for NIAID. Kaufman told me, “Everyone knows that Dr. Fauci runs the whole show at HHS. All the other agency heads are figureheads. Tony Fauci pulls all the strings.”