The pharmaceutical and the medical cartel’s historical preference was to test dangerous drugs and medical procedures on people of color. But by the late 1990s, Black Americans were increasingly suspicious of medical authorities. President Clinton’s belated 1996 official apology37 to the victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments (1935–1973) had reminded Blacks of other historic atrocities, including the barbaric gynecological experiments on Black women by Dr. J. Marion Simms (“Father of Modern Gynecology”).38 In 1992, a Los Angeles Times exposé revealed that the CDC had been conducting unlicensed experiments with a deadly flu vaccine on Black children in Haiti and Cameroon, and on 1,500 Black children in South Central Los Angeles beginning in 1986.39 Blacks were therefore understandably reluctant to sign up for clinical trials. Despite vigorous efforts by pharmaceutical companies and regulators to recruit Blacks, fewer than 4 percent of clinical trial enrollees in America were Black.40 Nevertheless, Dr. Fauci seemed to have a genius for finding Blacks, both American and African, to participate in his HIV chemotherapy drug experiments.
In 2003, an HIV-positive African American mother in Memphis, Tennessee, died during one of Dr. Fauci’s Nevirapine drug trials.41 In April of that year, Joyce Ann Hafford—four months pregnant and already the mother of a gifted thirteen-year-old—was shocked to learn she had tested positive following a routine HIV test recommended by her pediatrician. Believing her diagnosis to be a death sentence, Hafford enrolled in DAIDS’s clinical trial at the University of Tennessee in hopes of saving her soon-to-be-born son from getting AIDS. Dr. Fauci’s local PI, Dr. Edwin Thorpe, planned to recruit 440 pregnant women to determine the “treatment limiting toxicities” of four HIV drugs in pregnant women.42 It’s an embarrassment to me, to my family, and particularly to my deceased aunt and godmother that NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development was a collaborator in this fraud.
Hafford was healthy and symptom-free. None of her subsequent tests ever showed any clinical markers for AIDS, and Dr. Thorpe never told Hafford that the HIV test measured only for the presence of antibodies and was not a reliable indicator of HIV infection. Furthermore, pregnancy frequently triggers false positive results on HIV antibody tests, and Dr. Thorpe tested Hafford only once. To make matters worse, her family later found that Joyce never signed her consent form, suggesting that Dr. Thorpe never informed her of Nevirapine’s risks.
Hafford’s health took a steep nosedive after her first dose of Nevirapine. It only took a few days before Hafford was showing undeniable signs of dwindling liver function. Instead of taking her off the drugs that he knew could be deadly, Dr. Thorpe prescribed cortisone cream for her skin rashes. Within weeks, Hafford was presenting with alarming signals of hepatic collapse. Forty-one days after starting the trial, she was dead from liver failure—the same injury about which both FDA and JAMA had issued clear warnings. On July 29, doctors delivered her baby, Sterling, by C-section three days before Joyce died.
When the shattered family gathered around her body, Dr. Thorpe and his team told them, to their bewilderment, that Joyce had died of rapidly progressed AIDS. They were lying. The year after her passing, Associated Press reporter John Solomon gave Joyce’s family a trove of DAIDS reports he had obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request.43 In those internal memos, DAIDS officials openly acknowledged to one another that Nevirapine caused Joyce Hafford’s liver to fail.
Dr. Thorpe and his colleagues kept Sterling on AZT for three months. Fifteen months later, Sterling tested negative for HIV. Despite their repeated requests, Dr. Thorpe and his hospital refused to release Sterling’s medical records to the Haffords. Sterling’s family believes that NIAID withheld those records because they would prove that neither Joyce nor Sterling ever had HIV; all babies born to mothers with HIV test positive at birth, and almost all babies shed the maternal antibodies by eighteen months.
Celia Farber, who focused her Harper’s exposé on Joyce’s death and the HIVNET coverup, is still angry. Farber, who grew close to the Hafford family during the months she spent researching Nevirapine, blames Dr. Fauci directly: “The death of Joyce Anne Hafford in Memphis was a methodical calculated homicide of a black woman by Fauci’s henchmen,” Farber told me. “They had to know they were killing her when they saw her go into jaundice and they just watched her liver crash. They wouldn’t let her off the Nevirapine. It seemed like very clear medical murder at Dr. Fauci’s doorstep. I’m still trying to recover from it.”
At that time, Dr. Jonathan M. Fishbein, MD, was DAIDS’s first director of the Office for Policy in Clinical Research Operations.44 His job was to monitor and enforce compliance to federal research and ethical policy in DAIDS-sponsored studies. In the summer of 2003, he intervened in Hafford’s case. According to Dr. Fishbein, DAIDS’s medical staff always knew that Hafford died of Nevirapine toxicity. “Nevirapine’s toxicity,” Dr. Fishbein told me, “particularly its association with liver failure, was well documented and the PI certainly had that knowledge.”
That August, Dr. Fishbein sent a memo to Dr. Fauci’s AIDS Branch Director, Ed Tramont, informing him that Nevirapine caused Hafford’s lethal liver failure.45 Tramont wrote back, “Ouch. Not much wwe [sic] can do about dumd [sic] docs!”46 Tramont’s glib riposte seems to have been like a subtle signal to Dr. Fishbein to get in line with NIAID’s strategic coverup. Dr. Fishbein told me that acknowledging Nevirapine’s role in Hafford’s death would have jeopardized Nevirapine’s FDA approval. Despite Tramont’s crass cypher, Dr. Fishbein’s regulatory team nevertheless informed the FDA about Hafford’s drug-related death.
Hafford was not the only trial recruit to suffer. In the initial Phase I trial on twenty-one pregnant women, NIAID’s investigators would later report that four of twenty-two infants died and twelve suffered “serious adverse events.” Furthermore, the studies suggested that Nevirapine was ineffective. None of the women experienced reduction of viral loads. When Thorpe and his colleagues finally published the results of their Nevirapine study in 2004, they acknowledged that “the study was suspended because of greater than expected toxicity. . . .”47
Rooting Out Integrity in the Workplace