Despite its disappointing performance, Dr. Fauci worked hand-in-hand with Gilead’s remdesivir team to guide the trial to a satisfactory outcome. According to Vera Sharav, the President and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), “The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had complete control over the trial and made all decisions regarding trial design and implementation. Gilead Sciences employees participated in discussions about protocol development and in weekly protocol team calls with NIAID.”
Sharav’s organization, Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), monitors the quality and ethical performance of clinical trials. NIAID’s remdesivir trial’s original endpoint made sense: to win approval, the drug would need to demonstrate a “reduction in COVID mortality.” However, the drug didn’t show the hoped-for benefit. While fewer patients receiving remdesivir died, those receiving remdesivir were also a lot less sick than the placebo subjects when they entered the trial. So Dr. Fauci’s team decided to move the goalposts. The researchers, in fact, had changed the trial “endpoints” twice in an effort to create a meager appearance of benefit. Dr. Fauci’s new endpoints allowed the drug to demonstrate a benefit, not by improving the chances of surviving COVID, but by achieving shorter hospital stays.38 Yet this too was a scam, because it turned out that almost twice as many remdesivir subjects as placebo subjects had to be readmitted to the hospital after discharge—suggesting that Fauci’s improved time to recovery was due, at least in part, to discharging remdesivir patients prematurely. Altering protocols in the middle of an ongoing study is an interference commonly known as “scientific fraud” or “falsification.” UCLA Epidemiology Professor Sander Greenland explains, “You’re not supposed to change your endpoint mid-course. That’s frowned upon.” Vera Sharav agrees: “Changing primary outcomes after a study has commenced is considered dubious and suspicious.”39
But Dr. Fauci had little reason to worry that insiders would complain about the corruption of the study, since his trusted deputy, Cliff Lane, chaired the NIH Treatment Guidelines panel.40 Lane was doubly conflicted, since he had personally overseen the remdesivir trials in China, and stood, potentially, to share in patent rewards and royalties for the drug.41 In addition to Lane, seven of the panel members had financial relationships with Gilead—and eight additional panel members had had financial relationships with Gilead prior to the past eleven months, for which they were required to declare a relationship.42 “Is it any wonder remdesivir is the only drug recommended for COVID?” asks Vera Sharav, a Holocaust survivor who has devoted her life to advocating for ethics in the notoriously corrupt clinical trial industry.43,44,45,46,47
Before his study was completed or peer-reviewed, much less published, Dr. Fauci learned that The Lancet had just published a placebo-controlled Chinese study that showed remdesivir utterly ineffective at keeping hospitalized patients alive OR reducing the duration of hospitalizations.48 Even more importantly, remdesivir did not reduce the presence of the virus in the blood. Worst of all, the Chinese study confirmed remdesivir’s deadly toxicity. The Chinese regulators and researchers shuttered that trial because of potentially lethal side effects. Remdesivir caused serious injuries in 12 percent of the patients, compared to 5 percent of patients in the placebo group.49 Unlike Dr. Fauci’s trial, the Chinese study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multi-center, peer-reviewed study, published in the world’s premier scientific journal, The Lancet. All the underlying data was available to the incurious press and the uninformed public.
In contrast, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID-Gilead study was at that point, still unpublished, not peer-reviewed, its details undisclosed. It employed a phony placebo and had suffered a sketchy mid-course protocol change. In April, the Chinese cancelled two ongoing clinical trials with NIAID in China because the Chinese had succeeded in ending the COVID epidemic in the country, and researchers could no longer identify enough COVID patients to enroll in the study.50
In any event, the Chinese study spelled certain doom for remdesivir. It was now D.O.A. at FDA—a poem title? But Dr. Fauci never accepted this. The inimitable maestro of regulatory combat responded to the crisis with savvy and bold action that would miraculously salvage his sinking product: He appeared at one of his regular White House press conferences, this one in the Oval Office. Seated on the couch next to Deborah Birx and opposite President Trump, Dr. Fauci made a surprise announcement.
From that lofty platform, Dr. Fauci, with great fanfare, declared victory. The data from NIAID’s clinical trial for remdesivir shows “quite good news,” he said, glossing over the drug’s failure to demonstrate any mortality advantage.51 He boasted that the median time for hospitalization was eleven days for patients taking remdesivir, compared to fifteen days in the placebo group. He told the credulous press: “The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.” He claimed that his study had therefore proven remdesivir so remarkably beneficial to COVID patients that he had decided that it would be unethical to deny Americans benefits of this wonder drug. He was, he declared, unblinding and ending the study and giving remdesivir to the placebo group. Remdesivir would be America’s new “standard of care”52 for COVID. It was, of course, all a lie.
On May 1, the FDA granted the pandemic’s first Emergency Use Authorization for a COVID drug, allowing remdesivir treatments for patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19.53,54
Based on Dr. Fauci’s representation, President Trump purchased the world’s entire stock of remdesivir for Americans.55 The European Union signed a “joint procurement agreement” with Gilead to queue up in the pipeline for 500,000 treatment courses.56 The day after Dr. Fauci’s announcement at the White House, the University of North Carolina issued a press release headlined: “Remdesivir, developed through a UNC-Chapel Hill partnership, proves effective against COVID-19 in NIAID human clinical trials.”57 Dr. Fauci’s gain-of-function wizard, Dr. Ralph Baric, called this “a game changer for the treatment of patients with COVID-19.”58