By September of 2021, Dr. Fauci’s power to muzzle his critics had achieved a mastery over free expression unprecedented in human history. That month, with a single phrase, Dr. Fauci silenced pop icon Nicki Minaj after she questioned whether COVID vaccines might be causing problems involving testicular swelling. When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked him about Minaj’s claim, Dr. Fauci simply declared, “The answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no.”108 As usual, he cited no study to support this assertion. The vaccine manufacturers acknowledge that the products are not tested for effects on fertility.109 110 Nevertheless, based upon Dr. Fauci’s word alone, Twitter immediately evicted Minaj from its platform, censoring her communication with her 22 million followers. Pharma’s obedient attack dogs CNN, CBS, and NBC rushed on to the dog pile to defame and discredit the rapper and to assure the public that Minaj was wrong. Dr. Fauci, after all, had spoken!
On February 19, 1988, Dr. Fauci appeared with hosts Charles Gibson and Joan Lunden on ABC’s flagship television program, Good Morning America. His appearance was part of a propaganda blitz of the friendly media platforms to resurrect himself and AZT from the all-out assault by scientists and independent reporters like Lauritsen and Peltz.111 Initially, GMA invited Dr. Fauci’s most vocal and credible nemesis, perhaps the world’s leading virologist, Berkeley professor Dr. Peter Duesberg, to appear on its show. Duesberg, who had at that date received more NIH grants than any other scientist, was enraging his benefactor agency by claiming that AZT was not just worthless, it was killing more people than AIDS. Duesberg had flown across the country to appear. On the evening before his scheduled appearance, GMA’s producer called Dr. Duesberg in his Manhattan hotel room to inform him that the show had been cancelled. The following morning, Duesberg awoke to watch Dr. Fauci promoting AZT and defending his study on GMA, unchallenged. This was, by then, a common motif for Dr. Fauci—his gift at strong-arming obsequious, slavish, credulous reporters to silence critics and to shield him from debate. The fawning GMA hosts asked Dr. Fauci why only one drug, AZT, had been made available. He replied: “The reason why only one drug has been made available—AZT—is because it’s the only drug that has been shown in scientifically controlled trials to be safe and effective.”112 The sycophantic GMA team, characteristically, accepted Dr. Fauci’s statement as gospel. Almost all of Dr. Fauci’s claims in that broadcast were lies.113
Lauritsen points out that “this brief statement contains several outstanding falsehoods”: “First, there have been no ‘scientifically controlled trials’ of AZT; to refer to the FDA-conducted AZT trials as ‘scientifically controlled’ is equivalent to referring to garbage as la haute cuisine. Second, AZT is not ‘safe’: it is a highly toxic drug—the FDA analyst who reviewed the toxicology data on AZT recommended that it should not be approved. Third, AZT is not known objectively to be ‘effective’ for anything, except perhaps for destroying bone marrow.”114
Only thirty-three years later did Dr. Fauci finally concede that AZT’s performance in his ballyhooed clinical trials—ostensibly saving lives at a 19-1 ratio—was actually less than stellar. Ironically, his delayed confession arrived just as Dr Fauci was minting a new whopper. In May 2020, during the White House meeting where he pronounced the miraculous efficacy of Gilead’s antiviral remdesivir—another beneficiary of Dr. Fauci’s manipulations—he admitted, “The first randomized placebo-controlled trial with AZT . . . turned out to give an effect that was modest.”115
That’s not what he said at the time. In 1987, he claimed that AZT was 95 percent effective; nineteen had died in the placebo group and only one in the AZT group.116
In 2020, based on equally flimsy and contrived evidence, he made similar claims for his lethal remedy, remdesivir, and his dubious Moderna vaccine.
The media’s reportage of AZT in the late 1980s almost universally lamented the cruelty of AZT’s astronomical costs that ranged between $8,000 and $12,000, not counting the cost of the required blood transfusions when patients’ platelets plummeted. Anthony Fauci solved this problem by making AZT “standard of care” for otherwise-healthy people with no AIDS symptoms who nevertheless were diagnosed with HIV via PCR tests. In 1989, when Dr. Fauci recommended universal testing, the LA Times dutifully gushed that AZT could “benefit about 600,000”117 of the estimated 1.5 million HIV-positive people in the country. Dr. Fauci promised these healthy Americans that taking AZT could delay their inevitable death sentences and would “have the broadest impact of any of the therapeutic advances shown in recent years to prolong the lives of patients with AIDS or HIV infection.”118The New York Times’s Philip J. Hilts uncritically reported that everyone should now get tested: “Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases . . . said that now people who are at risk for AIDS, even if they have ‘absolutely no symptoms,’ it behooves them to get themselves tested.”119 The resultant flood of additional customers clamoring for the drug significantly expanded the AZT market, allowing Burroughs Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) to lower per-unit costs.
No mainstream media outlet told the public about the behind-closed-doors meetings, where FDA green-lighted Dr. Fauci’s sketchy new initiative. The meetings’ transcripts reveal the deep anxieties of the FDA panelists, who worried that they had no idea if AZT might actually help healthy people, or whether it may, perhaps, kill them. Among all the American journalists covering the AIDS beat, only Celia Farber showed curiosity about the particulars of this milestone debate. In 1989, she quoted from the FDA transcript in an article titled “Sins of Omission,” in SPIN:
Everybody was worried about this one. To approve AZT, said Ellen Cooper, an FDA director, would represent a “significant and potentially dangerous departure from our normal toxicology requirements.” One doctor on the panel, Calvin Kunin, summed up their dilemma. “On the one hand,” he said, “to deny a drug which decreases mortality in a population such as this would be inappropriate. On the other hand, to use this drug widely, for areas where efficacy has not been demonstrated, with a potentially toxic agent, might be disastrous.”
“We do not know what will happen a year from now,” said panel chairman Dr. Itzhak Brook. “The data is just too premature, and the statistics are not really well done. The drug could actually be detrimental.” A little later, he said he was also “struck by the facts that AZT does not stop deaths. Even those who were switched to AZT still kept dying.”
“I agree with you,” answered another panel member, “There are so many unknowns. Once a drug is approved there is no telling how it could be abused. There’s no going back.”120
By invoking the “people are dying argument” to rush through AZT’s licensing for healthy Americans, the FDA’s drug approval process was decimated. Farber told me “the idea that complying with the normal safeguards of the regulatory process and taking time to prudently study a drug for safety or efficacy was artfully conflated with murder.” In that sense, an unbroken devolution of FDA’s regulatory function leads from AZT to the fraud-fueled “Emergency use approvals” of remdesivir and the Moderna mRNA vaccine during the COVID pandemic.