Dr. Fauci’s hypocrisy about HCQ is evident to anyone who looks at his vacillating pronouncements throughout his long career. He has persistently insisted on double-blind randomized placebo trials for medicines he dislikes (those that compete with his patented remedies) and airily fixed the NIAID study of remdesivir by changing the endpoints midstream to favor the drug. Dr. Fauci did not sponsor or encourage randomized trials for masks, lockdowns, or social distancing. And in the decades since he took over NIAID, he has never demanded randomized studies to confirm safety of the combined 69 vaccine doses currently on the childhood schedule. Every one of these vaccines is regarded as so “unavoidably unsafe”—in the words of the 1986 Vaccine Act (NCVIA) and the Supreme Court—that their manufacturers have demanded—and received—immunity from liability.
During a 2013 USA Today interview, Dr. Fauci discussed remedies for another deadly coronavirus, MERS, which was causing an outbreak in Qatar and Saudi Arabia with over 30 percent mortality.144 Dr. Fauci then sang an entirely different tune than he is singing now about hydroxychloroquine. He suggested using a combination of the antiviral drugs ribavirin and interferon-alpha 2b to treat MERS, even though the treatment had never been tested for safety or effectiveness against MERS in humans. In that circumstance, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID had found that the treatment could stop MERS virus from reproducing in lab-grown cells. And, oh yes, NIAID had patented it.145
“We don’t have to start designing new drugs,” Dr. Fauci told journalists.146 “The next time someone comes into an emergency room in Qatar or Saudi Arabia, you would have drugs that are readily available. And at least you would have some data.”147 Even though the treatment hadn’t gone through any trials, Dr. Fauci urged its compassionate use: “If I were a physician in a hospital and someone were dying, rather than do nothing, you can see if these work.”148
He played by all-new rules when it came to COVID, forcing doctors to stand on the sidelines while patients died and prohibiting them from trying combinations of repurposed therapeutics to “see if these work.”149 Back in 2013, when Dr. Fauci endorsed Ribavirin/Interferon for use against MERS, the two-punch hepatitis C remedy was, according to NIH, horrendously dangerous, with harms occurring in literally every patient who took the concoction. It causes hemolytic anemia chronic fatigue syndrome, and a retinue of birth defects and/or death of unborn children. Ribavirin is genotoxic, mutagenic, and a potential carcinogen.150
Nevertheless, in 2013, Dr. Fauci advocated the therapy, despite the total lack of randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials, in fact, the lack of any human data on using the combination against MERS.
The COVID vaccines that qualified for Emergency Use Authorization include novel platforms like mRNA and DNA with no known safety profile. Others use toxic adjuvants like squalene and aluminum or novel adjuvants, with proven risks and potentially high rates of serious injuries. The two-month randomized clinical trials that justified the EUAs for COVID vaccines were far too brief to detect injuries with longer incubation periods.151,152,153 The vaccines are so risky that the insurance industry has refused to underwrite them,154 and the manufacturers refuse to produce them without blanket immunity from liability.155 Bill Gates, who is the principal investor in many of these new COVID vaccines, stipulated that their risk is so great that he would not provide them to people unless every government shielded him from lawsuits.156
Why then should HCQ be the only remedy required to cross this artificially high hurdle? After all, HCQ is less in need of randomized placebo studies than any of these vaccines or remdesivir; the safety of HCQ has been established over more than six decades. While vaccines are given to healthy people who face small risk of catching the disease, HCQ is administered to people who are actually sick, with virtually no risk to the patient. If a drug is safe and might work, if people are dying and there are no other good options, must we not try it?
Dr. Fauci’s on-again-off-again interest in drug safety is situational and self-interested. He claimed on July 31 about HCQ that “If that randomized placebo-controlled trial shows efficacy, I would be the first to admit it and to promote it, but I have not… So I just have to go with the data. I don’t have any horse in the game one way or the other; I just look at the data.”157
In fact, Dr. Fauci always had a stable of horses in the game. One of them is remdesivir, even after the WHO’s randomized placebo trial showed remdesivir ineffective against COVID.158 Furthermore, remdesivir has a catastrophic safety profile.159
His second nag is the Moderna vaccine, in which he invested years and six billion taxpayer dollars. He was thrilled to sponsor a human trial of a Moderna COVID vaccine (partly owned by his agency), before there were any safety and efficacy data from animal studies, which goes against FDA regulations. He then pushed for hundreds of millions of people to get EUA vaccines before the randomized placebo-controlled trials were complete. So much for Dr. Fauci’s requirement for having high-quality evidence before risking use of drugs and vaccines in humans.
Dr. Fauci’s ethical flip-flopping about the need for rigid safety testing is particularly troubling since he is championing a competitive product from which his agency and his employees expect a lucrative financial outcome.
In the midst of a pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of deaths attributed to COVID, and the economy in free fall, Dr. Fauci’s suggestion that we withhold promising treatments that have an established safety profile—from patients who have a potentially lethal disease—pending the completion of randomized controlled clinical trials, is highly manipulative and utterly unethical. It is not medically ethical to allow a COVID-19 patient to deteriorate in the early stages of the infection when there is an inexpensive, safe, and demonstrably effective HCQ treatment that CDC’s and NIAID’s own studies show blocks coronavirus replication. It would be equally unethical to enroll sick individuals in such studies—as Dr. Fauci proposes—in which half the infected patients would receive a placebo.
Dr. Fauci’s hypocrisy is particularly acute since the 21st Century Cures Act, which Congress passed in 2016, directs the FDA to accept precisely the type of “real world” evidence reported by treating physicians like Drs. Zelenko, Raoult, Risch, Kory, McCullough, Gold, and Chinese doctors, in lieu of controlled clinical trials, for licensing new products.160
The Cures Act161 recognizes that doctors and scientists can obtain very useful information when treating patients and observing the results outside of a formal trial setting.
For Big Pharma, no milestone was more important during the current pandemic than neutralizing HCQ to prevent its widespread beneficial use.
Dr. Fauci’s shocking inconsistency and ethical breaches are congruent with his long history of promoting Big Pharma’s more profitable patented products and using his power and influence to advance its agenda without regard to public health. Dr. Fauci’s leadership role in this deadly scandal is consistent with his long history of discrediting therapies that compete with vaccines and other patented pharmaceutical products.