Two years later, Dr. Fauci would reminisce about those halcyon days: “When I first got involved in AIDS research, I was reluctant to deal with the press. I thought it was not dignified.”83 There is, in fact, little evidence of that reticence in the public record. From the outset, Tony Fauci seemed almost desperate for such indignities.
Dr. Fauci launched his media blitz with an unprecedented action: At ten o’clock in the morning following his evening receipt of the initial study results, Dr. Fauci began personally calling key journalists to announce his triumph. “No director of an NIH institute had ever contacted the press like that,” says Nussbaum.84 Traditionally, the NIH director himself made major announcements, but Dr. Fauci was apparently unwilling to share the glory with his nominal boss, NIH Director James Wyngaarden, or with HHS Secretary Otis Bowen. In making his proclamation, Dr. Fauci employed the gimmick that he watched Robert Gallo pioneer during his premature announcement of Gallo’s study linking HIV to AIDS. That announcement had shattered another tradition: Historically, agencies didn’t announce the results of clinical trials until the data were peer-reviewed and published so that journalists—and the scientific community—could read the study and reach their own conclusion about what the science said. Gallo had trailblazed the technique of “science by press release” four years earlier, when he had staged an HHS press event to announce that the probable cause of AIDS had been found, a retrovirus that would later be named the “Human Immunodeficiency Virus” or “HIV.” The press reported Gallo’s discovery as scientific fact, even though Gallo had not published a peer-reviewed paper supporting his enormously consequential assertion. Here was a useful innovation that allowed regulatory officials to craft and control the public narrative from inception. The science was what the regulators declared it to be. There could be no opportunity for journalists to read the ambiguous data, consider contrary expert opinion, or second-guess official pronouncements.
Dr. Fauci made himself the virtuoso of this technique, displaying it, at its apogee, during his April 28, 2020, announcement of remdesivir’s miraculous performance during NIAID’s rigged and fraud-tainted clinical trials, while seated on an Oval Office couch beside President Trump. He had no peer-reviewed or published study, no authentic placebo trial, no data, and not even a handout for the press. With this vague hearsay claim, he forced through Emergency Use Authorization for his darling drug and sold Gilead’s entire inventory to the president without publishing a word or ever leaving the sofa.
Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, this practice would become a routine vehicle for extreme abuse in the COVID19 era, when vaccine companies habitually disclosed cherry-picked highlights of their clinical trials in press releases weeks before publishing far less bullish study results. Those tactics drew criticism as “pump and dump” enterprises with company executives simultaneously unloading stock timed with deceptive announcements that drove up share prices. At least one case—Dr. Fauci’s Moderna vaccine—prompted a federal securities investigation.85
Using the same extravagant language he would later apply to remdesivir, Dr. Fauci boasted to reporters that his trial had produced “clear-cut evidence” that AZT “saved lives.” Any reporter who wanted to cover the story for the evening news had to take his word for it. And then, as now, some people simply couldn’t conceive that Anthony Fauci would lie or exaggerate. Dr. Fauci giddily declared that his agency would recommend AZT not only for individuals with full-blown AIDS, but for asymptomatic people who had tested positive for HIV but showed no sign of AIDS. He never mentioned that AZT cost $10,000 for annual treatment—only that Burroughs Wellcome would sell it for $500/bottle. The FDA approval meant the taxpayers would subsidize AZT’s costs.
Burroughs Wellcome’s shares soared 45 percent on Dr. Fauci’s announcement, adding 1.4 billion pounds to the company’s UK stock market value in one day.86 The company’s CEO predicted that AZT profits would bring in over $2 billion per year.87
The PIs had handed NIAID its first successful drug trial. Dr. Fauci was now in the clear and he knew that the PIs had pulled his chestnuts from the fire. Not only had they given him a blockbuster AIDS drug, they had also built him a tried-and-tested system for producing future drug approvals. He no longer needed to pander to the CRI doctors. Dr. Fauci wasted no time in putting an end to his parallel-track charade.
When Dr. Fauci abandoned the CRI system, NIAID just as quickly lost its brief interest in patient care or in testing repurposed new drugs against the opportunistic infections that killed people with AIDS. NIAID went back to its comfortable niche nurturing pharmaceutical blockbusters. “It was the same old story,” recounts Nussbaum. “Nothing had changed for years.”88
There was only one problem: Dr. Fauci’s entire clinical trial for AZT had been an elaborate fraud.
A Moment of Truth, Uncovering the Fraud
In July 1987, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) finally published Burroughs Wellcome’s official report on the Phase II AZT trials—the so-called “Fischl study”— which was the basis of the FDA’s approval of AZT.89 Outside scientists finally had the chance to scrutinize the study’s details for the first time. Many had earlier expressed shock at its abbreviated duration, but now they began to uncover evidence of fatal methodological flaws—some attributable to confirmation bias, but others clearly the product of corruption, and deliberate falsification. Within days, reporters, researchers, and scientists began lobbing aspersions on Dr. Fauci’s Pollyannaish and self-serving interpretation of the data. European scientists complained that NIAID’s raw data showed no benefit of reducing symptoms, a finding that threatened Glaxo’s biggest anticipated profit pool. The Swiss newspaper Weltwoche termed his AZT trials a “gigantic botch-up.”90,91
Investigative journalist and market research analyst John Lauritsen, who had covered the AIDS crisis since 1985, became the first intrepid journalist to critically analyze the details of the AZT trials. When he saw the NEJM reports, he quickly realized that the research was invalid. In his first AZT article, “AZT on Trial” (19 October 1987), he wrote: “The description of methodology was incomplete and incoherent. Not a single table was acceptable according to statistical standards—indeed, not a single table made sense. In particular, the first report, on ‘efficacy,’ was marred by contradictions, ill-logic, and special pleading.”92 He telephoned the nominal authors of the report, Dr. Margaret Fischl and Douglas Richman, and spoke to each for half an hour: “Neither one of them could explain the tables in the reports that they themselves had allegedly written.” They could only say that he should call Burroughs Wellcome for answers to his questions.