Jonathan Fishbein, MD, who served as head of the Division of AIDS (DAIDS) Office of Policy in Clinical Research Operations from 2003–2005, told me that Fauci’s expanding influence seemed to eclipse that of his boss, NIH Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni: “When Zerhouni could have taken the high road and righted the misconduct that I exposed in the Division of AIDS, he chose to stay uninvolved. Fauci is a master at marketing himself and his Institute and leveraged AIDS to generate huge appropriations from Congress to the NIH. Who would ever have stood up to him? Certainly not Zerhouni or his successors! NIAID money is spread throughout the major medical institutions in the United States and for that reason, he wields enormous influence in the medical community.”
Dr. Fauci’s corrupt collaboration with pharmaceutical companies that yielded NIAID’s scandalous approval of AZT in 1987 consolidated his symbiotic relationship with the Pharma PIs and lowered NIAID’s standards for product approvals. His relationships with his PIs and their Pharma patrons yielded a cascade of beneficial personal opportunities, and Dr. Fauci quickly learned to overlook Pharma’s excesses. The 1980 Bayh–Dole Act8 allowed NIAID—and Dr. Fauci personally—to file patents on the hundreds of new drugs that his agency-funded PIs were incubating, and then to license those drugs to pharmaceutical companies and collect royalties on their sales. NIAID’s drug development enterprise quickly eclipsed HHS’s regulatory function. Millions of dollars began flowing in from drug royalties to NIH and to NIAID’s high-level personnel, including Dr. Fauci—further blurring the boundaries between public health and Pharma profits.
According to an exposé by the Associated Press, “In all, 916 current and former NIH researchers are receiving royalty payments for drugs and other inventions they developed while working for the government.”9 That investigation concluded that scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health flagrantly disregard ethical and legal requirements of financial disclosure.
Financial conflicts with pharmaceutical companies quickly became the defining feature of Dr. Fauci’s governance style. As early as 1992, a Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General investigation concluded that NIAID failed to police conflicts of interest by his PIs in a vaccine clinical trial.10
All that new NIH and NIAID money made clinical trials a vast, booming industry. Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav spent her long career investigating abusive human experiments by NIAID and other agencies. Sharav told me, “Beginning around 1990, clinical trials became the profit center for the medical community. The insurance industry and HMOs were squeezing doctors so that it became hard to make big money practicing medicine. The most ambitious doctors left patient care and gravitated toward clinical trials. Everybody involved was making money except the subjects of the human experiments. At the center of everything was NIH and NIAID. While people were not paying attention, the agency quietly became the partner of the industry.”
Pharma’s ethics quickly pervaded and corrupted NIAID’s culture. The agency routinely overlooked and often sanctioned and engaged in routine manipulation of science to “prove” efficacy of dangerous and ineffective drugs. Callous disregard toward suffering and deaths among clinical trial volunteers became a feature of NIAID’s modus operandi.
According to the AP investigation, NIH scientists who violate ethical and legal requirements and use underhanded recruitment tactics pose a very real and present threat to public safety: “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of patients in NIH experiments made decisions to participate in experiments that often carry risks without full knowledge about the researchers’ financial interests.”
In 2004, investigative journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Dr. Fauci’s secretive experiments on hundreds of HIV-positive foster children at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities in New York and six other states between 1988 and 2002.11 Those experiments were the core of Dr. Fauci’s career-defining effort to develop a second generation of profitable AIDS drugs as an encore to AZT.12
Scheff described how Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and his Big Pharma partners turned Black and Hispanic foster kids into lab rats, subjecting them to torture and abuse in a grim parade of unsupervised drug and vaccine studies: “This former convent houses a revolving stable of children who’ve been removed from their own homes by the Agency for Child Services [ACS]. These children are Black, Hispanic, and poor. Many of their mothers had a history of drug abuse and have died. Once taken into ICC, the children become subjects of drug trials sponsored by [Dr. Anthony Fauci’s] NIAID (National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, a division of the NIH), NICHD (the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) in conjunction with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies–– GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Genentech, Chiron/Biocine and others.”13
NIAID’s Pharma partners remunerated Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) for supplying children for the tests. As usual, Dr. Fauci had the safety oversight board rigged with his loyal PIs, foremost of whom was Dr. Stephen Nicholas, a generously funded NIAID AIDS drug researcher. “Stephen Nicholas was not only director of the ICC until 2002; he also simultaneously sat on the Pediatric Medical Advisory Panel, which was supposed to oversee the tests—which signifies a serious conflict of interest,” criticizes Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a medical industry watchdog organization.14
Scheff continued, “The drugs being given to the children are toxic—they’re known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage, and fatal skin disorders.15
“If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and force fed. If the children continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital, where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their intestines.16
“In 2003, two children, ages six and twelve, had debilitating strokes due to drug toxicities. The six-year-old went blind. They both died shortly after. Another fourteen-year-old died recently. An eight-year-old boy had two plastic surgeries to remove large, fatty, drug-induced lumps from his neck.”17
“This isn’t science fiction. This is AIDS research.”18
Even the foster children who survived Fauci’s experiments reported dire side effects, ranging from skin outbreaks and hives, nausea, and vomiting, to sharp drops in immune response and fevers—all common adverse reactions associated with the drugs he was targeting for development.
During one of his trials involving the drug Dapsone, at least ten children died. A May 2005 Associated Press investigation reported that those “children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning.” Researchers complained they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. Their guessing game cost those children their lives.19