117 Maria Trimarchi, “How much do pharmaceutical test subjects get paid?” How Stuff Works, (2021), https://money.howstuffworks.com/how-much-do-pharmaceutical-test-subjects-get-paid.htm
118 Jane Redecki, “University budget Models and Indirect Costs,” Ithaca S&R, February 25, 2021, https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/university-budget-models-and-indirect-costs/
119 Nussbaum, op. cit., 330
120 Terry Michaels, Down the Rabbit Hole: How US Medical Bureaucrats, Pharma Crony Capitalists, and Science Literate Journalists Created and Sustain the HIV-AIDS Fraud (Unpublished Manuscript), 10
121 Ibid.
122 John Lauritsen, The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex (Asklepios, 1993), 322
ChildrensHealthDefense.org/fauci-book
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For updates, new citations and references, and new information about topics in this chapter:
CHAPTER 4
THE PANDEMIC TEMPLATE: AIDS AND AZT
“Doctors need three qualifications: to be able to lie and not get caught, to pretend to be honest, and to cause death without remorse.”
—Jean Froissart 1337–1405
The AZT approval process was a shakedown cruise for Tony Fauci. As he ran AZT around the regulatory traps, Dr. Fauci pioneered and perfected the retinue of corrupt, deceitful, and bullying practices and strategies that he would replicate again and again over the next thirty-three years, to transform NIAID into a drug development dynamo.
When Dr. Fauci entered the principal investigator (PI) drug-testing universe, only one pharmaceutical company, Burroughs Wellcome (predecessor to GlaxoSmithKline), had a drug candidate teed up to test as an AIDS remedy—a toxic concoction, azidothymidine, known popularly as “AZT.”
US government–financed researchers developed AZT in 19641 as a leukemia chemotherapy. AZT is a “DNA chain terminator,” randomly destroying DNA synthesis in reproducing cells. AZT’s developer, Jerome Horwitz, theorized that the molecule might inject itself into cells and interfere with tumor replication. FDA abandoned the toxic chemotherapy compound after it proved ineffective against cancer and breathtakingly lethal in mice.2 Government researchers deemed it too toxic even for short-regimen cancer chemotherapy. Horwitz recounted that the drug’s “extreme toxicity made it ‘so worthless’ that he ‘didn’t think it was worth patenting.’” Former BusinessWeek journalist Bruce Nussbaum recounted that Horwitz “dumped it on the junk pile” and “didn’t [even] keep the notebooks.”3
Soon after NIH’s team identified HIV as the probable cause of AIDS in 1983, Samuel Broder, head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI)—another sub-agency of the NIH—launched a project to screen antiviral agents from around the world as potential treatments. In 1985, his team, along with colleagues at Duke University, found that AZT killed HIV in test tubes.4
NCI’s study inspired Burroughs Wellcome to retrieve AZT from Horwitz’s scrap heap and patent it as an AIDS remedy. Recognizing financial opportunity in the desperate terror of young AIDS patients facing certain death, the drug company set the price at up to $10,000/year per patient—making AZT one of the most expensive drugs in pharmaceutical history.5 Since Burroughs Wellcome could manufacture AZT for pennies per dose, the company anticipated a bonanza.
In order to justify these exorbitant prices for an existing drug, wrote Dr. Marcia Angell, the longtime editor of the New England Journal of Medicine in her 2004 book, The Truth About Drug Companies, “the company claimed far more credit than it deserved.”6 After Burroughs Wellcome’s CEO sent a self-congratulatory letter to the New York Times rationalizing AZT’s exorbitant sticker price with the standard Pharma embroidery about the high risks and extravagant costs of early drug development, Broder and four colleagues from the NCI and Duke responded angrily, reciting the seminal contributions Burroughs Wellcome did not make:
The company specifically did not develop or provide the first application of the technology for determining whether a drug like AZT can suppress live AIDS virus in human cells, nor did it develop the technology to determine at what concentration such an effect might be achieved in humans. Moreover, it was not first to administer AZT to a human being with AIDS, nor did it perform the first clinical pharmacology studies in patients. It also did not perform the immunological and virological studies necessary to infer that the drug might work and was therefore worth pursuing in further studies. All of these were accomplished by the staff of the National Cancer Institute working with staff at Duke University.7
The NCI scientists pointedly added that the company’s squeamishness about handling the HIV pathogens made it impossible for Burroughs Wellcome to perform any meaningful research: “Indeed one of the key obstacles to the development of AZT was that Burroughs Wellcome did not work with live AIDS virus nor wish to receive samples from AIDS patients.”8
When Fauci appropriated the HIV program from the National Cancer Institute, NIAID inherited AZT, which was then further down the clinical trial path than any other drug.9
AZT proved to be an irresistible opportunity for Fauci. After all, Burroughs Wellcome not only had a head start in the AIDS drug program, the company also had its own army of veteran “principal investigators” (PIs) with plenty of expertise at running the complex regulatory hurdles—which Dr. Fauci had not yet mastered. Dr. Fauci needed a visible success to jump-start his program and anoint his new regime with the patina of competence. Nussbaum described how the British pharmaceutical company manipulated its leverage over Dr. Fauci to gain monopoly control over the government’s HIV response: “Wellcome’s PIs came to dominate NIAID’s clinical trial system. They formed a web linking Wellcome, the drug AZT, and the NIH. They came to sit on the institute’s key drug selection committee, and they voted on whether to give high or low priority to the testing of each anti-AIDS drug, including those that might possibly compete with AZT in the marketplace. The PIs were a power unto themselves. They were, in fact, out of control.”10
Dr. Fauci would later mimic this successful model to populate key drug and vaccine approval committees in FDA, CDC, and at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) with his Pharma PIs, giving him, and his Pharma partners, complete, vertically integrated control over the drug approval process from molecule to market.