Kramer accused Fauci of keeping his mouth shut for thirty-six months to pander to the Reagan White House. He asked Fauci, “WHY DID YOU KEEP QUIET FOR SO LONG?” while people perished in the pandemic. It reminded him, he said, of Hitler’s “good lieutenant”: Adolf Eichmann. He accused Fauci of being too cowardly and self-involved to speak up until forced to by a Congressional committee: “We lie down and die and our bodies pile up higher and higher in hospitals and homes and hospices and streets and doorways.”64
Referring to aerosol pentamidine, Kramer pointed out, “[W]e know and hear what is working on some of us somewhere. You couldn’t care less about what we say. You won’t answer our phone calls or letters, or listen to anyone in our stricken community. What tragic pomposity!”65
“How many years ago did we tell you about aerosol pentamidine, Tony? That this stuff saves lives. And WE discovered it ourselves. We came to you, bearing this great news on a silver platter as a gift, begging you: Can we get it officially tested, can we get it approved by you so that insurance companies and Medicaid will pay for it (as well as other drugs we beg you to test) as a routine treatment, and our patients going broke for medicine can get it cheaper? You monster.”66
“We tell you what the good drugs are, you don’t test them, and YOU TELL US TO GET THEM ON THE STREETS! You continue to pass down word from On High that you don’t like this drug or that drug—WHEN YOU HAVEN’T EVEN TESTED THEM!”67
“There are more AIDS patients dead because you didn’t test drugs on them,” Kramer said, “than because you did.”68
After the Congressional hearing, everyone realized that the little Emperor had no clothes; Dr. Fauci recognized that his political life was dangling by a thread. He had spent hundreds of millions of dollars building a drug-testing network that didn’t work. The Congress he had always been able to charm, double-talk, and bamboozle had finally called fraud! His only hope for reputation and career salvation was a dramatic and unexpected change.
“He had been tarred with an ‘incompetence’ brush by the very people who were his major supporters in the past. Only a complete change of strategy could resuscitate Tony Fauci’s career. If he was to continue receiving financial support for AIDS research from Congress, if he was to continue being the head of NIAID, he had to reinvent himself.”69
Dr. Fauci’s Strategic Pivot
Anthony Fauci needed a makeover, and this master of bureaucratic survival responded to his existential crisis with a breathtaking pivot. Suddenly, Dr. Fauci turned to embrace the AIDS activists he had previously reviled. In the summer of 1989, he accosted Larry Kramer on a Montreal street during an international AIDS conference, took him for a walk, effectively begged forgiveness, and proposed a working partnership.70 He began testing AIDS community drugs in parallel trials, as Senator Kennedy and amfAR had long requested.
Dr. Fauci partnered with the AIDS doctors—the contemporary equivalents of Front Line COVID19 healers Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Richard Urso, and Dr. Ryan Cole (among others)—giving them authority and millions of dollars to launch local Community Research Initiative (CRI) programs that allowed community AIDS clinics to test promising drugs outside the formal clinical trial programs dominated by Dr. Fauci’s Pharma PIs, and to quickly win federal approvals. “Fauci himself was now trying to build a system that consisted of greater access to drugs at a much earlier stage in the testing game,”71 said Nussbaum. In a gesture of reconciliation with his biggest critics, Dr. Fauci named the parallel track program after Senator Kennedy’s aide, Terry Beirn, and he gave Larry Kramer a seat at the table.
Most ironically, in light of his successful campaign to sabotage hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin during the COVID crisis, Dr. Fauci suddenly dropped his knee-jerk insistence that every drug needed randomized placebo-controlled testing prior to approval. In an extraordinary volte-face, he fiercely argued that if a drug looked promising for alleviating potentially lethal illness during pandemics, patients ought to be able to get access to it, even if it hadn’t been through a double-blind placebo trial. In a brassy display of chutzpah and brazenly hypocritical misdirection, he questioned the ethics of FDA regulators who insisted on placebo testing of beneficial drugs during a global pandemic when people were dying. He seemed to have forgotten that this was precisely his posture until just a few weeks before. Dr. Fauci accused the FDA of foot-dragging and overmanaging drug development. He openly attacked NIAID’s sister agency for its cruel and rigid insistence on randomized double-blind placebo testing for DHPG, a promising remedy for retinal herpes. In order to quiet the AIDS community, Tony Fauci even put AL 721 into trials. Dr. Fauci became a vocal cheerleader of “parallel track” approval of the retinue of popular buyers’ club drugs: “It doesn’t make any sense to deprive those people of the choice of whether or not they want to take a chance on a drug that has proven to be effective, as long as it doesn’t interfere with clinical trials. As a scientist, I think it’s an appropriate thing to do.”72
“Fauci transformed himself in the summer of 1989. He became an aggressive advocate for speeding up testing and drug approval for all life-threatening diseases, not just AIDS,” recalls Nussbaum. “Fauci adopted virtually the entire ACT UP program at once and as a whole. It was the kind of flip-flop that comes with a true religious conversion. It was so startling that it appeared as if Fauci had found the light, had an epiphany, and transformed himself into another being.”73 This sudden flip-flop presaged Dr. Fauci’s 2021 neck-wrenching switcheroo when he suddenly demanded an investigation of the Wuhan lab after energetically forestalling that inquiry for over a year.
By the end of 1989, his insurrection against his own old orthodoxies and his merciless attacks on the beleaguered satraps at FDA had made Dr. Anthony Fauci into something of a hero to some in the HIV community.
Industry to the Rescue