Dr. Fauci said he reached his decision to abort the coming trial after meeting with scientists trying to understand why the Merck vaccine malfunctioned. Dr. Fauci’s colleagues could offer no explanation for the vaccine’s failure. Lawrence K. Altman of the New York Times reported that Dr. Fauci admitted that after a decade of effort, “scientists realized that they did not know enough about how HIV vaccines and the immune system interact.” Dr. Fauci told the Times that it was becoming clearer that more fundamental research and animal testing would be needed before an HIV vaccine was ever marketed. These were stunning admissions, which seemed to validate the critiques by Duesberg and others who predicted the inevitable failure of a vaccine based on the defective HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Dr. Fauci said he had concluded that scientists must go a step at a time because they “did not yet know fundamental facts like which immune reactions are the most important in preventing the infection.”87 Cornell University scientist Kendall A. Smith made an even broader confession of error: “We really have not understood what actually constitutes a successful vaccine, despite the more than two centuries that have elapsed since Sir Edward Jenner described the first effective vaccine for smallpox virus in 1798. Consequently, all of the vaccines currently in use were developed empirically, and only within the past 50 years, without a comprehensive understanding as to how the immune system functions.”88
“If Fauci’s HIV/AIDS hypotheses were true, they should have been able to develop a vaccine,” observes Dr. David Rasnick, a PhD biochemist who has worked for thirty years in the pharmaceutical biotech field. “Fauci’s fundamental conundrum is that he has told everybody to diagnose AIDS based on the presence of HIV antibodies. With every other disease, the presence of antibodies is the signal that the patient has vanquished the disease. With AIDS, Fauci and Gallo, and now Gates, claim it’s a sign you’re about to die. Think about it; if the objective of an AIDS vaccine is to stimulate antibody production, then success would mean that every vaccinated person would also have an AIDS diagnosis. I mean, this is fodder for a comedy bit. It’s like someone gave the Three Stooges an annual billion-dollar budget!”
On October 8, 2015, Gallo’s Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine announced the launch of its Phase 1 human trials of Gallo’s latest HIV vaccine candidate. A consortium led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $23.4 million to Gallo’s research on this vaccine. Other money came from Redfield’s pals in the US Military HIV Research Program.89
Gallo launched his clinical trial in collaboration with Profectus BioSciences, a biotech firm that he recently spun off from IHV to allow him to monetize the research he conducted with tax-deductible funding from Gates and taxpayer dollars from NIH and the military.90, 91
Gallo had already been testing his new HIV vaccines on animals, and “The results in monkeys are interesting, but they’re not perfect.” Undeterred by the vaccine’s disappointing performance in macaques, Gallo was champing at the bit to test his concoction on some higher primates. “If we keep just using monkeys, we’re never going anywhere. We need for humans to respond.”92 In May 2020, I asked Gallo what had ever happened to this experimental vaccine. Gallo claimed, in what I suspected to be an evasive nonanswer, that he was still (after six years) testing it for an immune response.93
By 2015, the BMGF was spending about $400 million a year on AIDS drug research. Gallo told me that his is only one of over 100 groups Gates has funded to find the elusive vaccine. Gates admitted publicly to Agence France-Presse that the quest for an AIDS vaccine has taken longer than expected, with many disappointments along the way.94 Despite Gates and Fauci’s impressive string of failures, Gates remained bullish. “A vaccine, that’s a big area of funding for our foundation. But even in the best case that’s five years away, and perhaps as long as 10,” he jauntily predicted during a question-and-answer session with young people. “Probably the top priority is a vaccine. If we had a vaccine that can protect people, we can stop the epidemic.”95
On February 3, 2020, Julie Steenhuysen of Reuters reported that NIAID had suddenly halted its clinical trial of its most promising HIV vaccine to date. NIAID was in the middle of Phase 3 trials on more than 5,000 South Africans when they realized that once again, the vaccine was raising the risk of AIDS in vaccinated individuals. Dr. Fauci issued another of his cheerful prognostications: “Research continues on other approaches to a safe and effective HIV vaccine, which I still believe can be achieved.”96
Since 1984, undeterred by thirty-seven years of broken promises, failed clinical trials, billions of squandered dollars, and uncounted human carnage, Dr. Fauci and his old crony Bob Gallo continue to ride the AIDS vaccine gravy train. Neither man has advanced the search for a cure, but both have built impressive institutions. Existential questions about their scientific validity still bedeviled the two intertwined disciplines of virology and vaccinology for which those institutions form key nerve centers. Dr. Fauci’s battle against AIDS is a religious crusade rooted in faith and appeals to authority rather than empiricism or rigorous scientific proof. Following the path of earlier colonial interventions in Africa, Dr. Fauci’s evangelical campaign to impose the orthodoxies of germ warfare on Africans is an exercise in raw power, domination, and the ruthless extraction of profit.
Virology; A New Janissary Corps