The loudest, most influential, and persistent challenge to the thesis that HIV might not be the only cause of AIDS came from Dr. Peter Duesberg, who in 1987 enjoyed a reputation as the world’s most accomplished and insightful retrovirolo-gist. Specifically, Dr. Duesberg accuses Dr. Fauci of committing mass murder with AZT, the deadly chemical concoction that according to Duesberg causes—and never cures—the constellations of immune suppression that we now call “AIDS.” But Duesberg’s critique goes deeper than his revulsion for AZT. Duesberg argues that HIV does not cause AIDS but is simply a “free rider” common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures. While HIV may be sexually transmittable, Duesberg argues, AIDS is not. Duesberg famously offered to inject himself with HIV-tainted blood “so long as it doesn’t come from Gallo’s lab.”4 For starters, Duesberg points out that HIV is seen in millions of healthy individuals who never develop AIDS. Conversely, there are thousands of known AIDS cases in patients who are not demonstrably infected with HIV. Dr. Fauci has never been able to explain these phenomena, which are inconsistent with the pathogenesis of any other infectious disease.
Many other prominent and thoughtful scientists have offered a variety of well-reasoned hypotheses to explain these baffling fissures in the HIV orthodoxy. Most of these alternative conjectures accept that HIV plays a role in the onset of AIDS but argue that there must be other cofactors, a qualifier that Dr. Fauci and a handful of his diehard PIs stubbornly deny.
Prior to advancing his own theory for the etiology of AIDS, Duesberg methodically laid out the logical flaws in Dr. Fauci’s HIV/AIDS hypothesis in a ground-breaking 1987 article in Cancer Research.5 Dr. Fauci has never answered Duesberg’s common-sense questions.
In his subsequent book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Duesberg, in 724 riveting pages, expands his dissection of the hypothesis’s flaws and outlines his own explanation for the etiology of AIDS.6
For those subsumed in the theology that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, Dr. Duesberg’s critiques seem so outlandish that they automatically debase anyone who even considers them. It’s telling, then, to discover how much traction his arguments have among the world’s most thoughtful and brilliant scientists, including many Nobel laureates, perhaps most notably Luc Montagnier, who first isolated HIV. To date, Dr. Fauci has been able to silence but not to answer or to refute Duesberg’s thesis.
I restate that I take no side in this dispute. It seems undeniable to me that the dissidents have raised legitimate queries that should be researched, debated, and explored. I believe public health officials have a duty to answer these sorts of questions, and I yearn to hear those arguments in an energized debate; Dr. Fauci’s aggressive censorship campaign and his refusal to debate arouse my suspicion and my ire. It brings to mind George R. R. Martin’s observation that entrenched powers remove men’s tongues not to prevent them from telling lies, but to stop them from speaking the truth.
If any of Dr. Duesberg’s revelations are solid, his story has momentous relevance today—as the removal of his tongue illustrates the capacity of the pharmaceutical cartel, in league with self-interested technocrats, to exaggerate and exploit viral pandemics, to foist toxic and dangerous remedies onto a credulous public, and promote self-serving agendas—even those with terrible outcomes—with the complicity of a fawning and scientifically illiterate media. Duesberg and others charge that by stifling debate and dissent, Dr. Fauci milled public fear into multibillion-dollar profits for his Pharma partners while expanding his own powers and authoritarian control. The resulting policies, they say, have caused calamity to global economies and public health, and vastly expanded the pool of human suffering.
The first time that someone—Dr. Tom Cowan, a physician from Northern California—suggested to me that HIV was not the sole cause of AIDS, I dismissed the comment as ridiculous. I had watched many HIV-positive friends die of AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s. I personally knew two of the celebrities—Arthur Ashe and Rudolf Nureyev—whose pioneering deaths from “AIDS” shocked the world at the epidemic’s dawn. It seemed self-evident that HIV was the culprit. I had no idea that the supposition was controversial. I have since learned that today, a disturbing number of virologists quietly doubt the theory that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS.
To understand the skepticism by many of the world’s leading scientific minds, we need to venture back through history and briefly down a very deep rabbit hole. That journey pulls the curtain back on a shockingly corrupt NIH culture distinguished by lacunae that most Americans associate with politics, not science: cutthroat ambition, backstabbing duplicity, and moral bankruptcy.
In July 1981, CDC reported a unique outbreak of immune deficiency–related health problems in a group of highly promiscuous gay men in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. A May 1983 Science article by French Institut Pasteur virologist Luc Montagnier first identified a retrovirus that would later earn the name HIV.7 Montagnier believed he had detected signals of HIV in the lymph nodes of some of the AIDS victims he had sampled. After hearing a lecture by Montagnier, Dr. Robert Gallo, a blustering, ambitious National Cancer Institute (NCI) researcher, entrepreneur, and homophobe, persuaded the Frenchman to send him a sample of the newly discovered retrovirus, promising to use his considerable influence with the journal Science to get Montagnier’s work published expeditiously. Instead, Dr. Gallo stalled the publication to give himself time to cultivate and steal Montagnier’s virus. With the help of other HHS officials, Gallo then claimed Montagnier’s pilfered virus as his own discovery and used an imaginative and cunning retinue of subterfuges and intricate frauds to obscure his larceny. In his book, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson meticulously documents Gallo’s brazen flimflam, perhaps the boldest, most outrageous, and most consequential con operation in the history of science. The book exposes Gallo as a mountebank who built his career poaching discoveries from other scientists and claiming them as his own.8
Scientists who worked for Gallo described his NIH lab, where he presided over some fifty scientists and a budget of $13 million, as a “den of thieves.”9 One of Gallo’s scientists told Crewdson, “It’s hard to be an honest person in this place.” She said she knew three employees who committed suicide.10 Gallo confided to a henchman that he liked to hire foreigners “because if they don’t do what he wants, he can deport them.” Gallo’s former mistress and lab employee, Flossie Wong-Staal, reported that Gallo voiced his craven need for the Nobel Prize and his bitterness at being denied the honor so frequently that it was practically a “rhetorical device.”11
It was natural that Gallo found a powerful and reliable ally in Tony Fauci. Gallo’s “proof” that the cause of AIDS was a virus—as opposed to toxic exposures—provided the critical foundation stone of Dr. Fauci’s career. This claim allowed Dr. Fauci to capture the AIDS program and its attendant cash flows from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and launch the project of building NIAID into the world’s leading drug-production empire.
On April 23, 1984, Gallo recruited his boss, HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler, to lend credibility and weight to his dramatic announcement. Heckler took the stage before a packed scrum of international press. “Good afternoon,” she told the world, “Ladies and gentlemen, first, the probable cause of AIDS has been found—a variant of a known human cancer virus.” She pointedly added, “Today we add a new miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science.”12