An Agency Without a Mission
In 1955, as deaths from epidemic disease declined, NIAID’s forerunner organization at NIH, the National Microbiological Institute (NMI), became part of the NIAID,19 to reflect the diminished national significance of infectious diseases and the unexplained increases in allergic and immune system diseases. Congress ordered NIAID to support “innovative scientific approaches to address the causes of these diseases and find better ways to prevent and treat them.”
Food allergies and asthma were still rare enough to be considered remarkable. Eczema was practically unknown, as were most autoimmune diseases, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Graves’ disease, Crohn’s disease, and myelitis.20,21
As early as 1949, Congressional bills to abolish CDC because of the remarkable decline in infectious disease mortalities twice won by impressive majorities.22 From the mid-1970s, CDC was seeking to justify its existence by assisting state health departments to track down small outbreaks of rabies and a mouse disease called hantavirus, and by linking itself to the military’s bioweapons projects. Looking back from 1994, Red Cross officer Paul Cummings told the San Francisco Chronicle that “The CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic” to justify its existence.23 According to Peter Duesberg, author of Inventing the AIDS Virus, the HIV/AIDS theory was salvation for American epidemic authorities.24
James Curran, the Chief of the CDC’s Sexually Transmitted Diseases unit, described the desperation among the public health corps in the early 1980s: “There was double-digit inflation, very high unemployment, a rapid military buildup and a threat to decrease all domestic programs, and this led to workforce cuts at the Public Health Service, and particularly CDC.”25 Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis similarly recalled the institutional desperation during the Reagan administration era. He said of the CDC: “They were hoping for a new plague. Polio was over. There were memos going around the agency saying, ‘We need to find the new plague’; ‘We need to find something to scare the American people so they will give us more money.’”26 NIH scientist Dr. Robert Gallo—who would become Dr. Fauci’s partner, coconspirator, and confidant—offered a similar assessment: “The CDC in Atlanta was under threat for reductions and even theoretically for closure.”27
Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant. Dr. Fauci’s immediate boss and predecessor as NIAID Director, Richard M. Krause, helped pioneer this new strategy in 1976, during Dr. Fauci’s first year at the agency. Krause was a champion of what he called “The Return of the Microbes” strategy,28 which sought to reinstate microbes to their former status as the feared progenitors of deadly diseases. That year, federal regulators concocted a fake swine flu epidemic that temporarily raised hopes around CDC for the resurrection of its reputation as a life-saving superhero.29
Even in that idealistic era, regulators were allowing Pharma to craft public health policy behind closed doors. Director Krause, whom Dr. Fauci would shortly succeed, invited Merck executives to sit in on internal planning meetings as collaborators.30 Working with Merck, NIAID31 used taxpayer funds to subsidize development and distribution of vaccines,32 and to rush untested products to market.33 But the swine flu pandemic was a dud, and HHS’s response was a global embarrassment. Only one casualty—a soldier at Fort Dix34—succumbed to the “pandemic,” and Merck’s experimental vaccine triggered a national epidemic of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a devastating form of paralysis resembling polio, before regulators recalled the jab.35 The four vaccine manufacturers—Merck & Co., Merrell, Wyeth, and Parke-Davis—had refused to sell the vaccines to the government unless they were guaranteed profits and indemnity. They were sued for $19 million within months of the vaccination campaign. The Department of Justice handled the lawsuits.36
Prior to 1997, the FDA forbade pharmaceutical advertising on television, and the drug companies had not yet transformed television reporters into pharmaceutical reps. Journalists, in short, were still permitted to do journalism. Sixty Minutes aired a scathing segment in which Mike Wallace mercilessly exposed the corruption, incompetence, and cover-ups at HHS that led to the phony swine flu pandemic and the wave of casualties from NIH’s experimental vaccine.37 The scandal forced the resignation of CDC Director David Sencer for his role in concocting the phony pandemic and pushing the dangerous vaccine.38 NIAID chief Richard Krause quietly resigned in 1984, deeding his seat to his faithful deputy, Tony Fauci.39
In a poignant emblem of the ascending power of the pharmaceutical paradigm under Dr. Fauci’s stewardship, the Sixty Minutes report on the 1976 pandemic scandal is now largely scrubbed from the Internet. You can still view it on the Children’s Health Defense website.
HIV/AIDS
Despite those catastrophic outcomes, Dr. Fauci’s takeaway from the 1976 swine flu crisis seems to have been the revelation that pandemics were opportunities of convenience for expanding agency power and visibility, and for cementing advantageous partnerships with pharmaceutical behemoths and for career advancement. Four years later, the AIDS pandemic proved a redemptive juncture for NIAID and the launch pad for Dr. Fauci’s stellar rise. The lessons he learned from orchestrating regulatory responses to the AIDS crisis would become familiar templates for managing subsequent pandemics.
Tony Fauci spent the next half-century crafting public responses to a series of real and concocted viral outbreaks40,41—HIV/AIDS42 in 1983; SARS43 in 2003; MERS44,45,46 in 2014; bird flu47,48 in 2005; swine flu (“novel H1N1”)49 in 2009; dengue50,51 in 2012; Ebola52 in 2014–2016; Zika53 in 2015–2016; and COVID-1954 in 2020. When authentic epidemics failed to materialize, Dr. Fauci became skilled at exaggerating the severity of contagions to scare the public and further his career.