The special bravado that allowed Dr. Fauci to summon a president to a distant continent, and to make Dr. Fauci’s personal agenda the centerpiece of White House foreign policy, was a demonstration of power that could only provoke the entire awe-struck public health bureaucracy to stand at attention and salute. What FDA bureaucrat would now have the courage to taint this prestigious HHS triumph with awkward questions about safety and efficacy?
Dr. Fauci “wanted the HIVNET site reopened for President Bush’s visit,” Dr. Fishbein told me. “That visit was such an embarrassment to all of us who knew the truth, but everyone fell into line.” The US AIDS media even began to refer to Museveni suddenly as a “benevolent dictator.” Farber remarks, “That Presidential junket was so transparently phony—a shameless exercise in colonial public relations and lies.”
On July 11, 2003, President Bush toured the clinical trial site in Kampala,34 which DAIDS had hurriedly reopened and populated with temporary health workers for the occasion. Dr. Fishbein explained to me, “NIAID officials rushed to reopen the site despite my concerns that it wasn’t ready. But Tramont overruled me. He wanted the restriction lifted ASAP because in his words, ‘the site is now the best in Africa run by Black Africans’ and President Bush was scheduled to be there in four days.” Said Farber, “NIAID officials rushed to reopen the site to paper over the disgrace and to impress and deceive the President.” She added, “It was really straight up—Potemkin’s Village, a vast PR campaign, with nothing behind the Hollywood fa?ade, except death. Dead babies, dead mothers—we will never know their names.”
Almost all of HHS was now behind Dr. Fauci’s project to rewrite history. In July 2002, DAIDS announced that it would reassess the Uganda Nevirapine study.
Presenting awards to one another is a knee-jerk strategy by which vaccine experts paper over malefactions and atrocities. It is therefore not surprising that, to advance the coverup and absolve the Uganda research team, Tramont recommended that Dr. Fauci get his putative NIH boss, Elias Zerhouni, to present Dr. Jackson and his Uganda project researchers who had supervised the African debacle with an NIH award. This strategy would co-opt the NIH Director into the coverup and fortify institutional resistance to a full-blown investigation. Tramont assigned the task to his flunky, DAIDS’s deputy director, John Kagan. But in a rare display of independent good judgment, Kagan protested that giving awards to the clowns who had killed all those Africans—probably with criminal negligence—was a bridge too far: “We cannot lose sight of the fact that they screwed up big time. And you bailed their asses out,” he advised Tramont by email. “I’m all for forgiveness, etc. I’m not for punishing them. But it would be ‘over the top’ to me, to be proclaiming them as heroes. Something to think about before pushing this award thing . . .”
But the conspirators had a problem. NIH medical officers Betsy Smith and Mary Anne Luzar were not willing participants to the coverup. To tie up the last loose ends, Kagan ordered NIAID’s ethics officer, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, to reprimand Luzar for insubordination. The admonishment would bring the agency’s Ethics Division into the coverup and create an insurance policy if Luzar blabbed to anyone about all those African kids with collapsed livers; an official reprimand from a supposedly “independent” ethics officer would allow NIAID to discredit Luzar as a “disgruntled employee.”
But Dr. Fishbein’s investigation convinced him that the whistleblower, Luzar, was a hero. He told Tramont that he could find no justification for Luzar’s reprimand and advised him against issuing the official rebuke: “They were out to get her because she refused to compromise her integrity,” Dr. Fishbein told me. Faced with Dr. Fishbein’s resistance, Tramont backed down. In Dr. Fishbein, Dr. Fauci’s team had run up against a public health official naive enough or conscientious enough to say “no.” Meanwhile, Dr. Fishbein’s investigation of Luzar gave him additional reasons to mistrust Kagan’s judgment. Female employees reported to Dr. Fishbein that Kagan was sexually harassing them.
Tramont may have felt that Dr. Fishbein was purposefully goading him when, instead of rebuking Luzar, Dr. Fishbein filed a sexual harassment complaint against Tramont’s sidekick and enforcer. “Kagan was Fauci’s bagman,” AP reporter John Solomon told me. “He was a career Army guy from Fort Detrick or Walter Reed.” Dr. Fishbein concurred in this assessment. “He was a ‘just following orders’ kind of guy, brought in to put a layer of insulation between Fauci and all the institutionalized mismanagement in his HIV clinical trials.” Dr. Fishbein adds that the corruption that had begun with AZT “then metastasized throughout the entire program.” Dr. Fishbein adds, “The sexual harassment issues aside, Kagan was a miserable manager.”
Boehringer Ingleheim never resubmitted its application to the FDA for preventing maternal-to-child transmission of HIV. Nevertheless, WHO—which, as we shall soon see, was by then under the control of Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci—began shipping this lethal concoction to developing nations globally to use on their pregnant women.35 “It’s a mystery why Nevirapine was ever developed, launched or marketed to the developing world the way it was,” says journalist Celia Farber, “since it was rejected by every Western drug safety agency—every single time. Why was it then re-purposed and shipped to non-Westerners? The double standard is quite stark. We need to start calling it what it is.” Says Dr. Fishbein: “The tragic irony here is that the Kampala Nevirapine research was performed to a level of standards that would be insufficient for supporting the drug’s approval for use in the United States, but Fauci fervently defended the study as adequate to justify giving nevirapine to Black Africans. Frankly, it strikes me as racist.” Reverend Jesse Jackson echoed Fishbein’s sentiment: “This was not a thoughtful and reasonable decision, but a crime against humanity. Research standards and drug quality that are unacceptable in the US and other Western countries must never be pushed onto Africa.”36
Profits to Die For