I hesitated to include this chapter because any questioning of the orthodoxy that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable—even dangerous—heresy among our reigning medical cartel and its media allies. But one cannot write a complete book about Tony Fauci without touching on the abiding—and fascinating—scientific controversy over what he characterizes as his “greatest accomplishment” and his “life’s work.”
From the outset, I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS. I include this history because it provides an important case study illustrating how—some four hundred years after Galileo—politics and power continue to dictate “scientific consensus,” rather than empiricism, critical thinking, or the established steps of the scientific method. It is a hazard to both democracy and public health when a kind of religious faith in authoritative pronouncements supplants disciplined observation, rigorous proofs, and reproducible results as the source of “truth” in the medical field.
While consensus may be an admirable political objective, it is the enemy of science and truth. The term “settled science” is an oxymoron. The admonishment that we should “trust the experts” is a trope of authoritarianism. Science is disruptive, irreverent, dynamic, rebellious, and democratic. Consensus and appeals to authority (be it CDC, WHO, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, or the Vatican) are features of religion, not science. Science is tumult. Empirical truth generally arises from the tilled, agitated, and upturned soils of debate. Doubt, skepticism, questioning, and dissent are its fertilizers. Every great scientific advance in history, every transformative idea, from evolution to heliocentrism to relativity, met initial ridicule from the panjandrums of “scientific consensus.” As novelist and physician Dr. Michael Crichton observed,
Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.1
Specifically, the original hypothesis on AIDS is an illustration of how vested interests (in this case, Dr. Anthony Fauci), using money, power, position, and influence, can engineer consensus on incomplete theories, and then ruthlessly suppress dissent.
The many thoughtful critics of Dr. Fauci’s central canon offer various plausible, but wildly divergent, alternatives to the official orthodoxy that HIV alone causes AIDS. There is one issue upon which they all agree: During the thirty-six years since Dr. Fauci and his colleague, Dr. Robert Gallo, first claimed that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, no one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs. The fact that Dr. Fauci has obstinately refused to describe a convincing scientific basis for his proposition, or to debate the topic with any qualified critics, including the many Nobel laureates who have expressed skepticism, makes it even more important to give air and daylight to dissenting voices.
Even today, incoherence, knowledge gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies continue to bedevil the official dogma. The unified chorus demanding blind adherence to that official dogma drowned out the lively public disputes of earlier years and ignored the clamor for scientific proof. An obsequious national media had consecrated the orthodoxy and anointed Anthony Fauci with an infallibility formerly reserved for popes. In the February 28, 1994, issue of New York Native, Neenyah Ostrom wrote an editorial titled “The Canonization of Anthony Fauci”: “Anthony Fauci, the man who has so mangled and misdirected US ‘AIDS’ research that 13 years into the epidemic there is no clear idea of its pathogenesis and no effective treatment, was recently raised to near sainthood, once again, by the New York Times.”2,3
Instead of responding to critics by answering common-sense inquiries, Dr. Fauci has cultivated a theology that denounces questioning of his orthodoxy as irresponsible, uninformed, and dangerous heresy. It’s axiomatic that American democracy thrives on the free flow of information and abhors censorship, so Dr. Fauci’s extraordinary capacity to ruthlessly silence, censor, ridicule, defund, and ruin prominent dissidents seems more congruent with the Spanish Inquisition or with Soviet and other totalitarian systems. Today, “The First Amendment simply does not apply to Tony Fauci,” says Charles Ortleb. “Any scientist who disputes his official cosmology or any of the canons that promote the orthodoxy that HIV is the one and only cause of AIDS is dead in terms of the rewards and sustenance of science.”
Finally, many of the tactics Dr. Fauci has pioneered to dodge debate—bedazzling and bamboozling the press into ignoring legitimate inquiry of the credo, and undermining, gaslighting, punishing, bullying, intimidating, marginalizing, vilifying, and muzzling critics—have become his mainstays for derailing skepticism about his mismanagement of subsequent pandemics, including COVID. So without attempting to draw conclusions about the underlying HIV/AIDS disputes, it is worth reviewing the weapons Dr. Fauci honed during his natal struggle to construct and fortify a “scientific” theology.