During the Cold War, the US military and intelligence agencies largely replaced Europe’s colonial armies in those regions, supporting virtually any tinhorn dictator who proved his “anti-Communist” bona fides by rolling out red carpets for US multinationals. When the Berlin Wall fell, the United States already had 655 military bases (now 800)80 across the developing world, and US companies had blank checks in host nations to extract agricultural, mineral, petroleum, and lumber resources, and large markets for finished goods including, notably, pharmaceuticals. After the Soviet bugaboo collapsed, Islamic terrorism and biosecurity supplanted communism as the rationale for a continued US military and corporate presence all over the developing world.
Pharma’s acquisitive longing for Africa’s natural resources and its teeming and compliant populations with their elevated disease burdens helped drive the rise of biosecurity as the spear-tip of corporate imperialism. Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci offered biosecurity as the underlying rationale for their medical neocolonialism project. Paraphrasing the military’s Cold War dogma, Gates and Dr. Fauci warned that if we didn’t stop the germs in Africa, we’d end up fighting them in New York and Los Angeles. They echoed, also, the hackneyed crusaders’ narrative that they were rescuing the continent from famine, pestilence, and ignorance with superior know-how and breakthrough technologies.
The combined Gates/Fauci power to rain foreign aid dollars on capital-starved African governments made them modern imperial viceroys on the continent. WHO became their colonial vassal, legitimizing and facilitating their campaigns to open African markets for drugmakers to dump unwanted products and to experiment with promising new cures.
AIDS Vaccines in Africa
In January 2003, as Gates and Dr. Fauci opened dozens of clinical trials for experimental AIDS vaccines across Africa, Dr. Fauci’s perennial hagiographer, Michael Specter, writing in The New Yorker, raised trenchant questions about “the ethical problems associated with long-term vaccine trials in the developing world—funded by Western donors and designed, largely, by Western scientists.” Specter asks, “Has the race to save Africa from AIDS put Western science at odds with Western ethics?” The article quotes African leaders asking why their continent needed to shoulder the burden of testing expensive vaccines and medicines that—if successful—would be primarily used in Western countries. They complained about pharmaceutical companies automatically lowering safety standards for clinical trials when they stepped onto the African continent. “Why us?” a prominent African journalist asked Specter. “It seems it’s always us. For how many years does Uganda have to be the test case?”81
“I am very worried about these trials,” said Peter Lurie, the deputy director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group. Lurie and his colleague, Sidney Wolfe, complained to Specter about the cavalier attitude of American researchers toward Third World subjects. “Instead of seeing themselves as activists for better care in Africa, scientists will use the poor quality of care to justify what they want to do anyway,” Lurie said. “But you are not permitted simply to use subjects in order to collect data because it is useful to you. That is exploitation and abuse. That is what Tuskegee was.” Lurie was referring to CDC’s notorious decision to leave hundreds of Black Alabama sharecroppers with untreated syphilis for forty years beginning in 1932, in order to document the course of the disease. (I am proud that my uncle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, played a key role in exposing and ending the experiment in 1973.) Lurie added, “If we aren’t careful, we could be in for the greatest injustice in the history of medicine.”82
Later that year, Dr. Fauci’s agency announced that NIAID’s most recent AIDS vaccine experiment had failed. “Please don’t say that I am pessimistic, because I am not,” Anthony Fauci said in 2003, obliquely conceding that HIV and AIDS were not behaving the way his hypotheses predicted. “The best ways to vaccinate don’t work with H.I.V. We need to come up with something new.”83
Gates seemed to think that floods of new money could teach the virus to behave. In July 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced sixteen grants totaling $287 million to create an international network of collaborative research consortia focused on accelerating the pace of HIV vaccine development by funding more than 165 PIs to conduct vaccine trials in nineteen countries.84
Two years later, on July 18, 2008, Dr. Fauci announced the cancellation of the largest human trial to date. It was NIAID’s most promising HIV vaccine by far. Dr. Fauci contributed $140 million of taxpayer money to develop the Merck jab, and NIAID had already begun enrolling 8,500 US volunteers. It would be the first trial of an HIV jab on US citizens. Dr. Fauci said he intended the new trial to determine whether the vaccine could significantly lower the amount of HIV in the blood of those who become infected. Of course, Merck and NIAID had already by then tested the vaccine on 3,000 participants in nine African countries. The latest data were showing that the trial had not gone well. The Times reported coyly that “The PAVE trial had been postponed after a test of the Merck vaccine failed in its two main objectives: to prevent infection and to lower the amount of HIV in the blood among those who became infected.”85
Buried near the end of the New York Times article were some key facts. It turned out that the vaccine was not only ineffective, but researchers reported alarming safety signals that caused a safety monitoring committee to halt the study. Furthermore, instead of preventing infection, the Merck/NIAID researchers reported data suggesting the vaccine actually raised the risk of contracting HIV!86