For two years, Senator Kennedy and Beirn vainly urged Dr. Fauci to create a “parallel track.” Kennedy was frustrated by Dr. Fauci’s reticence to listen to the HIV community. He considered it petty, cruel, and irresponsible that Dr. Fauci would not allow testing of the buyers’ club drugs.
In a September 2007 interview, Dr. Fauci recalled the urgency that Teddy brought to the topic. He said that Kennedy urged him, “We’ve got to have a clinical trial process that reaches out to the community. He was really the one who pushed very hard for the community program for clinical research on AIDS. That was one of his big agenda items. He wanted to get community access to clinical trials at the community level, not just limited to the trials run by drug companies and NIAID.”51
By 1987, Dr. Fauci’s political partners from all parties realized that Dr. Fauci’s program was “in shambles.”52 Despite the millions from Congress, not a single AIDS drug had emerged from NIAID’s pipeline. Senator Kennedy was beginning to suspect that Dr. Fauci was either inept or “in the tank” with Pharma. Ronald Reagan was pushing to transfer the entire AIDS effort to “more efficient” private pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Fauci’s failed predictions, organizational inadequacies, and obfuscations had steamed his Capitol Hill allies past their boiling points.
In the spring of 1988, Dr. Fauci’s congressional sponsors turned on him during a dramatic Capitol Hill confrontation. The April 28 hearing began with Rep. Weiss— perhaps Dr. Fauci’s most loyal sponsor—demanding that the NIAID chief explain his snail’s progress. Dr. Fauci responded by whining that he had no budget to purchase lab space, computers, desks, and office supplies, or to hire new workers.53
The stunned Upper West Side congressman reminded Dr. Fauci that he had accepted $374 million from Congress for AIDS research. It seemed astonishing that those sums were insufficient to purchase clerical supplies and furniture. Oblivious that his lame excuses were only stoking his benefactor’s scorching rage, Fauci moaned that his office items required separate budget columns not provided for in the massive congressional appropriation. In a barely controlled fury, Rep. Waxman coldly asked Dr. Fauci why he never informed his congressional mentors of this logjam. That question provoked a cavalcade of vague and dissembling bellyaching during which Dr. Fauci suggested, obliquely, that he had feared antagonizing the Reagan White House—which might have frowned on his cozy bonhomie with congressional Dems.
Dr. Fauci’s fuzzy equivocation prompted Rep. Waxman to darken visibly. “He was furious,” recounts Nussbaum. “He practically levitated out of his chair.”54
California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi complained of Dr. Fauci’s lackluster performance that “from our perspective, we have a burning building behind us and we’re coming to you all for water and we’re finding out that there’s not somebody there to turn on the faucet.”55
Pelosi next delivered the “coup de grace,” as Nussbaum chronicled the explosive exchange. Rep. Pelosi asked Dr. Fauci to assume that he had AIDS and found himself dying of pneumonia: “You know the theory behind aerosol pentamidine to prevent pneumonia is strong. You know that the aerosol pentamidine was evaluated by the NIH as highly promising. You know that many studies in San Francisco recommend it routinely and that it is available. . . . Would you take aerosol pentamidine or would you wait for a study?”56
For three years, Dr. Fauci had done everything in his power to deny aerosol pentamidine and its companion drug, Bactrim, to AIDS sufferers. But here’s what he told the panel in 1988: “If I were an individual patient, I would probably take aerosolized pentamidine if I already had a bout of Pneumocystis. In fact, I might try, even before then, taking prophylactic Bactrim.”57 These were two promising remedies that everyone on the panel and in the audience knew that Fauci had refused to either test or recommend. At that very moment, Dr. Fauci was denying tens of thousands of AIDS patients access to these lifesaving remedies.
Nussbaum describes the scene that followed: “Silence. There was dead silence in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building. People at the hearing just stared at Fauci and at one another. Here was the head of the NIH effort against AIDS publicly admitting that he personally would not follow the government’s own guidelines and recommendations. Here was a top government scientist basically admitting that the government effort should be circumvented by the millions of people with AIDS. Here was Tony Fauci openly calling for the prophylaxis of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia while his own clinical trials system did not have a single preventative drug in trial. It was a truly mind-wrenching admission. Fauci himself was calling into question the very foundation of the government’s entire research effort against AIDS.”58
Thirty-two years later, Dr. Fauci performed an encore of this kabuki dance during the early COVID crisis. On March 24, 2020, he answered a question from a journalist by admitting that, if he became ill with COVID, he would take hydroxychloroquine as his remedy.59 Shortly thereafter, Dr. Fauci launched his aggressive campaign to deny HCQ—and all early treatments—to the rest of humanity.
Dr. Fauci’s 1988 Capitol Hill performance left all his former friends wanting a piece of him. “Fauci was in deep trouble. These were his supporters, his financial mentors, his political protectors from an administration that was so aligned against the gay community and so ideologically antagonistic to the very existence of the NIH that it wanted Pharma to privatize the whole shebang. Now, Weiss and Waxman were clearly gunning for him. Fauci realized that the entire hearing was a setup to show his personal shortcomings.”60
Larry Kramer was thunderstruck: “When he read about the NIH delays, the ineptitude and perhaps the moral cowardice behind them, Kramer lost control.”61
On May 31, 1988, Kramer wrote his famous “Open Letter to Tony Fauci” in the Village Voice. Kramer’s diatribe compared NIAID to the fraternity of miscreants, delinquents, and dimwitted knuckleheads in the comedy film Animal House. He called Dr. Fauci an “idiot” and a “murderer.” He described Fauci sweating and squirming under Representative Ted Weiss’s questioning: “You were pummeled into admitting publicly what some have been claiming since you took over some three years ago. You have admitted that you are an incompetent idiot.”62
Said Kramer, “You expect us to buy this bullshit and feel sorry for you? YOU FUCKING SON OF A BITCH OF A DUMB IDIOT, YOU HAVE HAD $374 MILLION AND YOU EXPECT US TO BUY THIS GARBAGE OF EXCUSES!”63