This is how we know that Anthony Fauci was well aware of remdesivir’s toxicity when he orchestrated its approval for COVID patients. NIAID sponsored that project. Dr. Fauci had another NIAID-incubated drug, ZMapp, in the same clinical trial, testing efficacy against Ebola alongside two experimental monoclonal antibody drugs. Researchers planned to administer all four drugs to Ebola patients across Africa over a period of four to eight months.10,11
However, six months into the Ebola study, the trial’s Safety Review Board suddenly pulled both remdesivir and ZMapp from the trial.12 Remdesivir, it turned out, was hideously dangerous. Within 28 days, subjects taking remdesivir had lethal side effects including multiple organ failure, acute kidney failure, septic shock, and hypotension, and 54 percent of the remdesivir group died—the highest mortality rate among the four experimental drugs.13 Anthony Fauci’s drug, ZMapp, ran up the second-highest body count at 44 percent. NIAID was the primary funder of this study, and its researchers published the bad news about remdesivir in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 2019.14 By then, COVID-19 was already circulating in Wuhan. But two months later, on February 25, 2020, Dr. Fauci announced, with great fanfare, that he was enrolling hospitalized COVID patients in a clinical trial to study remdesivir’s efficacy.15 For important context, this was a month before the WHO declared the new pandemic, a time that there were only fourteen confirmed COVID cases in the United States, most from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. These individuals were among the first wave of COVID-19 hospitalizations from whom NIAID recruited the 400 US volunteers for Dr. Fauci’s remdesivir trial.16 Dr. Fauci’s press release said only that remdesivir “has shown promise in animal models for treating Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).”17 It’s unclear, then, if NIAID informed these frightened souls that, less than a year earlier, a safety review board had deemed remdesivir unacceptably toxic.
Its deadly effect on patients aside, remdesivir was a perfect strategic option for Dr. Fauci. Optics required that NIH devote some resources to antiviral therapeutic drugs; critics would complain if he spent billions on vaccines and nothing on therapeutics. However, any licensed, repurposed antiviral that was effective against COVID for prevention or early treatment (like IVM or HCQ) could kill his entire vaccine program because FDA wouldn’t be able to grant his jabs Emergency Use Authorization. Remdesivir, however, was an IV remedy, appropriate only for use on hospitalized patients in the late stages of illness. It would therefore not compete with vaccines, allowing Dr. Fauci to support it without compromising his core business. Furthermore, while HCQ and IVM were off-patent and available generically, remdesivir was in the sweet spot of still being on patent. The potential profit upside was impressive. Remdesivir cost Gilead $10 per dose to manufacture.18,19 But by granting Gilead an EUA, regulators could force private insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid to fork over around $3,120.00 per treatment—hundreds of times the cost of the drug.20,21 Gilead predicted remdesivir would bring in $3.5 billion in 2020 alone.22
Dr. Fauci did not suddenly get the idea that remdesivir might work against coronavirus in January 2020. In one of his many extraordinary feats of uncanny foresight, beginning in 2017, Dr. Fauci paid $6 million to his gain-of-function guru, Ralph Baric—a University of North Carolina microbiologist—to accelerate remdesivir as a coronavirus remedy at China’s biosecurity laboratory in Wuhan.23,24 Baric used coronavirus cultures obtained from bat caves by Chinese virologists working with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, another recipient of Dr. Fauci’s funding.25,26 Dr. Fauci demonstrated his personal interest in those experiments by dispatching his most trusted deputies, Hugh Auchincloss in 2018 and then Cliff Lane in 2020, to negotiate with the Chinese government and to supervise Baric’s experiments at the Wuhan lab and elsewhere in China.27 Baric claimed that his mouse studies showed remdesivir impeded SARS replication, suggesting that it might inhibit other coronaviruses. Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Lab and China’s Military Medicine Institute of the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Science submitted their own patent application for remdesivir.28 China’s military brass said the joint patent application was “aimed at protecting China’s national interests.”29
Early in March 2020, the Gates Foundation bankrolled $125 million of tax-deductible grants to support drug makers to develop coronavirus treatments.30 Gates and/or his foundation had large equity stakes in many of the pharmaceutical companies that received these funds—including Gilead. On April 24, 2020, Gilead’s volunteer spokesperson Bill Gates declared: “For the novel coronavirus, the leading drug candidate in this category is remdesivir from Gilead.”31
For HCQ, Dr. Fauci demanded well-designed randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials32,33 and he warned against the use of IVM for treatment.34 In contrast, Fauci greenlighted remdesivir following studies in which the control group did not receive a real placebo.35 Instead, Fauci’s researchers used no placebo in the more severely ailing patients and gave the remaining patients an “active comparator” containing the same treatment protocol agents as used in the remdesivir arm except for substituting sulfobutyl for remdesivir as the test agent.36 Utilization of so-called “toxic” or “spiked” placebos—also known as “fauxcebos”—is a fraudulent gimmick that Dr. Fauci and his drug researchers have pioneered over forty years to conceal adverse side effects of toxic drugs for which they seek approval. Dr. Fauci eventually recruited 400 US hospitalized volunteers for NIAID’s remdesivir trials, but despite this fauxcebo chicanery, Dr. Fauci’s researchers just couldn’t get remdesivir to show any improvement in COVID survival.37