Between 1985 and 2005, NIAID and its Pharma partners conscripted at least 532 infants and children from foster care in New York City as human subjects of clinical trials testing NIAID’s experimental AIDS drugs and vaccines.45 ICC and the medical research centers that conducted the trials received substantial payments for hosting the experiments, from both the National Institutes of Health and the manufacturers of the drugs. Among those companies were Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, Micro-Genesys, Biocine, Glaxo, Wellcome, and Pfizer.46
The subsequent independent investigations—by the Associated Press,47 by the federal Office of Human Research Protections,48 and by the Vera Institute of Justice49—confirmed that most children did not have the protection of an independent advocate to give or refuse consent to experimental interventions, and that they were almost all children of color: predominantly African American (64 percent) and Latino (30 percent), suggesting discriminatory policies consistent with HHS’s long history of medical racism.
The Vera Institute, relying mostly on city ACS documents, confirmed eighty deaths and that many other children suffered serious harm: “The child welfare files contained information indicating that some children experienced serious toxicities, or side effects, from trial medications, such as reduced liver function or severe anemia. These toxicities were consistent with toxicities described in published articles about the trials.”
“Fauci pooh-poohed all those deaths,” recalls Vera Sharav. “The very best thing you could say about Dr. Fauci is that he failed to get involved when problems emerged on his management watch.”
The Associated Press reported that the scope of Dr. Fauci’s experiments was much wider, extending beyond New York to “at least seven states.” Among them: Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado, and Texas. AP reported that more than four dozen different studies were involved. The foster children ranged from infants to late teens.
Investigation by the Federal Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP)
In 2006, following journalist John Solomon’s AP report, the OHRP launched its own investigation of the problems at NIAID. That study found NIAID’s toxic culture had normalized chronic violations of product safety science. OHRP confirmed the allegations by the AHRP—that drug companies, their PIs, and government officers failed to obtain proper consent from an independent advocate, failed to ensure “equitable” selection, and failed to ensure safeguards for the foster children who “are likely to be vulnerable to coercion or undue influence.”50
Vera Institute Report
In 2005, the NYC Administration of Child Services (ACS) commissioned a four-year investigation by the Vera Institute, at a cost of $3 million.51 The Vera Institute issued its Annual Report in 2009. The Report investigated a twenty-year period during which Dr. Fauci’s NIAID experiments endangered predominantly African American and Latino children in foster care by subjecting them to toxic Phase I and Phase II AIDS drug and vaccine experiments–mostly without parental consent and without the protection of an independent advocate.
Among the findings in the Vera study:
? eighty of the 532 children who participated in clinical trials or observational studies died while in foster care;
? twenty-five of the children died while enrolled in a medication trial;
? sixty-four children participated in thirty medication trials that were NOT REVIEWED by a special medical advisory panel, as the city’s policy required;
? and twenty-one children participated in trials that the panel had reviewed but had NOT RECOMMENDED.
? (In both cases, thirteen of the enrollments occurred before the children were placed in foster care.)
Vera Institute’s director, Timothy Ross, complained that the report only contained a portion of NIAID’s atrocities because NIAID allowed the hospitals to deny the Institute staff access to the children’s primary records or the clinical trial records, which the culprits kept sealed under the pretense of confidentiality. These are the hospitals that conduct the lucrative clinical trials for NIAID and Pharma that Dr. Fauci’s PIs supervise. NIAID basically funnels tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to these hospitals specifically, to give Dr. Fauci unquestioned power over the policies.52
Thanks to NIAID’s stonewalling, the Vera Institute had to rely on secondary child welfare files and Pediatric AIDS Unit (PAU) records, both of which are notoriously incomplete. The Vera Institute did not even have access to minutes from research review boards (IRBs) for the medical centers that conducted the trials.
2008 NIH Report
Even after this scandal exploded, there was no evidence that Dr. Fauci made any effort to reform NIAID. Six years later, two biomedical ethicists inside the NIH concluded in a January 2008 article in Pediatrics that the agency still did not have adequate protections for vulnerable foster children: “Enrolling wards of the state in research raises two major concerns: the possibility that an unfair share of the burdens of research might fall on wards, and the need to ensure interests of individual wards are accounted for. . . . Having special protections only for some categories is misguided. Furthermore, some of the existing protections ought to be strengthened.”53
During the decades since Dr. Fauci took over NIAID, he has sanctioned drug companies to experiment on at least fourteen thousand children, many of them Black and Hispanic orphans living in foster homes. He permitted these companies to operate without oversight or accountability. Under Dr. Fauci’s laissez faire rubric, these companies systematically abused and, occasionally, killed children.54, 55
Dr. Fauci presided over these atrocities, collaborating with pharmaceutical company researchers and winking at their loose definitions of “informed consent” and “volunteer.” Instead of looking out for the best interests of children, Dr. Fauci gave outlaw drug makers56 free rein to torture vulnerable children behind closed doors, with neither parental permission nor requisite oversight from child welfare authorities.
***
In 1965, my father kicked down the door of the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, where pharmaceutical companies were conducting cruel and often-deadly vaccine experiments on incarcerated children.57 Robert Kennedy declared Willowbrook a “snake pit” and promoted legislation to close the institution and end the exploitation of children. Fifty-five years later, national media and Democratic Party sachems have beatified a man who presided over similar atrocities, somehow elevating him to a kind of secular sainthood.