US military documents12 show that in 1992 Redfield and Birx, his then-assistant—both serving at Walter Reed in Washington—published inaccurate data in the New England Journal of Medicine, claiming that an HIV vaccine they helped develop and tested on Walter Reed patients was effective.13 They both must have known the vaccine was worthless.
In 1992, an Air Force medical office accused Redfield of engaging in “a systematic pattern of data manipulation, inappropriate statistical analyses and misleading data presentation in an apparent attempt to promote the usefulness of the GP160 AIDS vaccine.”14 A specially convened Air Force tribunal on scientific fraud and misconduct concluded that Redfield’s “misleading or, possibly, deceptive” information “seriously threatens his credibility as a researcher and has the potential to negatively impact AIDS research funding for military institutions as a whole. His allegedly unethical behavior creates false hope and could result in premature deployment of the vaccine.” 15 The tribunal recommended investigation by a “fully independent outside investigative body.”16 Under threat of court-martial, loss of his medical license, and possible imprisonment, Dr. Redfield confessed to angry DOD interrogators and to the tribunal that his analyses were faulty and deceptive. He agreed to correct them and to publicly admit the vaccine was worthless at an upcoming AIDS conference at which he was scheduled to speak in July 1992. Perhaps it was the grandeur of the hall, the microphone, and the audience that conspired to weaken his resolve. Instead of retracting his falsehood, he boldly repeated his fraudulent claims at this and two subsequent international HIV conferences.17 As astonished prosecutors watched, he then brazenly parroted his debunked perjuries in testimony before Congress, swearing that his vaccine cured HIV.18
Redfield’s bold gambit worked. Bamboozled by Redfield’s brazen ballyhoo, Congress immediately appropriated $20 million to the military to support Redfield and Birx’s research project.19 Enraged military prosecutors wanted to court-martial Redfield. But as Public Citizen complained in a 1994 letter to the Congressional Committee’s Chairman, Henry Waxman, the dedicated budget hikes promised by Congress prompted the Army to kill the investigation, silence its own prosecutors, and “whitewash” Redfield’s misdeeds.20
By snatching triumph from the jaws of career-ending disaster, Redfield had pulled off the perfect crime. The bold flimflam catapulted Birx and Redfield into their stellar careers as top federal health officials. Whatever other lessons he learned from the episode, recklessness and mendacity continued to be Redfield’s go-to strategies. Gallo’s partnership with Redfield became a gold mine for both men. Dr. Gallo told me in a May 11, 2021, email that the Institute of Human Virology’s (IHV) annual budget is in excess of $100 million: “A majority of this funding is from PEPFAR.” President George W. Bush created PEPFAR in 2003, at Dr. Fauci’s urging, to coordinate AIDS assistance from all the various federal government, civilian, and military sources. Since 2014, PEPFAR’s administrator has been Deborah Birx, who simultaneously served on the board of the Bill Gates–backed Global Fund.
In 2017, the IHV’s Annual Report boasted that these two quacksalvers had won over $600 million in grants—much of it from NIH and Bill Gates—since they cemented their lucrative partnership.21 They seem to have spent the bulk of that loot experimenting with failed HIV drugs and vaccines on Black people, including 20,000 residents of Washington and Baltimore and 1.3 million misfortunates from Africa and the Caribbean.
Gallo and Redfield’s IHV partnership was a good bet. They had an academic affiliation with the University of Maryland, their own nonprofit to launder grant money from their old NIH, NIAID, and NCI cronies, and a for-profit spinoff that would allow them to monetize their taxpayer-funded discoveries. Their former accomplices at NIH were pumping $200 million annually into the HIV vaccine boondoggle.22 Moreover, Redfield had an inside track through Birx and through his military confederates to the vast Pentagon budgets for bioweapons and infectious disease. Those connections yielded plenty of federal dough to keep everyone in the chips. Furthermore, in 1998 a new HIV funder appeared—one with deep pockets and a shared obsession with vaccines.
That year, the William H. Gates Foundation announced a nine-year, $500 million plan to fund AIDS vaccine development through Gates’s International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI)—the predecessor organization to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI).23 IAVI’s president, Seth Berkley—Gates’s faithful and extravagantly compensated24 minion—said the plan would fund multiple efficacy trials of AIDS vaccine candidates in developing countries. If any of the vaccines worked even reasonably well on sub-Saharan Africans, they could then presumably be tested in Western countries.
Despite Redfield’s well-publicized history as a charlatan and pretender, President Donald Trump put him in charge of the CDC at a time when the agency’s overarching mission was promoting COVID vaccines. Trump also elevated Birx, a lifelong protégée to both Redfield and Anthony Fauci and confidante to Bill Gates. These three vaccine mountebanks—Redfield, Birx, and Fauci—led the White House coronavirus task force and steered America’s COVID response during the first year of the pandemic.
The trio—none of whom ever treated a COVID patient—adopted controversial strategies to confine the nation under house arrest, shut down the global economy, deny the public access to early treatment and lifesaving therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, excite persistent public terror through the broadcasts of deliberately exaggerated death and case counts, and repeatedly tell the world that “the only path back to normal is a miraculous vaccine.” With minimal scientific support, they imposed draconian quarantine, mask, and social-distancing mandates, purposefully or accidentally inducing a species of mass psychosis called “Stockholm syndrome” wherein hostages become grateful to their captors convinced that the only path to survival is unquestioning obedience.
The Gates/Fauci Bromance