“The death blow to FDA’s safety function was AZT,” says Farber. “After that, any potentially deadly disease became an excuse for curtailing clinical trials. Death by medication was normalized as an inherent part of progress.” All those poisoned Americans were just unfortunate casualties in Little Napoleon’s noble war against the germs.121
Dr. Fauci’s fraud persuaded hundreds of thousands of people to take AZT. For many of them, it was a lethal choice. In 1987, AZT became the AIDS “therapy” even though in the recommended dosage of 1,500 mg/day, it was absolutely fatal.122 Throughout the 1980s, the average lifespan of a patient on AZT was four years. The life expectancy only began to increase in 1990, when the FDA lowered the recommended dosages from 1,200 mg/day to 600.123 The quality of life on AZT was universally pretty miserable. Many credible scientists argued that AZT was killing more people than AIDS. Lauritsen estimated that AZT killed 330,000 gay men between 1987 and 2019.124 Many of the dead were perfectly healthy before beginning the AIDS regimen. Absent AZT, Lauritsen says, the vast majority of those men would not have died.
Fast-Track Template
AZT’s record-setting race to approval did not stand for long. By 1991, Dr. Fauci had effectively abandoned testing low-profit repurposed drugs in the parallel track CRI program. But he used a parallel track to open a loophole in the FDA drug approval system, a loophole large enough to drive through truckloads of Pharma’s new high-profit patented antivirals. Using CRI’s relaxed rules, Dr. Fauci and his Pharma partners shattered a series of new speed records at FDA. Still smarting from the public roasting Dr. Fauci had administered to them, bedraggled and bullied FDA officials lowered agency standards to green-light Dr. Fauci’s dark pharmacopoeia of deadly chemotherapy drugs with minimal safety testing. That year, exploiting the regulatory breach he had created with CRI’s fast-track system, Dr. Fauci waved through another DNA chain antiretroviral terminator drug to quick approval, allowing it to skip the double-blind placebo testing he had previously declared indispensable. NIH had developed and patented didanosine (ddI) before licensing it to Bristol Myers Squibb.125 Didanosine won FDA approval without even a pretense of a placebo-controlled study. The drug had so many debilitating and lethal side effects that FDA, in an uncharacteristic act of civil disobedience against NIAID’s diminutive dictator, issued a black box warning. Nevertheless, desperate HIV-infected Americans rushed like doomed lemmings to take the drug. In 2010, FDA issued a statement that ddI can cause potentially a fatal liver disease called non-cirrhotic portal hypertension.126 Even with its demonstrated toxicity, Dr. Fauci used CRI parallel-track process to bypass the usual controls, to win approval for use of ddI in pregnant mothers who test positive for HIV. A 2019 study [Hleyhel et al., Environ Mol Mutagen (2019)127] found that ddI accounted for 16 percent of prescriptions for infected mothers and 30 percent of the cancers in their children.
In 1996, Dr. Fauci used his expedited fast track to break another record by winning FDA approval for Merck’s HIV antiviral Crixivan; this time it took only six weeks.128 Dr. Fauci achieved that feat by allowing Merck to run Crixivan through a skeleton CRI process on a tiny cohort of ninety-seven volunteers in three groups, thereby winning the swiftest approval in history: forty-two days. That approval prompted open revolt by the AIDS community, which felt betrayed when Merck hiked up the price of the drug. Activists led by the Treatment Action Group condemned Merck’s misuse of the CRI exemptions to secure approval for its deadly and ineffective drug.
In 2016, Dr. Fauci boasted that his efforts had led to the approval of some thirty new drugs to treat HIV/AIDS.129 Dr. Fauci called this “extraordinary” accomplishment “one of the most important transformative discoveries in biological sciences.”
These drugs generated billions of dollars in revenue for drugmakers: in 2000, global revenue from AIDS remedies was $4 billion; by 2004, it jumped to $6.6 billion. In 2010, AIDS drugs cracked the $9 billion mark130 for pharmaceutical giants and topped $30 billion in 2020.131
“On the surface of AIDS, what the public sees, is a benevolent exterior, devoted to ‘saving lives,’ of originally mostly gay men in the west, then, since they shifted the narrative, primarily Africans. A global apparatus now worth over $2 trillion and composed of more NGOs, more organizations than anybody could count, obliterates all dissent, all real language, history and truth,” says Celia Farber, author of Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. “It’s a Beast system, and Fauci created it. It’s not ‘capitalism,’ at all. It detests merit, standards, and all the values of Western Civilization. It uses the violence of the ‘woke’ economy to re-cast lies as truth, and to proudly crush and block any and all dissenting voices. It does this always in the name of ‘saving lives.’ Only now, with COVID, are Americans able to see Fauci’s cold, ruthless face behind the mask. Americans have tried to follow what that man has said for a year and a half now, and we who have been dealing with him for so long, we feel like: Welcome to our nightmare. Nothing he says makes sense, yet nobody stands over him, to reign him in. Tower of Babble. Americans are trying to make him into a benign figure, but more and more, they feel a sinking feeling. Is he a madman? Why can’t we understand what he is actually saying, what he means? This is very unsettling, when people are as afraid as people are now, since Covid.”
Aftermath
A key and enduring legacy of the AZT battle was Dr. Fauci’s emergence as the alpha wolf of HHS. His enormous budget, and multiplying contacts on Capitol Hill, the White House, and the medical industry, thereafter allowed him to influence or ignore a succession of politically appointed HHS directors and to bully, manipulate, and dominate HHS’s other sister agencies, most notably FDA.