Gallo Redux
In 1991, as part of a settlement ending years of litigation, Bob Gallo finally admitted that he had stolen the HIV virus from Montagnier. He was hardly chastened. On April 14, John Crewdson reported, in the Chicago Tribune, that one of Gallo’s experiments with an HIV vaccine had killed three AIDS patients in Paris the previous year.5 NIH had launched the project before handing it off to Gallo and his trusty henchman, Daniel Zagury, who tested the concoction on volunteers in France and, predictably, an African country, this time Zaire. His cronies at the National Cancer Institute had granted Gallo’s experiments “expedited review, approval.” How expedited? Just twenty-five days. The patients died after Gallo’s team inoculated them with an HIV vaccine derived from cowpox. NIH scientists formulated the preparation from vaccinia—a virus that causes cowpox in bovines—into which the government scientists genetically inserted a fragment of the HIV virus. Apparently, the cowpox remained infectious, and three of their nineteen Paris volunteers immediately developed “vaccinia,” a frequently fatal necrosis, which caused acute lesions and an expanse of hardened, swollen, purplish-red skin around the victims’ injection sites as the disease devoured their flesh.
As is typical of AIDS vaccine research, the NIH scientists cached the atrocity. Neither Gallo nor Zagury reported the deaths. Instead, Gallo vaunted the trial as a great success in the Lancet’s July 21, 1990, edition, audaciously claiming that there had been “no deaths” and “no complications or discomfort” among any of those to whom he administered the preparation.6
One of Dr. Gallo’s casualties was a forty-two-year-old classic literature professor—regarded as a brilliant Egyptologist—who succumbed March 5, 1990, more than four months before Gallo’s article appeared. A second volunteer, a thirty-six-year-old Paris University librarian, died on July 6, weeks before Gallo published his article. Friends described Gallo’s two victims as healthy and vibrant in the days and weeks immediately preceding their deaths. “It was unimaginable,” a co-worker said of the robust professor, “that he could have died six weeks later.”7
A longtime friend of Dr. Gallo’s third victim, who died on October 1, 1990, asked Zagury’s principal assistant, Dr. Odile Picard, whether the experimental vaccine may have caused the destructive lesions that the coroner detected on the victim’s brain during autopsy. Picard assured him the vaccines were not at fault, adding, “We don’t know what this is.” A month after this conversation, Picard delivered another paper, also signed by Gallo and Zagury, at an international AIDS meeting in Paris, the Colloque des Cent Gardes. Here again Picard mentioned nothing about the three deaths, telling her colleagues that the vaccinia preparation had shown itself “safe in patients.”8 Perhaps she meant safe for those patients who survived.
André Boué, the distinguished French geneticist and secretary to France’s National Committee on Medical Ethics, who approved the vaccine trials in 1987, complained that Gallo never informed his panel that any of the subjects had died. Officials of Assistance Publique, the municipal hospital system in Paris, grumbled that Gallo’s team also neglected to tell them of the three fatalities. French officials only learned of the deaths from physicians who became suspicious at hospitals where Gallo’s team had shipped their ailing recruits to die.9
NIH managers also protested that Gallo had not come clean about the deaths. One functionary called Gallo’s omission “very troubling.” NIH records show that neither Gallo nor any of his NIH confederates informed the Office of Protection from Research Risks about the body count. Federal law requires that OPRR approve human experimentation and that researchers report adverse events, including, of course, the most adverse event. In February, citing multiple violations of federal regulations by Gallo and his team on both sides of the Atlantic, the OPRR abruptly halted the experiment.10
Channeling his mentor’s hallmark chutzpah, Zagury, after submitting the chipper Lancet article, applied for a patent on the deadly vaccine technology called “Methods of Inducing Immune Responses to the AIDS Virus,” with Zagury listing himself as an “inventor” in the application.11
Once again, the omertà held. There was no investigation, no accountability, and no word of what sort of injuries the volunteers in the Zaire arm of the study may have suffered. Characteristically, Gallo was unembarrassed, unbowed, and undaunted by this latest setback. The bought-and-bullied virology community stayed silent about a scandal that would have implicated NIH and provoked unwanted scrutiny of the HIV orthodoxies.
Five years later, Gallo left NCI and established the Institute for Human Virology (IHV) with his two longtime cronies, William Blattner, who served for 22 years under Gallo as Director of Viral Epidemiology at NCI, and Robert Redfield, a military doctor and researcher who shared Gallo’s lifelong obsession with HIV and his ethical lacunae.
Dr. Robert Redfield
Many Americans will recognize Redfield as Donald Trump’s CDC Director during the 2020 COVID pandemic. Dr. Redfield and his faithful sidekick, Dr. Deborah Birx, served with Dr. Fauci on Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force.
Both Redfield and Birx were former Army medical officers who, in the 1980s and 1990s, led the military’s AIDS research, a specialty that seems like a magnet for hucksters and quacks.