46 AP, “Woman died during AIDS drug study,” NBC News (Dec. 16, 2004), https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/woman-died-during-aids-drug-study-flna1c9448535
47 Edwin M. Thorpe et al., “Maternal toxicity with continuous nevirapine in pregnancy: results from PACTG 1022,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Jul 1, 2004), pubmed.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/15213559/
48 NIAID, “An International Study to Evaluate Recombinant Interleukin-2 in HIV Positive Patients Taking Antiretroviral Therapy (ESPRIT),” Clinicaltrials.gov (Aug 31, 2001), https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00004978?term=ESPRIT%2C+IL-2&cond=HIV&draw=2&rank=1
49 Email exchange between Drs. Larry Fox and Jonathan Fishbein, December 12–15, 2003
50 John Solomon, Report: “Researchers mum on financial interests,” Associated Press/NBC, (Jan 10, 2005), https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/report-researchers-mumon-financial-interests-flna1c9475821
51 Ibid.
52 Solomon, op. cit.
53 Janice Hopkins Tanne, “Royalty payments to staff researchers cause new NIH troubles,” BMJ (Jan. 22, 2005), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC545012/
54 Ibid.
55 Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Reviewing the HIVNET 012 Perinatal HIV Prevention Study. Review of the HIVNET 012 Perinatal HIV Prevention Study. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2005. 6, Response to the Charge to the Committee. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22299/
56 Sean Moulton, “NIH AIDS Division Director Fired Possible Retaliation for Whistleblowing,” Center for Effective Government (July 11, 2005), https://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/2495
57 Dr. Ruth Kirschstein, Senior Advisor to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, to Deputy Director, NIH: Subject: Management Review. August 9, 2004
58 Valendar Turner, “HIV drug remains unproven without placebo trial,” NATURE, (Mar 2005), https://ur.booksc.eu/book/10543591/51e6c0
59 Michelle Ruiz, “For Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Christine Grady, Love Conquers All,” Vogue (Feb. 11, 2021), https://www.vogue.com/article/dr-anthony-fauci-and-dr-christine-grady-love-story
ChildrensHealthDefense.org/fauci-book
childrenshd.org/fauci-book
For updates, new citations and references, and new information about topics in this chapter:
CHAPTER 9
THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease.
—Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden” 1897
In 1984, following Dr. Robert Gallo’s notorious press conference, Dr. Fauci promised the world an AIDS vaccine forthwith. Delivering a functioning AIDS immunization would, of course, be the most persuasive debunking of the Duesbergians and other critics of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. “Finally,” Dr. Fauci assured the global press, “given the fact that we now have the virus in our hands, it is quite possible, in fact, it’s inevitable that we will develop a vaccine for AIDS.”1 Margaret Heckler told the media scrum, “We hope to have . . . a vaccine ready for testing in about two years.”2 Heckler was off the mark by a third of a century and counting. In the intervening decades, the federal government spent well over half of a trillion dollars on AIDS. Dr. Fauci has dedicated much of that moolah to his quest for an elusive vaccine to immunize people against HIV. Dr. Fauci pumped our money into nearly 100 vaccine candidates, with none of these coming even close to the finish line. All these disappointments never darkened Dr. Fauci’s buoyant optimism that he will soon collar that retreating horizon.
For a decade, Oklahoma’s US Senator Tom Coburn, MD, occupied front-row seats in Congressional and Senate Health Committees during Dr. Fauci’s annual gallivants to Capitol Hill. By 2010, Coburn had wearied at the NIAID director’s bootless promises of the imminent delivery of his quixotic jab. When, on May 18, Dr. Fauci returned to the Senate hearing room to tout “significant progress in HIV vaccine research,” the normally taciturn Dr. Coburn finally exploded. He lambasted Dr. Fauci for deliberately deceiving lawmakers and accused his fellow physician of hoodwinking Congress into approving appropriations with no purpose beyond sustaining his bureaucracy: “Most scientists involved in AIDS research believe that an HIV vaccine is further away than ever.”3
It had taken years of Dr. Fauci’s ritualistic pilgrimages for Coburn to recognize, with indignant clarity, that attempted HIV vaccines are an ATM for NIH, whether they work or not. From an institutional standpoint, none of Dr. Fauci’s failed experiments were, after all, failures. They each resulted in massive transfers of public lucre to Dr. Fauci’s Pharma partners, and sustaining funding for NIAID’s laboratories and PIs. The only true failure at NIAID would be a shrinking workforce.
This verity remains utterly obscure to the dewy-eyed press, which faithfully applauds each of Dr. Fauci’s Groundhog Day encores. In 2019, nearly a decade after Coburn’s remonstrance, and only a few months before the COVID19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci made a surprise announcement: he finally had a working HIV vaccine. While the inoculation had demonstrated a bare-bones 30 percent efficacy in human trials in Thailand, data from the Phase III trial in South Africa looked promising, and NIAID was getting teed up to test the vaccine on Americans.4 Dr. Fauci added some deflating caveats: While his new vaccine didn’t prevent transmission of AIDS, the nimble technocrat jauntily predicted that intrepid souls who took the jab would find that when they did get AIDS, the symptoms would seem to be much reduced. So confident was Dr. Fauci of the media’s slavish credulity that he assumed, correctly, that he’d never need to answer the many questions raised by this feverish gibberish. That entire odd proposition received zero critical press commentary. His success at slapping lipstick on this donkey and selling it to the world as a Thoroughbred may have emboldened his ruse—a year later—of placing similar cosmetics on the COVID vaccines that, likewise, neither prevent disease nor preclude transmission.
A PARADE OF HORRIBLES
The thirty-year decampment of journalistic scrutiny means that there is still no coherent public narrative chronicling Dr. Fauci’s futile quest for his “inevitable” AIDS vaccine, much less accountability. Industry and government scientists have instead shrouded the scandalous saga in secrecy, subterfuge, and prevarication, obscuring a thousand calamities and a sea of tears deserving its own book. Every meager effort to research the debacle—on Google, PubMed, news sites, and published clinical trial data—yields only shocking new atrocities—a grim, repetitive parade of horribles: heartbreaking tragedies, entrenched institutional arrogance and racism, broken promises, vast expenditures of squandered treasure, and the recurring chicanery of Anthony Fauci, Bob Gallo, and Bill Gates. It’s a darker version of Groundhog Day, devoid of humor, irony, wisdom, or redemption. It will be an easier read if I touch on only a few random lowlights of the painful saga.