That same day, Dr. Fishbein received a letter of termination from Tramont. Dr. Fishbein sought and received an automatic postponement of his sacking as he argued his whistleblower case before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Tramont’s action, in the middle of a congressional investigation, was a naked gesture of defiance toward NIH’s congressional overlords from both political parties. It signaled HHS’s resolution to protect Dr. Fauci at any cost and to muzzle criticism by his principal detractor.
Teflon Tony had come a long way since 1987, when his public blistering by Congress had left him remorseful and terrified for his future. By 2004, he had the protection of his boss, a powerful Republican president, who—thanks to Dr. Fauci—was also implicated in the corrupt HIVNET trials and who cared little for the distempers of a Democrat-controlled Congress. Frustrated and angry at Dr. Fauci’s insubordination, Grassley and Baucus fired off a letter dated June 30 to NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, demanding an explanation for Dr. Fishbein’s firing and accusing NIAID of retaliating against Dr. Fishbein to silence his corruption charges against NIAID.56 The letter noted that retaliation against an employee for reporting misconduct is “unacceptable, illegal, and violates the Whistleblower Protection Act.”
Meanwhile, a secret internal NIH review of the Nevirapine trials was confirming Dr. Fishbein’s worst accusations about Dr. Fauci and HIVNET. On August 9, 2004, Dr. Ruth Kirschstein, senior advisor to Zerhouni, sent the NIH director the results of her investigation. Kirschstein warned that Dr. Fauci’s efforts to fire Fishbein at the very least gave the “appearance of reprisal.” Kirschstein added that “It is clear that [Dr. Fauci’s AIDS Branch] is a troubled organization” and that Dr. Fishbein’s complaint “is clearly a sketch of a deeper issue.”57 Zerhouni kept quiet about these damning results from the agency’s internal investigations. Defying the Senate, he fired Dr. Fishbein on July 4, 2005.
Following his dismissal, Dr. Fishbein brought his case before the Merit Systems Protection Board, asserting protection from any official retaliation under federal whistleblower laws. The MSPB reinstated Dr. Fishbein after determining his firing was “wrongful retribution.” It was clear, however, that Dr. Fishbein had no future at NIH. He negotiated a termination deal. The terms of Dr. Fishbein’s settlement agreement with NIAID are secret, and the deal forbids him from discussing its particulars.
Dr. Fishbein told me that despite his nominal victory, Dr. Fauci continued to punish him from afar with reverberations reaching far beyond NIAID. “I couldn’t get a job in public health for five years,” Dr. Fishbein says of Dr. Fauci’s vendetta. “Everyone in science is terrified of crossing him. He’s like a mafia kingpin. He controls everything and everyone in public health.” Dr. Fishbein added, “He spreads so much money around and everyone knows he is vindictive. I had one friend tell me, ‘I can’t risk hiring you because I can’t afford to anger Fauci.’” Says Dr. Fishbein, “This was my first exposure to the cancel culture.”
He further reminisced: “I left the private sector and took the NIH job because I wanted to do public service. But I was very naive. I believed the government could find solutions, and that justice always prevailed. My experience at the Division of AIDS really opened my eyes about how the system really operated. The federal budget is a big trough to feed special interest groups. But if you become wise to it, open your mouth, and get on the wrong side of someone really powerful, they are out for blood. The government lawyers up, and they have unlimited resources to burn you. Truth may not be on their side, but they can throw every obstacle in your way to getting a fair hearing of your grievance. And you can’t get justice because litigation will drain you to your last penny. The system isn’t designed to help the aggrieved party. I couldn’t coerce Fauci for a deposition. He was too busy doing interviews and accepting awards. There were never any consequences for the perpetrators. They continued merrily in their careers. I had to start all over again. If they are determined to ruin your life, they can do it.”
Farber is also disenchanted. “They unleash such violence over your whole existence if you cross them. You never walk the same again. They make you feel like you are a dead person, totally devalued. They put a lot of money into these attack campaigns over my article. They went nuclear. Their crusade to discredit and destroy me had lasting impacts on my life. But you know what? I didn’t get murdered. Joyce [Hafford] did. I think of her all the time.
“And the real losers in that battle,” added Farber, “were the millions of African women and babies forced to take Nevirapine, a drug that does not prevent AIDS but sickens and kills people who take it.” In the end, Dr. Fauci succeeded in rigging corrupt clinical trials, concealing catastrophic cheating, and deftly manipulating the politics to bring his dangerous and inefficacious drug, Nevirapine, to market.
In March 2005, Dr. Valendar Turner, a surgeon at the Department of Health in Perth, Australia, pointed out in a letter to Nature: “None of the available evidence for Nevirapine comes from a trial in which it was tested against a placebo. Yet, as the study’s senior author has said, a placebo is the only way a scientist can assess a drug’s effectiveness with scientific certainty.”58
Dr. Turner observed that the transmission rate that HIVNET 012 reported for HIV—13.1 percent—was above the background transmission rate. “The HIVNET 012 outcome is higher than the 12 percent transmission rate reported in a prospective study of 561 African women given no antiretroviral treatment. This, in effect, is the placebo group.” If anything, then, Dr. Fauci’s pet drug has aggravated rather than prevented transmission in all those African babies he was pretending to save.
Farber argues that, under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the failure of researchers to properly control with a placebo group “is perhaps the outstanding characteristic of AIDS research in general.” The statistical gimmick of getting rid of the inert placebo control group would become a tool wielded by Dr. Fauci to gain approvals for hundreds of new drugs and vaccines, from AIDS to COVID.
According to Farber, “As it was, there was no placebo group, so HIVNET’s results are a statistical trick, a shadow play, in which success is measured against another drug and not against an inert placebo—the gold standard of clinical trials.”