In 1987, the Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of an HHS scheme its writers characterized as a deliberate campaign by officials to misre-present AIDS as a general pandemic to secure greater public funding and financial support.22
The flimflam worked. Terror of pestilence, it turns out, is a potent impulse, and Fauci was adept at weaponizing it—and he quickly learned that other “respected authorities” would follow his lead. Following Dr. Fauci’s fear-mongering prophecy, Theresa Crenshaw of the President’s AIDS Commission made the astonishing forecast that within fourteen years, double the number of people then on the planet would be dying from lethal infections: “If the spread of AIDS continues at this rate, in 1996 there could be one billion people infected; five years later, hypothetically ten billion.” Crenshaw asked, “Could we be facing the threat of extinction during our lifetime?”23 Crenshaw’s dire soothsaying never materialized. In 2007, WHO estimated only 33.2 million people worldwide were HIV-positive.24 The HIV prevalence curves based on CDC’s own data show that at least in the US, HIV has not spread at all since testing was first available, stubbornly remaining at the same levels relative to population.
The Oprah show broadcast Crenshaw’s subsequent prognostication that “By 1990, one in five heterosexuals may be dead of AIDS.”25 Thankfully, this prognosis was also hyperbolic. According to CDC data, about one in 250 Americans tests HIV-positive, and outside the risk groups this number drops to about one in five thousand—about 1/1,000th Crenshaw’s bodement.26 The hysteria following Fauci’s dystopian prediction prompted Der Spiegel to warn that AIDS infections would entirely exterminate the German population by 1992.27 The following year (1985), the magazine Bild Der Wissenschaft also forecast the prompt extinction of the Teutonic race.28
A slightly less exuberant 1986 prophecy by Newsweek had five to ten million Americans lethally infected by 1991.29 Newsweek’s auguring was off by ten times; US authorities have since identified only one million HIV infections.30
Dr. Fauci’s embellishments quickly made HIV-positives the modern equivalent of lepers. Paranoia of AIDS from nonsexual contact persisted for years. In New York in 1985, for instance, 85 percent of schoolchildren at one public elementary school stayed home during opening week, while hundreds of parents demanded the school system bar any HIV-positive children from attending classes.31 The Reagan administration made it unlawful for persons with AIDS to enter the United States. The Cuban government quarantined AIDS victims in modern leper colonies. AIDS activists charged Dr. Fauci with causing the “irrational, punitive” response that followed his hysterical statements.32
A year later, growing furor over his assertion forced Dr. Fauci to acknowledge that health officials had never detected a case of the disease spread through “casual contact.”33
Finally, AIDS activists further complained that Dr. Fauci lacked sensitivity and human compassion toward people suffering from the disease. His laser focus on a single magic bullet antiviral left Dr. Fauci reluctant to study drugs that treated the constellations of grim infections that tortured and killed people with AIDS; patient care—which typically involved off-the-shelf drugs—was incompatible with NIAID’s mushrooming mercantile obsession with high-price patented antivirals. Dr. Fauci’s narrow focus on AZT over off-patent therapeutic medications prompted the AIDS plague’s most vocal activist, Larry Kramer, to call Dr. Fauci a “damned bungler”34 and “Public Enemy Number One.”35
Melisa Wallack and Craig Borten, who received Oscar nominations for their script, Dallas Buyers Club, intensively researched NIAID’s institutional hostility to patient care and repurposed drugs during the 1986 AIDS crisis. Dr. Fauci’s campaign to sabotage therapeutic remedies played a key role in precipitating the emergence of the organized underground medical network. So-called “Buyers Clubs” filled the vacuum by providing treatments that community doctors and their patients considered effective against AIDS, but that FDA refused to approve. “Dr. Fauci was a liar,” recalls Wallack, who researched Dr. Fauci intensively for her film. “He was utterly beholden to pharmaceutical companies and was hostile to any product that would compete with AZT. He was the real villain of this era. He cost a lot of people their lives.”36
By 1987, thousands of AIDS activists from organizations like amfAR and ACT UP—many of them dressed in burial frocks—began mounting mass protests against Dr. Fauci at NIH’s Bethesda, Maryland, research complex and demanding that he, at last, meet with them. Carrying signs that read, “Red Tape Kills Us,” and “NIH— Negligence, Incompetence and Horror,” protesters were met by a line of police officers in riot gear.37 The protestors objected to Dr. Fauci’s narrow focus on Wellcome’s single patented antiviral and wanted more attention for existing therapeutic drugs that seemed to reduce the worst of AIDS’s most agonizing and deadly symptoms.
As the clamoring crowds multiplied on NIH’s expansive Bethesda campus, Congressman Henry Waxman intervened to force Dr. Fauci to finally sit down with activists in the spring of 1987. It was his first meeting with AIDS advocates since he became AIDS Commissar three years earlier. “The arrogance was simply part of NIH culture,” wrote Nussbaum. “No one thought that people with AIDS and their local doctors had anything to recommend in terms of their own treatment. The same was true of people with cancer. They were all ‘patients’ or ‘victims’ to be pitied and helped by white-coated scientist-heroes.”38