Of those who got AZT, all suffered from its unspeakable toxicity. “A number of them . . . would very definitely have died from anemia,” had the PIs not given the blood transfusions to keep them alive, says Lauritsen. AZT causes anemia in every animal species ever studied, including human beings. In his book, Poisoned by Prescription, Lauritsen explains how “[p]atients taking AZT became anemic, and suffered low white blood cell counts accompanied by vomiting.” FDA’s documents showed that everyone in the AZT group suffered severe toxicities and anemia, yet NIAID’s official report listed no adverse effects among AZT recipients.
Some of the AZT patients suffered adverse reactions so deadly that they needed multiple blood transfusions just to keep them alive. Dr. Fauci’s crooked researchers pumped these individuals with regular blood transfusions and then neglected to record their multiplicity of health problems. In the AZT group, thirty patients—over half the total—clung to life until the end of the study only with help from multiple blood transfusions. In each case the Boston PIs checked “no adverse reactions” on the CRFs. Some 20 percent received multiple transfusions. In the placebo group, on the other hand, only five patients received transfusions.
“What happens when you get a blood transfusion?” asks noted AIDS researcher and author Dr. Robert E. Willner, MD, PhD. “You look better, you feel better, and you live a little bit longer. But the most important question and lesson from all of this, you must ask the question: Why do those on AZT need six times more transfusions in a four-month period than the individuals on the placebo? Because you’re dealing with a killer drug. . . .”98
“Many of the patients would have died from the toxicities of AZT if they had not been given emergency blood transfusions,” reports Lauritsen. “This is a serious adverse effect. That means literally that they would have died from the poison. And yet the case report forms that showed up eventually would report no adverse effects. I mean, this is a type of dishonesty. It’s hard to go any further than that.”
Dr. Willner, who died in 1995, accused Dr. Fauci of using transfusions and other artifices to systematically conceal AZT’s horrendous toxicity. “What do we have to say about the National Institutes of Health, when a private, independent laboratory, found AZT to be 1,000 times more toxic than the laboratory of the NIH? We can understand a 5 percent error in a laboratory, even a 10 percent error, but a 10,000 percent error or a 100,000 percent error? That’s fraud.”99
One typically appalling item in Spitzig’s report concerned Patient #1009, who was already taking AZT and was therefore ineligible to participate in the clinical trial. The Boston PIs nevertheless illegally entered him in the study and assigned him to the placebo group, although he never stopped taking AZT. He suffered typical AZT toxicities including severe headaches and anemia, dropped out of the study after less than a month, and died two months later. The PIs counted him as a death in the placebo group. Lauritsen wrote: “Further comment would be superfluous. If this is not fraud, the word has no meaning.”100,101
Even in that innocent era, the United States mainstream media heavily censored journalistic criticism of Dr. Fauci and the corruption in the AZT studies. Most Americans were therefore unaware of any dissent from the AIDS orthodoxy. This was less true in Europe and the UK. On February 12, 1992, Channel 4 Television in London broadcast a documentary, “AZT: Cause for Concern.” Produced by Meditel, the film described the material from the FOIA documents, exposed the crooked AZT trials as rank fraud, and chronicled the terrible toxicities of the drug. The next day, the charity, Wellcome Foundation, divested itself of most of its stock in Wellcome Pharmaceuticals, the parent company of Burroughs Wellcome, the manufacturer of AZT. Burroughs Wellcome stocks plunged, and the company suffered a series of hostile takeovers by SmithKline Beecham and then by Glaxo. Millions around the world viewed the UK documentary, but neither it nor any of the Medical AIDS-critical documentaries have ever been broadcast in the US.102
AZT is the most toxic drug ever approved for long-term use. Molecular biologist Professor Peter Duesberg has explained AZT’s mechanism of action: It is a random terminator of DNA synthesis, the life process itself. Dr. Joseph Sonnabend stated simply: “AZT is incompatible with life.”103
On January 27, 1988, NBC News broke the censorship blockade to broadcast the first of reporter Perry Peltz’s three-part exposé on the AZT Fischl trial.104,105 Peltz reported additional evidence of widespread tampering with the rules and the pervasive cheating, which she discovered had started on day one. Peltz learned that Fauci’s claim that the study was double-blind was a wholesale canard and reported that most volunteers knew who was on the drug and who wasn’t. Since everyone was desperate for the “miracle drug,” the volunteers on AZT admitted to sharing their drug with placebo group members. This practice assured that researchers would get no clean results from either cohort. Furthermore, Peltz learned both placebo and study subjects were taking other drug regimens they obtained by purchasing remedies from buyers’ clubs. Peltz was practicing understatement when she branded NIAID’s AZT experiments as “seriously flawed.”
Dr. Fauci loves the media spotlight, but only when the pitcher is throwing softballs. Peltz closed her report with a pointed comment: “When preparing this report, we repeatedly tried to interview Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health. But both Dr. Fauci and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Frank Young declined our request for interviews.”106 When Lauritsen saw the NBC broadcast, he commented, “Welcome to the club, Perri!” Fauci also refused to speak to the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio, Channel 4 Television (London), Italian television, The New Scientist, and Jack Anderson. All these outlets had expressed skepticism about the Fischl report.107
Of course, Dr. Fauci remained a constant presence on the more obeisant media outlets. Despite years of ineptitude and catastrophe, he has managed to survive by cultivating credulous journalists who do not ask critical questions and give him free rein to broadcast self-serving propaganda. Furthermore, he had already become a master at persuading media outlets against giving platforms to his critics, a technique that served him well in 2020 and 2021.