60 David Daleiden, “University of Pittsburgh Won’t Explain its Planned Parenthood Ties,” Center for Medical Progress, Newsweek opinion page (May 26, 2021), https://www.newsweek.com/university-pittsburgh-wont-explain-its-planned-parenthood-ties-opinion-1594564
ChildrensHealthDefense.org/fauci-book
childrenshd.org/fauci-book
For updates, new citations and references, and new information about topics in this chapter:
CHAPTER 8
WHITE MISCHIEF: DR. FAUCI’S AFRICAN ATROCITIES
“They increased the number of diseases from two to nearly thirty that could be classified as AIDS, and after that they started a global testing program of ‘vulnerable populations,’ which just coincidentally happen to be people not in a position to defend themselves easily. They started to find AIDS everywhere, including in Africa, but including in the United States—and wouldn’t you know, one of the communities they found was the African-American community, and they tested a lot of women and they found a lot of HIV-positive women, and they decided, well, let’s go forward.”
—Kary Mullis, winner of 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry
As Vera Sharav points out, racism is an abiding feature of medical authoritarianism and human experimentation. Molecular biologist Harvey Bialy, the editor of the Nature Biotechnology journal, observed that the subtle backdrop of racial and sexual bigotry and bullying are the distinguishing attributes of AIDS research: “The fearful fascination with the contagion was amplified by the official narrative that the disease originated in Africans doing weird things with monkeys, and spread to the voodoo kingdom of Haiti, and that the sexual depravity of homosexuals drove the disease into the United States.” Dr. Fauci’s critic, Charles Ortleb, the editor of New York Native and author of a biography of the NIAID director, recalls that the theme of unwanted minorities spreading contagion was a standardized soliloquy of totalitarianism, most notoriously Hitler’s stoking of public fears of tuberculosis to incite bigotry toward Jews: “There was always this undertone of bigotry with AIDS. I don’t think we can dismiss as coincidence that the population that they targeted for their toxic concoctions were gays, Blacks, Hispanics, and Africans.”
And Dr. Fauci did not restrict his unethical experiments with AIDS drugs to American children. By June 2003, NIH and NIAID were running 10,906 clinical trials in ninety countries, and Dr. Fauci’s pioneering AIDS Branch, newly christened DAIDS (Division of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), was testing new toxic antiviral concoctions in some four hundred clinical trials in the United States and globally.1 Dr. Fauci’s PIs targeted developing nations that lacked strong institutional structures for protecting impoverished citizens from the abusive practices of powerful pharmaceutical multinationals. According to Vera Sharav, Dr. Fauci had NIAID and its pharmaceutical company partners move his most controversial and risky studies offshore “because they can do stuff that they could never get away with in the United States.”
Journalist Celia Farber concurs with Sharav’s assessment: “The racism is cloaked inside carefully crafted philanthropic manipulations such as ‘access’ to drugs. It’s never access to clean drinking water, education, sanitation, nutrition. It’s a very blighting message for the US to constantly be browbeating Africans with our self-serving messaging that they are so sick, and we have just the drugs to ‘save’ their lives. When the opposite happens, it’s swept away and hidden behind the false front of charity. I call it Pharma-Colonialism.”2
Africa has been a Pharma colony for over a century. It is the venue of choice for companies seeking cooperative government officials, compliant populations, the lowest per-patient enrollment costs, and lax oversight by media and regulatory officials. Powerless, often illiterate, and, if necessary, disposable quasi volunteers allow Pharma’s PIs to paper over even catastrophic side effects and mistakes. In 2005, FDA officials learned that Dr. Fauci’s DAIDS team had concealed scores of deaths and hundreds of injuries during HIV drug trials in Africa with another of his toxic chemotherapy vanity products, Nevirapine.3, 4, 5
Dr. Fauci’s fingerprints were all over DAIDS’s sketchy African experiments. In October 1988, his success at getting approval for AZT won him the equivalent of a billion-dollar lottery for a career technocrat—a mention during then-Vice President George H. W. Bush’s presidential debate:
You’ve probably never heard of him. He’s a very fine researcher, top doctor at National Institute of Health, working hard doing something, research on this disease of AIDS.
The accolade gained him an even larger prize—access to and the trust of the new president.
Two administrations later, Dr. Fauci warned President George W. Bush that HIV had gotten a toehold in Africa and was spreading like wildfire. He persuaded the president to demonstrate his bona fides as a “compassionate conservative” by redirecting the United States foreign aid spending into the heroic enterprise of eliminating African AIDS. Accordingly, on January 19, 2002, President Bush announced a $15 billion package to combat AIDS, including a $500 million program to purchase millions of doses of Nevirapine for distribution to African mothers and children.6 Dr. Fauci told the President that Nevirapine would save millions of lives by preventing maternal transmission of HIV to unborn children. President Bush would later repeat this promise in his 2003 State of the Union address.
Dr. Fauci’s artful 1988 achievement of winning FDA approvals for AZT had launched the AIDS drug gold rush. Nevirapine was German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim’s beachhead in the race. Boehringer had apparently lifted Nevirapine from the same toxic junk pile from which Burroughs Wellcome had retrieved AZT. Canadian regulators rejected Nevirapine—in 1996 and 1998—due to its potent toxicity and dubious efficacy.7 In December 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association advised health care workers exposed to HIV to avoid prescribing Nevirapine after the drug caused life-threatening liver toxicity in patients. A 2001 FDA review reported twenty “serious adverse events” (meaning, death, hospitalization, “life-threatening,” or permanently disabling) resulting from brief, prophylactic Nevirapine exposure.8 Nevertheless, the German chemical company found a soft landing for its product at NIAID.
Another Drug Too Big to Fail