Even all those years ago, Anthony Fauci had already perfected his special style of ad-fear-tising, using remote, unlikely, farfetched and improbable possibilities to frighten people. Fauci helped terrify millions into wrongly believing they were at risk of getting AIDS when they were not; emphasis in his statement is added to highlight the caveats and conditional language:
The long incubation period of this disease, we may be starting to see, as we’re seeing virtually, as the months go by, other groups that can be involved, and seeing it in children is really quite disturbing. If the close contact of the child is a household contact, perhaps there will be a certain number of individuals who are just living with and in close contact with someone with AIDS or at risk of AIDS who does not necessarily have to have intimate sexual contact or share a needle, but just the ordinary close contact that one sees in normal interpersonal relationships. Now that may be farfetched in a sense that there have been no cases recognized as yet in which individuals have had merely casual contact, close or albeit with an individual with AIDS who for example have gotten AIDS. For example, there have been no cases yet reported of hospital personnel, who have fairly close contact with patients with AIDS. There have been no case reports of them getting AIDS; but the jury is still out on that because the situation is constantly evolving and the incubation period is so long, as you know. It’s a mean of about fourteen months, ranging from six to eighteen months. So what medical researchers and public health service officials will be—are concerned with is what we felt were the confines of transmissibility now going to be loosening up and broadening up so that something less than truly intimate contact can give transmission of this disease.
The message people took away from those 250 rambling and obfuscating words: “Something less than truly intimate contact can give you this disease.”
Translated into English, however, it’s just twelve words of truth: There have been zero cases of AIDS spread by ordinary close contact.
Dr. Fauci’s most vocal critics complain that, from his earliest days running NIAID, he was neither a competent manager nor a particularly skilled or devoted scientist. His gifts were his aptitude for bureaucratic infighting; a fiery temper; an inclination for flattering and soft-soaping powerful superiors; a vindictive and domineering nature toward subordinates and rivals who dissented; his ravenous appetite for the spotlight; and finally, his silver tongue and skilled tailor. He won his initial beachhead by wresting jurisdiction over the AIDS crisis from NIH’s Big Kahuna, the National Cancer Institute (NCI).55
In 1981, the CDC first recognized the emergence of a new disease that health officials dubbed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among about fifty gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. The AIDS crisis initially landed at NCI because the condition’s most pronounced signal was Kaposi’s sarcoma, which was then considered a deadly skin cancer associated with immune suppression.
A decade earlier, in 1971, President Nixon had launched the “War on Cancer.”56 The medical establishment promised a cancer cure by 1976.57 Instead, Pharma quickly transformed NCI into its cash cow as captured regulators funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into single-purpose patented cancer remedies and wonder-drug production that the agency developed with pharmaceutical company partners. The money enriched Pharma, researchers, doctors, and universities, but yielded little net public health benefit. Fifty years and $150 billion dollars later,58,59 soft tissue and non-smoking cancers have increased dramatically.60 NCI, ever-sensitive to offending Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Chemical, had spent almost nothing to address public exposures to carcinogens from medicines, vaccines, meats, processed foods, sugar, and chemical-laden agriculture. Mainstream cancer research suggests that one-third of all cancers could be eliminated through lifestyle changes. But according to cancer expert Samuel Epstein, NCI spent “Just 1 million—that is 0.02 percent of its $4.7 billion budget in 2005—on education, press releases, and public relations to encourage” better eating habits to prevent cancer.61
Under NIH’s regulatory rubric, the only exposures that are permissible targets of criticism and research in that universal bugaboo are Big Tobacco and the sun, which doesn’t pay lobbyists. NIH’s unbridled criticism of UV light has made sunscreen lotions another booming profit center for Big Pharma.
For Pharma and its NCI regulators and enablers, the AIDS crisis looked like another ATM machine. But in 1984, NIH scientist Robert Gallo linked AIDS to his virus, HTLV-III, which in time would be renamed the “human immunodeficiency virus” (HIV). Dr. Fauci then moved aggressively to capture that revenue stream for his agency. In a dramatic confrontation with NCI’s Sam Broder that year, Dr. Fauci persuasively argued that, since AIDS was an infectious disease, NIAID must have jurisdiction. His victory over NCI in that tip-off placed Dr. Fauci in position to capture the sudden flood of congressional AIDS appropriations flowing to NIH through the adept lobbying of a well-organized AIDS community then besieging the Capitol for resources to study and treat the “gay plague.”
In 1982, congressional AIDS funding was a pitiful $297,000.62 By 1986, that number jumped to $63 million.63 The following year, it was $146 million.64 By 1990, NIAID’s annual AIDS budget was $3 billion. But Gallo’s HIV/AIDS hypothesis proved a PR windfall for Dr. Fauci, as well. “The most dangerous place in America is between Tony and a microphone,” recalls Dr. Fauci’s perennial Boswell, Charles Ortleb, the former publisher of the New York Native, the gay newspaper that chronicled the early AIDS epidemic. “Once people recognized that this was caused by a virus,” recalled CDC’s James Curran, “media attention went from no news coverage to the most-covered news story in history. People went from neglecting it, to fear and panic.”65
The expanded flow of cash spelled opportunity for Dr. Fauci. “AIDS was his big chance,” wrote historian and journalist Bruce Nussbaum, who penned the definitive history of early AIDS research, Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment are Corrupting the Fight Against AIDS.66 “He wasn’t well known as a brilliant scientist, and he had little background in managing a big bureaucracy; but Fauci did have ambition and drive to spare. This lackluster scientist was about to find his true vocation—empire building.”67
“Teflon Tony”