Part 6 : Pharma Profits Over Public Health ...The HIV Pandemic Template For Pharma Profiteering

The Real Anthony Fauci

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

CHAPTER 2 

PHARMA PROFITS OVER PUBLIC HEALTH 

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” 

—C. S. Lewis 

For five decades, Dr. Anthony Fauci has wielded formidable power to fortify the pharmaceutical industry’s explosive growth and its corrosive influence over our government regulatory agencies and public health policy. During his fifty-year career, Dr. Fauci has nurtured a complex web of financial entanglements among pharmaceutical companies and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and its employees that has transformed NIAID into a seamless subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Fauci unabashedly promotes his sweetheart relationship with Pharma as a “public-private partnership.”1 

From his perch at NIAID, Dr. Fauci has used his $6 billion annual budget 2 to achieve dominance and control over a long list of agencies and governing bodies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Pentagon, the White House, the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN) organizations, and into the deep pockets of the Clinton and Gates Foundations, and Britain’s The Wellcome Trust. 

A leviathan yearly grant budget gives Dr. Fauci power to make and break careers, enrich—or punish—university research centers, manipulate scientific journals, and to dictate not just the subject matter and study protocols, but also the outcome of scientific research across the globe. Since 2005, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funneled an additional $1.7 billion 3 into Dr. Fauci’s annual discretionary budget to launder sketchy funding for biological weapons research, often of dubious legality. This Pentagon funding brings the annual total of grants that Dr. Fauci dispenses to an astonishing $7.7 billion—almost twice the annual donations of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[ Who elected this pos to have 7.7 billion to give away d.c] 

Working in close collaboration with pharmaceutical companies and other large grant makers, including Bill Gates—the biggest funder of vaccines in the world—Dr. Fauci has consistently used his awesome power to defund, bully, silence, delicense, and ruin scientists whose research threatens the pharmaceutical paradigm, and to reward those scientists who support him. Dr. Fauci rewards loyalty with prestigious sinecures on key HHS committees when they continue to advance his interests. When the so-called “independent” expert panels license and recommend new pharmaceuticals, Dr. Fauci’s control over these panels gives him the power to fast-track his pet drugs and vaccines through the regulatory hurdles, often skipping key milestones like animal testing or functional human safety studies. 

Dr. Fauci’s funding strategies evince a bias for developing and promoting patented medicines and vaccines, and for sabotaging and discrediting off-patent therapeutic drugs, nutrition, vitamins, and natural, functional, and integrative medicines. Under his watch, drug companies engineered the opioid crisis and made American citizens the globe’s most over-medicated population.4 During his half-century as America’s Health Czar, Dr. Fauci has played a central role in crafting a world where Americans pay the highest prices for medicine 5 and suffer worse health outcomes compared to other wealthy countries.6 Adverse drug reactions are among the nation’s top four leading causes of death, after cancer and heart attacks.7,8 Dr. Fauci’s impressive longevity at NIAID is largely due to his enthusiasm for promoting this Pharmacentre agenda. [ I am seriously concerned about my B.P. so I look with caution when I wonder why the government created the NIAD in the first place, because I know they ain't doing that s*#t anymore d.c ]

NIAID: A Pharma Subsidiary 

Under Dr. Fauci’s management, NIAID has become the center of a web of corrupting financial ties with the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Fauci’s NIAID looks much more like a drug company than any sort of agency to advance science. 

“I’ve been interviewing scientists for a long time in this country, and let me tell you something. There are two kinds: Those who are serfs of Anthony Fauci and those who are genuine scientists. The serf class will refract whatever the latest Lysenkoism is from Fauci and NIAID. They are protecting their grants,” says Celia Farber, whose 2006 Harper’s article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Destruction of Medical Science,” laid bare the culture of squalor, corruption, and violence at the vendetta-driven Division of AIDS (DAIDS). “The latter [genuine scientists] are the minority. They look, sound, and behave like scientists. And to varying degrees, they all live in a climate of both economic and reputational persecution. Peter Duesberg is one very famous example but there are others. Fauci’s vendetta system has many ways of crushing the natural scientific impulse—to question and to demand proof. Breathtakingly, because of Fauci’s impact since 1984, this tradition has been all but snuffed out in the US. ‘Everybody is afraid.’ How many times have I heard that line?” 

By all accounts, Anthony Fauci has implemented a system of dysfunctional conflicts and a transactional culture that have made NIAID a seamless appendage of Big Pharma. There is simply no daylight between NIAID and the drugmakers. It’s impossible to say where Pharma ends and NIAID begins. “It’s like Ozark,” says Farber. 

Researchers in NIAID’s labs supplement their income with honoraria they earn by attending Pharma seminars and briefing pharmaceutical company personnel with inside information about research progress on new drugs in NIAID’s pipeline.9 Dr. Fauci’s underlings routinely perform private projects for drug companies in their NIAID labs and take contract work running clinical trials for Pharma’s new drugs. Journalist and author Bruce Nussbaum reports that it is standard practice for Dr. Fauci’s employees to pocket enough gravy from the deal flow to add 10–20 percent to their NIAID salaries from this sort of work. NIAID officials justify this controversial practice arguing that the influx of pharmaceutical dollars strengthens NIAID’s labs and allows the agency to retain talented staff. NIAID also deducts 40, 50, or 60 percent off the top of these contracts for “overhead,” cementing the agency’s partnership with the industry. 10 [there is NO justification for NONE of this...it is spelled CORRUPTION!!! dc]

It’s no surprise that a 2004 Office of Government Ethics investigation chided Dr. Fauci for failing to control the corrupting entanglements between his staffers and pharmaceutical companies.11,12 That report cited NIAID for failing to review and resolve possible ethical conflicts affecting two-thirds of NIAID’s workers who were moonlighting in private industry. [ chided? wtf are we going to get 18 years later, for the hell of the last two years, only a politician could throw that word out there d.c ]

The investigators also found13 that NIAID had failed to obtain approval for a full 66 percent of “outside activities” the institute had undertaken over the review period. Outside activities, according to the NIH, 14 are undertakings that “generally involve providing a service to or a function for an outside organization, with or without pay or other compensation.” That could include generating income from a pharmaceutical patent from a drug company, consulting for industry, obtaining silent or equity involvement with biotech firms, or conducting paid lectures and seminars. Dr. Fauci’s management style thrives on creating many such opportunities for his agency and its employees to participate in profitable ventures with pharmaceutical companies. [ In reality that amounts to NO REGULATION of outside activities, I hate these bureaucrats  dc]

Dr. Fauci’s drug development enterprise is rife with other corrupting conflicts. Most Americans would be surprised to learn, for example, that pharmaceutical companies routinely pay extravagant royalties to Dr. Fauci and his employees and to NIAID itself. Here’s how the royalty system works: Instead of researching the causes of the mushrooming epidemics of allergic and autoimmune diseases—the function for which US taxpayers pay his salary—Dr. Fauci funnels the bulk of his $6 billion budget to the research and development of new drugs. He often begins the process by funding initial mechanistic studies of promising molecules in NIAID’s own laboratories before farming the clinical trials out to an old boys’ network of some 1,300 academic “principal investigators” (PIs) who conduct human trials at university-affiliated research centers and training hospitals, as well as foreign research sites. 

After these NIAID-funded researchers develop a potential new drug, NIAID transfers some or all of its share of the intellectual property to private pharmaceutical companies, through HHS’s Office of Technology Transfer. The University and its PIs can also claim their share of patent and royalty rights, cementing the loyalty of academic medicine to Dr. Fauci. 

Once the product gets to market, the pharmaceutical company pays royalties—a form of legalized kickbacks— through an informal scheme that allows Pharma to funnel its profits from drug sales to NIAID and to the NIAID officials who worked on the product. Under a secretive, unpromulgated HHS policy, Dr. Fauci and his NIAID underlings may personally pocket up to $150,000 annually from drugs they helped develop at taxpayers’ expense.15,16,17  [ so if we are funding this drug research, what does big pharma do, other then ring the cash register, this is some f*#Ked up S*#t people dc ]

The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the named owner of at least 4,400 patents. On October 22, 2020, the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report titled: BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH: NIH Should Publicly Report More Information about the Licensing of Its Intellectual Property. In this document, the authors reported that the NIH has received, “up to $2 billion in royalty revenue for NIH since 1991, when FDA approved the first of these drugs. Three licenses generated more than $100 million each for the agency.”18 [ I found that report, I'm going to help them announce it, because I do not think they took that advice d.c ]

However, Dr. David Martin has reported that the NIH Office of Technology Transfer licensing records 19 suggest that NIH was less than transparent with the GAO investigators. Conspicuously absent from the GAO report are over 130 NIH patents associated with active compounds generating billions of dollars in revenue. 

NIAID grants have resulted in 2,655 patents and patent applications, of which only 95 include an assignment to the Department of Health and Human Services as an owner. 20 Dr. Fauci assigned most of these patents to universities, thereby making the ultimate commercial beneficiaries entirely opaque while binding the invaluable loyalty of American medical schools and the nation’s most influential physicians to Dr. Fauci and his policies. 

Somewhat fishily, one of the largest holders of NIAID generated patents is SIGA Technologies (NASDAQ: SIGA).21 SIGA publicly acknowledges a close affiliation with NIAID, but the GAO omits all mention of SIGA in its report. SIGA’s CEO, Dr. Phillip L. Gomez, spent nine years working for Dr. Fauci at NIAID developing Dr. Fauci’s signature vaccine programs for HIV, SARS, Ebola, West Nile Virus, and Influenza before exiting to commercial ventures. While NIAID clearly developed SIGA’s technology, the company reports revenue from NIAID but no royalty or commercial payments to NIH or any of its programs. 

Eight US patents list Dr. Anthony Fauci as an inventor. However, NIAID, NIH, and GAO do not list any of them in their reports of active licensing despite the fact that Dr. Fauci has acknowledged collecting patent royalties on his interleukin-2 “invention.”22 

Furthermore, GAO reported none of NIAID’s patents despite clear evidence that Gilead Sciences and Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a division of Johnson & Johnson) have generated over $2 billion annually from sales directly resulting from NIAID-funded technologies.23 Missing from the GAO report are two patents for Janssen’s Velcade® that have generated sales in excess of $2.18 billion annually for many years. The GAO report also omits any mention of the patents for Yescarta®, Lumoxiti®, or Kepivance® in violation of 37 USC §410.10 and 35 USC §202(a). At least thirteen of the twenty-one patents in the GAO report, including Dr. Fauci’s Moderna vaccine, illegally fail to disclose government interest despite their indisputable NIH pedigrees. 

How big is Dr. Fauci’s drug development enterprise? Since Dr. Fauci arrived at NIH, the agency has spent approximately $856.90 billion.24,25 Between 2010 and 2016, every single drug that won approval from the FDA— 210 different pharmaceuticals— originated, at least in part, from research funded by the NIH.26 

Following drug approval, Dr. Fauci continues to collaborate with his pharmaceutical partners on promoting and pricing and profiting from their new product. Over the decades since Dr. Fauci took over NIAID, the agency has formalized an elaborate process of negotiating against US taxpayers to allow Pharma to extract maximum profits back from NIAID’s germinated drugs. With NIAID’s help, the lucky pharmaceutical company walks the new drug through accelerated FDA approval. The CDC then sets obscene retail prices for these collaborative products in secretive negotiations. Such sweetheart deals—at taxpayer and consumer expense—and accelerated approvals can yield direct financial benefits to NIAID, to Dr. Fauci’s favored employees, and even to Dr. Fauci himself. 27 

Dr. Fauci launched his career by allowing Burroughs Wellcome (now GlaxoSmith-Kline) to charge $10,000 annually 28 for azidothymidine (AZT), an antiretroviral medication developed exclusively by NIH and tested and approved by Dr. Fauci himself. Dr. Fauci knew that the product cost Burroughs Wellcome a mere $5/dose to manufacture.29 Higher profit for industry “partners” often means more extravagant royalty payments for his NIAID and NIH cronies. 

Another antiviral drug developed by Dr. Fauci’s shop, remdesivir, provides a recent example of a similar Pharma money-making scheme facilitated by NIAID/NIH. While remdesivir proved worthless against COVID, Dr. Fauci altered the study protocols to give his pet drug the illusion of efficacy. 30, 31 Despite opposition from FDA and WHO, Dr. Fauci declared from the White House that remdesivir “will be the standard of care” for COVID, guaranteeing the company a massive global market. Dr. Fauci then overlooked Gilead’s price gouging; the company sold remdesivir for $3,300–$5,000 per dose, during the COVID pandemic. The raw materials to make remdesivir cost Gilead under $10. Medicaid must, by law, cover all FDA approved drugs, so taxpayers again foot the bill. Through these boondoggles, Anthony Fauci has made himself the leading angel investor of the pharmaceutical industry. 

The disparate treatment of patented versus less expensive off-patent COVID-19 drug treatments by federal health agencies clearly exposes Dr. Fauci’s historic bias for high-ticket patent medicines that favor extravagant pharmaceutical industry profits over public health.32 

A 2017 study in the Emory Corporate Governance and Accountability Review summarizes how compromised federal public health officials like Dr. Fauci have transformed NIAID, NIH, CDC, and FDA into pharmaceutical marketing machines.33 The Emory researchers paint drug and vaccine makers as “thick as thieves,” with HHS officials acting not as regulators, but as “enablers, or perhaps worse still, [they are] complicit in questionable or ethically unsound activity as a result of being driven by self-serving motives . . .” According to Dr. Michael Carome, a former HHS official and a director of the advocacy group Public Citizen, “Instead of a regulator and a regulated industry, we now have a partnership. . . . That relationship has tilted the agency [HHS] away from a public health perspective to an industry friendly perspective.”34 Dr. Fauci is the human face of this corrupt dynamic. 

Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the commercial features of this partnership have eclipsed his agency’s mission to advance science. At NIAID, the Pharma tail now wags the public health dog. Dr. Fauci has done almost nothing to advance NIAID’s core obligation of researching the causes of the devastating explosions in epidemics of chronic allergic and autoimmune diseases that, under his tenure, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children,35 up from 12.8 percent when he took charge of NIAID in 1984.36 While ignoring the explosion of allergic conditions, Dr. Fauci has instead reshaped NIAID into the leading incubator for new pharmaceutical products, many of which, ironically, profit from the cascading chronic disease pandemic. 

Over the last fifty years at NIH, Dr. Fauci has played a leading role in Big Pharma’s engineered demolition of American health and democracy, working hand in glove with pharmaceutical companies to overcome federal regulatory obstacles and transform the NIH and NIAID into a single-minded vehicle for development, promotion, and marketing of patented pharmaceutical products, including vaccines and vaccine-like products. 

Most of us would like “America’s Doctor” to properly diagnose our illnesses using the best science, and then instruct us on how to get healthy. What if, instead of spending their entire budgets developing profitable pharmaceutical products, Dr. Fauci and the heads of other NIH institutes deployed researchers to explore the links between glyphosate in food and the explosion of gluten allergies, the link between pesticide residues and the epidemic of neurological diseases and cancers, the causal connections between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease, between mercury from coal plants and escalating autism rates, and the association of airborne particulates with the asthma epidemic? What if NIH financed research to explore the association between childhood vaccines and the explosion of juvenile diabetes, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis, and the links between aluminum vaccine adjuvants and the epidemics of food allergies and allergic rhinitis? What if they studied the impacts of sugar and soft drinks on obesity and diabetes, and the association between endocrine disruptors, processed foods, factory farms, and GMOs on the dramatic decline in public health? What would Americans look like if, for fifty years, we had a public health advocate running one of our top health agencies—instead of a Pharma shill? What would have happened if we’d spent that hundreds of billions dollars on real science, instead of drug development? Dr. Fauci seems willing only to give us diagnoses and cures that benefit Big Pharma—instead of public health—and to cover his trail with artifice. 

His critics have compared Dr. Fauci to a similarly long lived federal agency bureaucrat, J. Edgar Hoover, who used his five-decade dictatorial control of the FBI to transform the agency into a vehicle for shielding organized crime, fortifying his corrupt political partners, oppressing Black Americans, surveilling his political enemies, suppressing free speech and dissent, and as a platform for building a cult of personality around his own inflated ego. More recently, Dr. Fauci’s perennial biographer, Charles Ortleb, analogized Dr. Fauci’s career and pathological mendacity to the sociopathic con men Bernie Madoff and Charles Ponzi.37 Another critic, author J. B. Handley, labeled Dr. Fauci “a snake oil salesman” and a “bigger medical charlatan than Rasputin.”38 Economist and author Peter Navarro, former Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, observed during a national network television interview in April 2021 that “Fauci is a sociopath and a liar.”39 

His white lab coat, his official title, and his groaning bookshelves crowded with awards from his medical cartel collaborators allow Dr. Fauci to masquerade as a neutral, disinterested scientist and selfless public servant driven by a relentless commitment to public health. But Dr. Fauci doesn’t really do public health. By every metric, his fifty year regime has been a catastrophe for American health. But as a businessman, his success has been boundless. 

In 2010, Dr. Fauci told adoring New Yorker writer Michael Specter that his go-to political playbook is Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. 40 He spontaneously recited his favorite line from Puzo’s epic: “It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.”

CHAPTER 3 

THE HIV PANDEMIC TEMPLATE 

FOR PHARMA PROFITEERING 

“Guys like Fauci get up there and start talking and you know he doesn’t know anything really about anything, and I’d say that to his face. Nothing. The man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there, you’ll know it… He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. And he should not be in the position like he’s in. Most of those guys up there on the top are just total administrative people and they don’t know anything about what’s going on at the bottom. Those guys have got an agenda, which is not what we’d like them to have, being that we pay them to take care of our health in some way. They’ve got a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go, they change them when they want to, and they smugly, like Tony Fauci, do not mind going on television, in front of the people that pay his salary, and lie directly into the camera.” 

—Dr. Kary Mullis, winner of the 

1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry 

for his invention of the Polymerase 

Chain Reaction (PCR) technique, 

from interview with Gary Null, 1993. 

“Of course! I will always give you truth. Just ask the question and I’ll give you the truth. At least to the extent, that I think it is, right [laughs].” 

—Dr. Fauci, Der Spiegel, 

September 2020 

“Scientifically,” he [Harvey Bialy] says, “cancer is still an interesting question. AIDS has not been an interesting question for fifteen years.” 

“Why do you say that?” 

“Because it’s been a closed book for fifteen years. It has been clear for fifteen years that this is a non-infectious condition that has its cause in a whole variety of chemicals.” 

His voice rises. “Doesn’t the book demonstrate very clearly that scientifically, nothing happened between 1994 and 2003? Zero. Absolutely nothing except one wrong epidemiological prediction after another, one failed poisonous drug after another. 0.000.000 cured. No vaccine, or even a fake vaccine. It’s a total failure. We’ve turned virology inside out and upside down to accommodate this bullshit hypothesis for seventeen years now. It’s enough.” 

—From Serious Adverse Events: 

An Uncensored History of AIDS, by Celia Farber 

Prior to 1987, Peter Duesberg never had a single grant proposal rejected by the NIH. Since 1987, he has written a total of thirty research proposals; every single one has been rejected. He has submitted several proposals on aneuploidy, as recently as last year— they too have been rejected. 

“They just took him out,” says Richard Strohman, a retired UC Berkeley biologist. “Took him right out.” 

“The system works,” says Dave Rasnick. “It’s as good as a bullet to the head.” 

—From Serious Adverse Events: 

An Uncensored History of AIDS, by Celia Farber 

Beginnings 

Anthony Stephen Fauci was born in Brooklyn’s Dyker Heights neighborhood on December 4, 1940. Three of his grandparents were native Italians; his maternal grandfather was born in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. All four came to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Both his parents were born in New York City. His father, Stephen Fauci, graduated from the College of Pharmacy, Columbia University. His mother, Eugenia, went to Brooklyn College and Hunter College. They married at eighteen years old. It’s tempting to link his emergence as the modern champion of the pharmaceutical paradigm to the fact that Dr. Fauci’s parents owned a drugstore. His father, a pharmacist, filled prescriptions; his mother worked the cash register, and young Tony apprenticed on his Schwinn bicycle for a lifelong career delivering drugs. 

Anthony attended Our Lady of Guadeloupe Grammar School in Brooklyn and Regis High School, an elite Jesuit academy, where his tenacity distinguished him in the classroom and on the basketball court. Regis heavily weighted its curriculum toward the classics: “We took four years of Greek, four years of Latin, three years of French, ancient history, theology, etc.,” he told an NIH oral historian in 1989. He was a good athlete in a borough of stickball aces. An early Yankees fan, he preferred the reliable champions to the hometown heroes and describes himself as “somewhat of a sports outcast among my friends, who were all Brooklyn Dodgers fans.”1 The underdog Dodgers lost eight of eleven World Series encounters against the Bronx Bombers. Tony’s idols were Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Mets/Dodgers/Giants great Duke Snider. His appetite for total victory and domination made him a ferocious contender. Despite his diminutive size—he is 5´7˝—he played basketball and football and was a star point guard and captain of Regis’s 1958 basketball squad. Tony scored an impressive ten points per game, according to his yearbook. It wasn’t enough; the Raiders ended the season with a dismaying 2- 16 record. A teammate, Bob Burns, recalls that “he was ready to drive through whoever was in his way.” Another classmate, John Zeman, told Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Cohen, “He was just a ball of fire. He would literally dribble through a brick wall.”2 

Dr. Fauci went to Holy Cross College in 1958, studying philosophy, French, Greek, and Latin and graduating in 1962 with a BA. “I still am very interested in the classics,” he said in a 1989 interview with Dr. Victoria Harden, director of the NIH Historical Office.3 Dr. Fauci grew up Roman Catholic: “I credit very much the Jesuit training in precision of thought and economy of expression in solving and expressing a problem and the presentation of a solution in a very succinct, accurate way. This has had a major, positive influence on the fact that I enjoy very much and am fairly good at being able to communicate scientific principles or principles of basic and clinical research without getting very profuse and off on tangents.”4 Perhaps reason became the enemy of his faith—or, perhaps, Jesuit discipline robbed the catechisms of their fun. Today, Dr. Fauci brushes off queries about his Catholicism, describing himself as a humanist.5 

Dr. Fauci never doubted that he wanted to be a doctor, commenting that in high school, “[T]here really was no question that I was going to be a physician. I think there was subliminal stimulation from my mother, who, right from the very beginning when I was born, wanted me to be a physician.”6 

Dr. Fauci earned his medical degree from Cornell in 1966, graduating first in his class. Like his wife, immunologist and NIH’s Bioethics Department Director Dr. Christine Grady, Dr. Fauci is a lifelong germaphobe, but he confesses that he went into virology and immunology not so much to kill bugs as to avoid combat service in Vietnam: “I left Cornell and went into my internship and residency in 1966. That was at the exponential phase of the Vietnam War, and every single physician went into military service. I can remember very clearly when we were gathered in the auditorium at Cornell early in our fourth year of medical school. The recruiter from the Armed Forces came there and said, ‘Believe it or not, when you graduate from medical school at the end of the year, except for the two women, everyone in this room is going to be either in the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, or the Public Health Service. So, you’re going to have to take your choice. Sign up and give your preferences.’ So I put down Public Health Service as my first choice and then the Navy. Essentially, I came down to the NIH because I didn’t have any choice.”7 

The US Public Health Service was a heavily militarized public health agency led by its uniformed officer corps, including the surgeon general, which had grown out of military hospitals operated by the early Navy. NIH was its research arm created during World War II to support soldiers’ health during the war. As infectious disease mortalities in the US declined precipitously in the mid1950's, NIH maintained its relevance by declaring war on cancer. 8,9 

“I was very lucky because I knew that it was a phenomenal scientific opportunity. I wanted to learn some basic cellular immunology with the ultimate aim of going into what has been my theme for the past twenty-one years —human immunobiology and the regulation of the human immune system.”10 

After completing his residency at Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Fauci joined NIH in 1968 as a clinical associate at the NIAID, one of two dozen of NIH’s sub-agencies. In 1977, he became deputy clinical director of NIAID. Oddly, his specialty was applied research in immune-mediated illness—a subject of increasingly grave national concern. He would spend the next fifty years largely ignoring the exploding incidence 11 of autoimmunity and allergic diseases, except to the extent they created profitable markets for new pharmaceuticals. Dr. Fauci became NIAID’s director on November 2, 1984, just as the AIDS crisis was spiraling out of control. 

NIAID: A Sleepy, Irrelevant Agency 

When Dr. Fauci assumed leadership of NIAID, the agency was a backwater. Allergic and autoimmune disorders were hardly a factor in American life. Peanut allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases (e.g., diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis) were still so rare that their occasional occurrences in schoolchildren were novelties. Most Americans had never seen a child with autism; only a tiny handful would recognize the term until the 1988 film Rain Man introduced it into the vernacular. Cancer was the disease Americans increasingly feared, with nearly all the attention at NIH and the bulk of federal health funding going to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). 

Worst of all, by the era of Dr. Fauci’s ascendance as an ambitious bureaucrat at NIAID, infectious diseases were no longer a significant cause of death in America. Dramatic improvements in nutrition, sanitation, and hygiene had largely abolished the frightening mortalities from mumps, diphtheria, smallpox, cholera, rubella, measles, pertussis, puerperal fever, influenza, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever. 12 The devastating lethality from these former scourges that decimated earlier generations of Americans had dwindled. From 1900, when one-third of all deaths were linked to infectious diseases (e.g., pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea and enteritis), through 1950, infectious disease mortality decreased dramatically (except for the 1918 Spanish flu), leveling off in the 1950s to what we see today, about 5 percent of all US deaths.13 

Annual deaths from communicable disease dropped in the 1980s to around 50 per hundred thousand population, from 800 per hundred thousand in 1900.14 By the twentieth century, more people were dying of old age and heart attacks than from contagious illnesses.15 

At NIAID and at its sister agency, CDC, the bug hunters were sliding into irrelevance. NIAID’s heyday was a distant memory; it had served at the forefront of the war against deadly pestilence. NIH had mobilized scientists to track the epidemics of cholera, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and the 1918 Spanish flu contagion that infected and killed millions globally. 

Today CDC and NIAID promote the popular orthodoxy: that intrepid public health regulators, armed with innovative vaccines, played the key role in abolishing mortalities from these contagious illnesses. Both science and history dismiss this self-serving mythology as baseless. As it turns out, the pills, potions, powders, surgeries, and syringes of modern medicine played only a minor role in the historic abolition of infectious disease mortalities. 

An exhaustive 2000 study by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, concluded, “Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in [infectious disease] mortality seen in the first half of the [20th] century . . . nearly 90 percent of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.”16 

Similarly, a comprehensive 1977 study by McKinlay and McKinlay, formerly required reading in almost all American medical schools, found that all medical interventions, including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics, contributed only about 1 percent of the decline and at most 3.5 percent.17 Both CDC and the McKinlays attributed the disappearance of infectious disease mortalities not to doctors and health officials, but to improved nutrition and sanitation—the latter credited to strict regulation of food preparation, electric refrigerators, sewage treatment, and chlorinated water. The McKinlays joined Harvard’s iconic infectious disease pioneer, Edward Kass, in warning that a self-serving medical cartel would one day try to claim credit for these public health improvements as a pretense for imposing unwarranted medical interventions (e.g., vaccines) on the American public. 

As the McKinlays and Kass18 had predicted, vaccinologists successfully hijacked the astonishing success story—the dramatic 74 percent decline in infectious disease mortalities of the first half of the twentieth century—and deployed it to claim for themselves, and particularly for vaccines, a revered and sanctified—and scientifically undeserving—prestige beyond criticism, questioning, or debate.

An Agency Without a Mission In 1955, as deaths from epidemic disease declined, NIAID’s forerunner organization at NIH, the National Microbiological Institute (NMI), became part of the NIAID, 19 to reflect the diminished national significance of infectious diseases and the unexplained increases in allergic and immune system diseases. Congress ordered NIAID to support “innovative scientific approaches to address the causes of these diseases and find better ways to prevent and treat them.” 

Food allergies and asthma were still rare enough to be considered remarkable. Eczema was practically unknown, as were most autoimmune diseases, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Graves’ disease, Crohn’s disease, and myelitis.20,21 

As early as 1949, Congressional bills to abolish CDC because of the remarkable decline in infectious disease mortalities twice won by impressive majorities.22 From the mid-1970s, CDC was seeking to justify its existence by assisting state health departments to track down small outbreaks of rabies and a mouse disease called hantavirus, and by linking itself to the military’s bioweapons projects. Looking back from 1994, Red Cross officer Paul Cummings told the San Francisco Chronicle that “The CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic” to justify its existence.23 According to Peter Duesberg, author of Inventing the AIDS Virus, the HIV/AIDS theory was salvation for American epidemic authorities.24 

James Curran, the Chief of the CDC’s Sexually Transmitted Diseases unit, described the desperation among the public health corps in the early 1980s: “There was double-digit inflation, very high unemployment, a rapid military buildup and a threat to decrease all domestic programs, and this led to workforce cuts at the Public Health Service, and particularly CDC.”25 Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis similarly recalled the institutional desperation during the Reagan administration era. He said of the CDC: “They were hoping for a new plague. Polio was over. There were memos going around the agency saying, ‘We need to find the new plague’; ‘We need to find something to scare the American people so they will give us more money.’”26 NIH scientist Dr. Robert Gallo—who would become Dr. Fauci’s partner, coconspirator, and confidant—offered a similar assessment: “The CDC in Atlanta was under threat for reductions and even theoretically for closure.”27 

Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant. Dr. Fauci’s immediate boss and predecessor as NIAID Director, Richard M. Krause, helped pioneer this new strategy in 1976, during Dr. Fauci’s first year at the agency. Krause was a champion of what he called “The Return of the Microbes” strategy, 28 which sought to reinstate microbes to their former status as the feared progenitors of deadly diseases. That year, federal regulators concocted a fake swine flu epidemic that temporarily raised hopes around CDC for the resurrection of its reputation as a life-saving superhero. 29 

Even in that idealistic era, regulators were allowing Pharma to craft public health policy behind closed doors. Director Krause, whom Dr. Fauci would shortly succeed, invited Merck executives to sit in on internal planning meetings as collaborators.30 Working with Merck, NIAID 31 used taxpayer funds to subsidize development and distribution of vaccines,32 and to rush untested products to market.33 But the swine flu pandemic was a dud, and HHS’s response was a global embarrassment. Only one casualty—a soldier at Fort Dix 34—succumbed to the “pandemic,” and Merck’s experimental vaccine triggered a national epidemic of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a devastating form of paralysis resembling polio, before regulators recalled the jab.35 The four vaccine manufacturers—Merck & Co., Merrell, Wyeth, and Parke Davis—had refused to sell the vaccines to the government unless they were guaranteed profits and indemnity. They were sued for $19 million within months of the vaccination campaign. The Department of Justice handled the lawsuits.36 

Prior to 1997, the FDA forbade pharmaceutical advertising on television, and the drug companies had not yet transformed television reporters into pharmaceutical reps. Journalists, in short, were still permitted to do journalism. Sixty Minutes aired a scathing segment in which Mike Wallace mercilessly exposed the corruption, incompetence, and cover-ups at HHS that led to the phony swine flu pandemic and the wave of casualties from NIH’s experimental vaccine.37 The scandal forced the resignation of CDC Director David Sencer for his role in concocting the phony pandemic and pushing the dangerous vaccine.38 NIAID chief Richard Krause quietly resigned in 1984, deeding his seat to his faithful deputy, Tony Fauci.39 

In a poignant emblem of the ascending power of the pharmaceutical paradigm under Dr. Fauci’s stewardship, the Sixty Minutes report on the 1976 pandemic scandal is now largely scrubbed from the Internet. You can still view it on the Children’s Health Defense website. 

HIV/AIDS 

Despite those catastrophic outcomes, Dr. Fauci’s takeaway from the 1976 swine flu crisis seems to have been the revelation that pandemics were opportunities of convenience for expanding agency power and visibility, and for cementing advantageous partnerships with pharmaceutical behemoths and for career advancement. Four years later, the AIDS pandemic proved a redemptive juncture for NIAID and the launch pad for Dr. Fauci’s stellar rise. The lessons he learned from orchestrating regulatory responses to the AIDS crisis would become familiar templates for managing subsequent pandemics. 

Tony Fauci spent the next half-century crafting public responses to a series of real and concocted viral outbreaks 40,41—HIV/AIDS 42 in 1983; SARS 43 in 2003; MERS 44,45,46 in 2014; bird flu 47,48 in 2005; swine flu (“novel H1N1”)49 in 2009; dengue 50,51 in 2012; Ebola 52 in 2014– 2016; Zika 53 in 2015–2016; and COVID-19 54 in 2020. When authentic epidemics failed to materialize, Dr. Fauci became skilled at exaggerating the severity of contagions to scare the public and further his career. 

Even all those years ago, Anthony Fauci had already perfected his special style of ad-fear-tising, using remote, unlikely, farfetched and improbable possibilities to frighten people. Fauci helped terrify millions into wrongly believing they were at risk of getting AIDS when they were not; emphasis in his statement is added to highlight the caveats and conditional language: 

The long incubation period of this disease, we may be starting to see, as we’re seeing virtually, as the months go by, other groups that can be involved, and seeing it in children is really quite disturbing. If  the close contact of the child is a household contact, perhaps there will be a certain number of individuals who are just living with and in close contact with someone with AIDS or at risk of AIDS who does not necessarily have to have intimate sexual contact or share a needle, but just the ordinary close contact that one sees in normal interpersonal relationships. Now that may be far fetched in a sense that there have been no cases recognized as yet in which individuals have had merely casual contact, close or albeit with an individual with AIDS who for example have gotten AIDS. For example, there have been no cases yet reported of hospital personnel, who have fairly close contact with patients with AIDS. There have been no case reports of them getting AIDS; but the jury is still out on that because the situation is constantly evolving and the incubation period is so long, as you know. It’s a mean of about fourteen months, ranging from six to eighteen months. So what medical researchers and public health service officials will be—are concerned with is what we felt were the confines of transmissibility now going to be loosening up and broadening up so that something less than truly intimate contact can give transmission of this disease. 

The message people took away from those 250 rambling and obfuscating words: “Something less than truly intimate contact can give you this disease.” 

Translated into English, however, it’s just twelve words of truth: There have been zero cases of AIDS spread by ordinary close contact. 

Dr. Fauci’s most vocal critics complain that, from his earliest days running NIAID, he was neither a competent manager nor a particularly skilled or devoted scientist. His gifts were his aptitude for bureaucratic infighting; a fiery temper; an inclination for flattering and soft-soaping powerful superiors; a vindictive and domineering nature toward subordinates and rivals who dissented; his ravenous appetite for the spotlight; and finally, his silver tongue and skilled tailor. He won his initial beachhead by wresting jurisdiction over the AIDS crisis from NIH’s Big Kahuna, the National Cancer Institute (NCI).55 

In 1981, the CDC first recognized the emergence of a new disease that health officials dubbed Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among about fifty gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. The AIDS crisis initially landed at NCI because the condition’s most pronounced signal was Kaposi’s sarcoma, which was then considered a deadly skin cancer associated with immune suppression. 

A decade earlier, in 1971, President Nixon had launched the “War on Cancer.”56 The medical establishment promised a cancer cure by 1976.57 Instead, Pharma quickly transformed NCI into its cash cow as captured regulators funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into single-purpose patented cancer remedies and wonder-drug production that the agency developed with pharmaceutical company partners. The money enriched Pharma, researchers, doctors, and universities, but yielded little net public health benefit. Fifty years and $150 billion dollars later, 58,59 soft tissue and non-smoking cancers have increased dramatically. 60 NCI, ever-sensitive to offending Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Chemical, had spent almost nothing to address public exposures to carcinogens from medicines, vaccines, meats, processed foods, sugar, and chemical-laden agriculture. Mainstream cancer research suggests that one-third of all cancers could be eliminated through lifestyle changes. But according to cancer expert Samuel Epstein, NCI spent “Just 1 million—that is 0.02 percent of its $4.7 billion budget in 2005—on education, press releases, and public relations to encourage” better eating habits to prevent cancer. 61 

Under NIH’s regulatory rubric, the only exposures that are permissible targets of criticism and research in that universal bugaboo are Big Tobacco and the sun, which doesn’t pay lobbyists. NIH’s unbridled criticism of UV light has made sunscreen lotions another booming profit center for Big Pharma. 

For Pharma and its NCI regulators and enablers, the AIDS crisis looked like another ATM machine. But in 1984, NIH scientist Robert Gallo linked AIDS to his virus, HTLVIII, which in time would be renamed the “human immunodeficiency virus” (HIV). Dr. Fauci then moved aggressively to capture that revenue stream for his agency. In a dramatic confrontation with NCI’s Sam Broder that year, Dr. Fauci persuasively argued that, since AIDS was an infectious disease, NIAID must have jurisdiction. His victory over NCI in that tip-off placed Dr. Fauci in position to capture the sudden flood of congressional AIDS appropriations flowing to NIH through the adept lobbying of a well-organized AIDS community then besieging the Capitol for resources to study and treat the “gay plague.” 

In 1982, congressional AIDS funding was a pitiful $297,000.62 By 1986, that number jumped to $63 million.63 The following year, it was $146 million.64 By 1990, NIAID’s annual AIDS budget was $3 billion. But Gallo’s HIV/AIDS hypothesis proved a PR windfall for Dr. Fauci, as well. “The most dangerous place in America is between Tony and a microphone,” recalls Dr. Fauci’s perennial Boswell, Charles Ortleb, the former publisher of the New York Native, the gay newspaper that chronicled the early AIDS epidemic. “Once people recognized that this was caused by a virus,” recalled CDC’s James Curran, “media attention went from no news coverage to the most-covered news story in history. People went from neglecting it, to fear and panic.”65 

The expanded flow of cash spelled opportunity for Dr. Fauci. “AIDS was his big chance,” wrote historian and journalist Bruce Nussbaum, who penned the definitive history of early AIDS research, Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment are Corrupting the Fight Against AIDS. 66 “He wasn’t well known as a brilliant scientist, and he had little background in managing a big bureaucracy; but Fauci did have ambition and drive to spare. This lackluster scientist was about to find his true vocation—empire building.”67 

“Teflon Tony” 

The AIDS crisis’s best-known activist—and the most vocal critic of the NIH response—playwright Larry Kramer, may have been the first to make the cold assessment about Dr. Fauci’s winning capacity for combining charm and flattery with evasion, misdirection, and misinformation to bedazzle the media into suspending skepticism and overlooking his reliable incompetence. “The main reason that Fauci has gotten away with so much,” Kramer observed in 1987, “is that he’s attractive and handsome and dapper and extremely well spoken and he never answers your question.”68 Historians Torsten Engelbrecht, author of Virus Mania, and Konstantin Demeter call Fauci “Dr. Baron of Lies.”69 

Asked to offer thoughts on Fauci, veteran AIDS “war” reporter Celia Farber pulls back and takes a broad view. She said: 

People understand the Arendt concept of the “banality of evil.” 

You have set yourself the formidable task of deconstructing him. Why is he “evil”? (Which he is.) It’s not because he is so “banal,” so bureaucratic, so boring. That’s the drag costume.

In fact, he is a revolutionary—a very dangerous one, who slipped behind the gates when nobody understood what he was bringing in. 

What was he bringing in? He was bringing in—as a trained Jesuit and committed Globalist—a new potion that would achieve any and all aims for Pharma and the powers he served. The potion was then known as Political Correctness—now called “woke.” 

Fauci switched the entire linguistic system of American science, from classical “speak,” to woke “speak.” He brought in Cancel Culture, essentially, before anybody could imagine what it was. It was too perverse for genuine scientists to conceive of such a thing mixing with science, they could not believe it, or grasp it. Like a rape. It was incredibly confusing. That’s what I documented, on the ground, that horror and confusion among real scientists, as American science changes so radically before their eyes, to accommodate HIV. 

Farber went on: 

Let me elaborate a bit. Fauci’s reign begins in 1984, a year of total change. Everything changes, all of a sudden. Gallo is deployed with Margaret Heckler to make the declaration by US Government fiat that the “probable cause of AIDS” had been “found” and that it was some kind of trans-Atlantic fusion that looked “virus like” on the big screen, but was really neither a cogent virus nor a pathogen. The reason it “flew” to use [Nature Bio/Technology founding editor] Harvey Bialy’s word, was because everything had already changed. It was understood, without overt commands, that the “gay cancer” that had everybody in such a panic could not be assessed as complex toxic illness with a complex cause. The entire US media understood what to say and not say, and not only because of the allegiance to the shadow government, but because the era of classical science had ended. It ended that day. It would henceforth be a crime against decency to, for example, address anything that could be making gay men sick other than “the virus.” 

That’s not “bad science.” That’s perfectly executed political correctness. And they are diametrically at odds, in the Biblical sense of good and evil. 

What Fauci did was he made political correctness the new currency, of his funding empire. Peter Duesberg was not “wrong” about HIV and AIDS, he was politically incorrect about it and that was how Fauci banished him—sentenced him to funding and reputation death, as though he had done something really bad by dissenting against HIV theory. Stop and think how insane this is. An elite cancer virologist brought over from Germany’s Max Planck Institute whose credentials are so outstanding, who was well on his way to solving cancer’s genetics . . . felled suddenly by a fatwah, issued by this . . . Mufti? Who was he to issue a fatwah against America’s top cancer virologist? Well, he did. He blocked every federal research dollar to Duesberg after 1987, because Duesberg repudiated the woke ideology Fauci’s HIV empire, in a few paragraphs of a scientific paper that was about something else. He sustained the economic and reputational attack/vendetta for the next 3 decades. Without blinking. It’s really an unbelievable story. It would make Americans’ blood boil if they knew about it—because almost all have lost somebody in their family to cancer. 

Fauci had, by 1987, when Duesberg wrote the Cancer Research paper that sealed his scientific fate, an apparatus that included mass media, psychological operations, public health—this octopus that just straight-up throttled the entire scientific tradition of Western civilization. Evidence based science and the discourse culture that goes with it— gone. That’s what he did. It’s no small feat. He destroyed American science by snuffing out its spirit, the spirit of open inquiry, proof and standards. 

The reason so many outstanding scientists lent their names to opposing Fauci’s vendetta on Duesberg was not that they cared, necessarily, about the cause of AIDS; This was, for them, a battle over the very soul of science. Kary Mullis [PCR inventor] broke down crying in an interview I did with him in 1994, talking about it— talking about what Fauci did to Peter Duesberg and what it meant. 

The real scientists were horrified. Suddenly a guillotine was present. A new and strange terror. People were “guilty,” of thoughtcrimes like “HIV denialism.” Fauci had made political correctness the new revolutionary language, see? And that meant if you were “bad,” if you didn’t push agenda driven science, everything was taken away from you. And the media cheered. And anybody who didn’t was destroyed, vilified, harassed, fired, in a word, canceled. 

His gifts for deflection, misdirection, and obfuscation, and perhaps his boyish charm, give Dr. Fauci a Teflon quality— which he shared with President Ronald Reagan, under whom he initially came to power. Something about Dr. Fauci allows him to escape responsibility for (or even mild questioning about) his steady parade of sketchy decisions, his confident claims unsupported by scientific evidence, his relentless cascade of lies and failed predictions, and his miserable track record for keeping Americans healthy. 

As the nation’s newly appointed AIDS czar, Dr. Fauci was now a gatekeeper for almost all AIDS research. NCI already had long experience and robust infrastructure for conducting clinical trials on new drugs. NIAID had neither. Nevertheless, parroting NCI’s vows to cure cancer, Dr. Fauci promised Congress that he would quickly produce drugs and vaccines to banish AIDS. In his 1990 book, Nussbaum concludes that Fauci’s triumph over NCI cost many thousands of Americans their lives during the AIDS crisis.70 Myriad contemporary critics concurred with that assessment. 

The PIs: The Pharma/Fauci Mercenary Army 

NIAID’s lack of in-house drug development capacity allowed Dr. Fauci to build his new program by farming out drug research to a network of so-called “principal investigators,” or PIs, effectively controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Today, when people refer to the “Medical Cartel,” they are principally speaking of pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems, HMOs and insurers, the medical journals, and public health regulators. But the glue that holds all these institutions together, and allows them to march in lockstep, is the army of PIs who act as lobbyists, spokespersons, liaisons, and enforcers. Tony Fauci played a key historic role in elevating this cohort to dominate public health policy. 

PIs are powerful academic physicians and researchers who use federal grants and pharmaceutical industry contracts to build feudal empires at universities and research hospitals that mainly conduct clinical trials—a key stage in the licensing process— for new pharmaceutical products. Thanks to NIH’s largesse, and to NIAID in particular, a relatively tiny network of PIs—a few hundred— determines the content and direction of virtually all America’s biomedical research. 

In 1987, some $4.6 billion of NIH’s $6.1 billion budget went to these off-campus researchers.71 By 1992, NIH’s budget had expanded to $8.9 billion,72 with $5 billion going to outside scientists at 1,300 universities, laboratories, and other elite institutions.73,74 Today, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID alone controls $7.6 billion in annual discretionary expenditures that he distributes mainly to PIs around the globe.75 

PIs are pharmaceutical industry surrogates who play key roles promoting the pharmaceutical paradigm and functioning as high priests of all its orthodoxies, which they proselytize with missionary zeal. They use their seats on medical boards and chairmanships of university departments to propagate dogma and root out heresy. They enforce message discipline, silence criticism, censor contrary opinions, and punish dissent. They populate the Data and Safety Monitoring Boards (DSMBs) that influence the design of clinical trial protocols and guide the interpretation of clinical trial outcomes and conclusions; the external advisory FDA panel, Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), that guides determination of whether new vaccines are “safe and effective” and merit licensure (marketing); and the CDC panel, The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), that essentially mandates vaccines to children. They are the credentialed and trusted medical experts who prognosticate on television networks—now helplessly reliant on pharmaceutical ad revenue—to push out Pharma content. These “experts”—Paul Offit, Peter Hotez, Stanley Plotkin, Ian Lipkin, William Schaffner, Kathleen Edwards, Arthur Caplan, Stanley Katz, Greg Poland, and Andrew Pollard—appear between Pharma ads on network and cable news shows to promote the annual flu shots and measles scares, to drum up fears about COVID, and to rail against “anti-vaxxers.” They write the steady stream of editorials that appear in local and national newspapers to reinforce the hackneyed orthodoxies of the pharmaceutical paradigms—“all vaccines are safe and effective,” etc. They root out heresy by sitting on the state medical boards—the “Inquisition” courts—that censure and de-license dissident doctors. They control the medical journals and peer-review journal literature to fortify Pharma’s agenda. They teach on medical school faculties, populate journal editorial boards, and chair university departments. They supervise hospitals and chair hospital departments. They act as expert witnesses for pharmaceutical companies in civil court and the federal vaccine court. They present awards to one another. 

The 2006 meeting of CDC’s ACIP provides an illustrative blueprint for how Tony Fauci and his Pharma partners use their PIs to control the key FDA and CDC panels that license and “recommend” new vaccines for addition to the childhood schedule. That 2006 ACIP panel recommended two new blockbuster Merck shots: the Gardasil HPV vaccine for all girls ages nine through twenty-six,76 and three doses of a Merck rotavirus vaccine, Rotateq, for infants at ages two, four, and six months.77 Both Bill Gates 78 and Tony Fauci (via NIAID)79 had provided seed and clinical trial funding for the development of both Gardasil and the rotavirus vaccine.80,81 Merck maintained it had not tested either vaccine against an inert placebo in pre-approval trials, so no one could scientifically predict if the vaccines would avert more injuries or cancers than they would cause. Nevertheless, the sister FDA panel, VRBPAC, approved Gardasil—to prevent cervical cancer—without requiring proof that the vaccine prevented any sort of cancer, and despite strong evidence from Merck’s clinical trial that Gardasil could dramatically raise risks of cancer and autoimmunity in some girls.82 ACIP, nevertheless, effectively mandated both jabs. Gardasil would be the most expensive vaccine in history, costing patients $420 for the three-jab series and generating revenues of over $1 billion annually for Merck.83 

That year, nine of the thirteen ACIP panel members and their institutions collectively received over $1.6 billion of grant money from NIH and NIAID.

Systemic Conflicts of Interest 

Pharma and Dr. Fauci similarly rig virtually all the critical drug approval panels using this strategy of populating them with PIs who, bound by financial fealty to Pharma and NIAID funders, reliably approve virtually every new drug upon which they deliberate—with or without safety studies. 

From 1999 to 2000, Government Oversight Committee (GOC) Chairman Republican Congressman Dan Burton investigated the systemic corruption of these panels during two years of intense investigations and hearings. According to Burton, “CDC routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on influential advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines . . . while these same scientists have financial ties, academic affiliations and other . . . interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight.”84, 85 

Paul Offit: Voting Himself Rich 

The notorious “Television Doctor” Paul Offit was the codeveloper of the rotavirus vaccine that ACIP approved in that 2006 session. Offit is one of Dr. Fauci’s most prominent PIs and an exemplar of the kind of power, influence, and lucre available to PIs whose entrepreneurial energies are unobstructed by scruples. Offit is the darling of both mainstream and social media. He is a perennial guest on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN, on cable shows such as The Daily Show, and a former guest on The Colbert Report. He is the New York Times’s guest expert and provides regular editorials for the Times’s op-ed pages. He is a frequently quoted expert on evening news broadcasts and a regular contributor to online media outlets including HuffPost, Politico, and The Daily Beast. 86 

Media platforms uniformly identify Offit as a “vaccine expert” from the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). With Offit’s encouragement, they seldom, if ever, disclose his pervasive financial entanglements with Dr. Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies. In 2011, for example, while presenting at NIH for the Great Teachers Lecture Series, he unabashedly declared, “I’m sorry, I have no financial conflicts of interest.”87 

Given his voluminous conflicts, the brashness of that claim indicates his shameless arrogance. Dr. Offit, in fact, is a vaccine developer who has made millions monetizing his relationships with vaccine companies. He occupies the “Hilleman Chair” at CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), which Merck funded with a $1.5 million donation and named in honor of the company’s heavyweight vaccinologist.88 

Offit and his university and hospital affiliates have flourished largely based on hundreds of millions in grant monies from Dr. Fauci’s agency and from virtually all the big vaccine companies. In 2006 alone, his institution, CHOP, received $13 million from NIAID and $80 million from NIH. Offit’s biennial propaganda books—including titles like Vaccines: What Every Parent Should Know and Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure—are unabashed paeans to Big Pharma, and scourges to industry detractors and natural health. Offit uses these plugola tomes to exalt a wide range of “miracle” pharma products, to vilify vaccine hesitancy, and gaslight and bully the mothers of vaccine-injured children. Merck launders hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal payments to Offit through bulk purchases of these propaganda broadsides, which the company then distributes to pediatricians across the country. 89 

Offit is the most visible spokesperson for Pharma, its allied industries, and the chemical paradigm in general. He represents himself as an authoritative source of reliable information, but he is actually a font of wild industry ballyhoo, prevarication, and outright fraud. He brazenly claims, against all scientific evidence, that vaccine injuries are a myth—that all vaccines are safe and effective, that children can safely receive ten thousand vaccines at once,90 and that aluminum is safe in vaccines for babies because it is a “vital nutrient.”91 (There is no scientific study suggesting that aluminum is safe or that it has any nutritional value.) Offit says that mercury in vaccines is harmless and is quickly excreted from the body. 92 (Published science demonstrates decisively that mercury is a cataclysmically harmful and persistent toxin, and it is well known that both ethyl and methylmercury bioaccumulate.) 

Dr. Offit vocally supports GMO foods 93 and chemical pesticides and is an obstreperous foe of vitamins, nutrition, and integrative medicine.94 He warns against the fallacy of going “GMO free,” and takes the radical position that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) is harmless. He bitterly demonizes Rachel Carson for killing millions of people by hatching the plot against Monsanto’s DDT. 95 

Dr. Offit counsels his fellow PIs that lying is part of their job. He justifies any whopper that maximizes vaccine uptake. In 2017, Offit coached a group of fellow PIs, “You can never really say that MMR doesn’t cause autism but frankly when you get in front of the media you better get used to saying it because otherwise people hear a door being left open when a door shouldn’t be left open.”96 In his 2008 book, Autism’s False Prophets, Offit fabricated a conversation claiming that a vaccine safety advocate, J. B. Handley—a prominent Portland, Oregon, businessman with a severely autistic son—threatened one of Offit’s acolytes. Handley sued Offit for libel,97 forcing him to retract the statement, to publicly apologize for the fabrication, and to make a humiliating $5,000 donation to Jenny McCarthy’s autism charity. 98 

Despite such embarrassments, the mainstream media treat Offit’s most outlandish statements as gospel. Physicians rely upon the veracity of his pronouncements in making treatment decisions. Dr. Offit serves on the board of various pharma front groups 99 and astroturf organizations 100 and commands a vast network of bloggers and trolls, each of them directly or indirectly paid by the pharmaceutical companies to stifle debate, propagate lies, bully and intimidate the mothers of intellectually disabled children, silence scientific and medical dissent, and root out heresy. 

In 1998, Offit sat on the CDC’s ACIP Committee and participated in the debate that added rotavirus vaccine to the mandatory schedule for the first time, neither from the debate nor the vote, despite the fact that he had his own rotavirus vaccine then in development. He voted that year to add Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals’s rotavirus vaccine, RotaShield, to the mandatory schedule despite the absence of functional safety studies. Offit knew that ACIP’s positive vote on Wyeth’s rotavirus jab would virtually guarantee a similar approval for his own rotavirus vaccine during an upcoming ACIP session.101 

Before arriving at ACIP, every vaccine must first get reviewed by FDA’s sister “independent panel” called VRBPAC (which is also populated with Dr. Fauci’s and Big Pharma’s PIs), then licensed as “safe and effective” by the FDA. According to the findings of that 2000 Congressional investigation,102 four of the five FDA VRBPAC committee members who voted to license the Wyeth rotavirus vaccine that year had financial conflicts with the four pharmaceutical companies, Sanofi, Merck, Wyeth, and Glaxo, that were developing versions of the vaccine. 

Once the FDA committee gave RotaShield its blessing, the vaccine moved to ACIP to vie for a CDC “recommendation,” which effectively mandates the vaccine for 3.8 million school children annually, guaranteeing the manufacturer a trapped market worth hundreds of millions. 

During the 1998 ACIP session, Dr. Offit sat as one of five full voting members. (There were five additional nonvoting members.) His Rotateq codeveloper, Stanley Plotkin, also sat on the committee. The ACIP Committee unanimously recommended Wyeth’s RotaShield vaccine. 

The August 2000 Congressional investigation found that the majority of ACIP members were conflicted in that vote.103 That report found that seven out of ten ACIP working group committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine. 

According to the Congressional Report: 

#The Chairman served on Merck’s Immunization Advisory Board. 

#One member was under contract with the Merck vaccine division, received funds from various vaccine manufacturers, including Pasteur (now Sanofi), and was under contract as a principal investigator from SmithKline (now GSK). 

#Another member (of that same ACIP panel) received a salary from Merck as well as other payments from Merck. 

#Another member was participating in vaccine studies with Merck, Wyeth (now Pfizer), and SmithKline (now GSK). 

#Another member received grants from Merck and SmithKline (now GSK). 

#Another member shared a patent on his own rotavirus vaccine funded by a $350,000 grant for Merck to develop this vaccine and was a paid consultant to Merck. 

The last of these bullet points referred to Paul “I Have No Conflicts” Offit. Dr. Fauci’s and Pharma’s corrupt control of those two panels allowed Wyeth to obtain both an FDA license and a CDC “recommendation” without having to genuinely safety test this product, a process that would have revealed terrible risks. Even the truncated trials of Wyeth’s RotaShield, conducted with no placebo, revealed serious side effects in babies, including “failure to thrive,” fevers high enough to cause brain injury, and a condition called intussusception, wherein a child’s intestines telescope into themselves, causing an agonizing blockage that, in some instances, results in death. The intussusception figures alone were statistically significant— cited as one in two thousand of the children who received the vaccine.104 At this time, there were around 3.8 million children in the target age group living in the United States; this translated to around 1,890 statistically likely cases of intussusception.105 

Nevertheless, VRBPAC, under Fauci’s and Pharma’s tight control, approved the vaccine, and ACIP put it on the mandatory schedule. Less than a year after Dr. Offit and his confederates on ACIP voted to mandate RotaShield with no authentic safety testing, Offit again sat on the ACIP committee that revoked this earlier recommendation. ACIP pulled RotaShield from the market in October 1999 due to the many children who, predictably, suffered intussusception.106 VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, contains fifty reports of vaccine-related intussusception for the year 1999.107 Paul Offit’s shrewd maneuvering through this sequence of events opened an unobstructed path to approval and enormous riches for his own rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq. 

Since its approval, Dr. Offit’s rotavirus vaccine has caused a wave of catastrophic illnesses and agonizing deaths in babies from intussusception.108 

From 1985 to 1991, prior to the introduction of the rotavirus vaccine, the rotavirus disease caused only 20–60 deaths per year nationwide, mainly due to dehydration associated with diarrhea.109,110 Since dehydration is easily treated, virtually all deaths from rotavirus are avoidable with timely and appropriate medical care. 

Reported adverse reactions from Dr. Offit’s RotaTeq vaccine range from 953 to 1,689 per year. These included fever, diarrhea, vomiting, irritability, intussusception, SIDS, severe combined immunodeficiency, otitis media, nasopharyngitis, bronchospasm, urinary tract infection, hematochezia, seizures, Kawasaki disease, bronchiolitis, urticaria, angioedema, gastroenteritis, pneumonia, and death.111 

The best evidence indicates that Dr. Offit’s rotavirus vaccine causes negative net public health impacts; in other words, Dr. Offit’s vaccine almost certainly kills and injures more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and injured prior to the vaccine’s introduction. 

Finally, in 2010, after its introduction, NIH learned that Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, also contained the porcine retrovirus that causes an HIV-like syndrome called “wasting disease” in pigs.112 Neither Dr. Fauci nor any other agency has ever funded a study to establish the safety of injecting their dangerous pig retroviruses into babies. Millions of American children have now been inoculated with the virus, thanks to Offit. 

In 2006, ACIP added Offit’s vaccine to the schedule, allowing Offit and his business partners to sell his patent rights for the formulation to Merck for $186 million. Offit made a declared profit of over $20 million as a result of this series of transactions. Offit reported, in a gushing 2008 Newsweek story, that the millions he made from his rotavirus caper was “like winning the lottery.”113 In a less adoring assessment of the scam, UPI journalist Dan Olmsted and coauthor Mark Blaxill accused Offit of “voting himself rich.”114 

The disturbing saga of Paul Offit and his rotavirus vaccine illustrates how Tony Fauci’s PIs stuff the sausages at HHS.

How PIs Control Public Marketing 

Dr. Fauci’s choice to transfer virtually all of NIAID’s budget to pharmaceutical PIs for drug development was an abdication of the agency’s duty to find the source and eliminate the explosive epidemics of allergic and autoimmune disease that began under his watch around 1989.115,116 Refereed science, surveillance data, and manufacturers’ inserts all implicate the very drugs and vaccines that Tony Fauci largely helped develop as culprits in those new epidemics. NIAID money effectively became a giant subsidy to the blossoming pharmaceutical industry to incubate a pipeline of profitable new drugs targeted to treat the symptoms of those very diseases. 

While NIH remains a massive funding source for PIs, rich contracts from big drug companies and royalty payments from drug products often dwarf their government funding. Pharma money is the PIs’ bread and butter, commanding their loyalties and dictating their priorities. They and their clinics and research institutions are, effectively, arms of the pharmaceutical industry. Their empires rely on Pharma for their growth and survival. 

Moreover, PIs typically function in quasi-feudal fiefdoms: loyal to a single pharmaceutical company. Each drug company—Glaxo, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, and Gilead—cultivates a cadre of its own reliable PIs whom it funds to conduct clinical trials and drug research. Unwritten protocols dictate that a Merck PI will not customarily perform research for a Merck competitor. Typically, the drug company contracts with the reliable PI’s medical school, attending hospital, or research institution to run clinical trials. The company makes payments ranging from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 (depending on the trial phase, complexity, and the company) for each patient enrolled in the drug trial,117 with the university skimming one-half to two-thirds of those funds for “academic overhead.”118 

Those payments from the pharmaceutical company secure long-term loyalty from the institution and its board. Moreover, both the researcher and the university customarily share patent interests in any product the PI helps develop, collecting rich royalties when it hits the market. Additional money from the Pharma sponsor supports the PI’s assistants and laboratory costs. The drug company also pays “legalized bribes” to the PI grantee through honoraria, expert witness fees, speaking gigs, and first-class travel to exclusive resorts for conferences. All these perquisites tend to fortify loyalty and incentivize the favorable research results necessary to securing FDA drug approvals. On all sides of these transactions, each stakeholder understands that positive reviews of the subject drug promise future work. 

According to Nussbaum, “PIs do their own kind of science and, more often than not, their experiments have little to do with either health or the public. They test drugs by private pharmaceutical companies for personal gain, for money that goes to their universities, and for power.”119 

The system allows pharmaceutical companies to systematically divert federal monies—the initial NIAID grant—to serve their own private profit priorities. Naturally, the system is hostile to drugs with expired patents or those that emerge from companies that are not paying the PI’s research expenses. This bias explains Dr. Fauci’s signature animosity toward non-pharmaceutical, unpatentable, or patent-expired and generic remedies. 

In his unpublished history of the HIV era, Down the Rabbit Hole, author and historian Terry Michael offers a similar description of Dr. Fauci’s abrogation of his scientific role to the army of Pharma PIs: “But NIH has other clients, including thousands of grant-seeking medical science Ph.D.’s produced by American universities after World War II. NIAID funds much of the pharmaceutical industry’s research and clinical trials. In fact, Big Pharma has become a client of the NIH and especially its NIAID.”120 

This powerful army, garrisoned at hospitals and universities in every large American community, allows Pharma and Dr. Fauci to control the public health narrative around the country. Before I understood its structure, I encountered the pervasive power of the combination. 

Between 1990 and 2020, I served as president of an influential environmental group, Waterkeepers, with 350 affiliates around the county and the globe. Waterkeepers is the world’s largest water protection group. I published regularly in the New York Times and all the major papers: Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and San Francisco Chronicle; in magazines including Esquire, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic; and in online publications, most often in HuffPost. I delivered over 220 speeches each year, including sixty paid speaking engagements to large audiences at universities and corporate events. I earned a substantial income from those appearances. All that changed in 2005, after I published an article, “Deadly Immunity,” about corruption in CDC’s vaccine branch, simultaneously in Rolling Stone and Salon. 

Newspapers thereafter generally refused to publish my articles on vaccine safety and ultimately banned me from publishing on any issues. In 2008, without consulting me or citing a specific reason, Salon retracted and removed my 2005 article. Salon’s founder, David Talbot, faulted Salon for caving in to Pharma. Rolling Stone finally removed the article without explanation in February 2021, and HuffPost purged all half-dozen of my vaccine articles. The editors of those online journals had thoroughly fact-checked my pieces prior to publication. They removed them without notice to me, and without ever explaining their decisions. It was the beginning of the mass censorship of any vaccine information that departs from official narratives. 

That year, universities and corporate hosts and municipal speakers’ forums suddenly cancelled my scheduled speeches in droves. My bookings dropped from sixty paid speeches per year down to one or two. My speakers’ bureau told me that floods of telephone calls from powerful members of the medical community had prompted the cancellations. They deluged the offices of presidents and board members of the colleges, businesses, and community groups that were hosting me, protesting my appearances. The callers were public health officials and leading doctors from local hospitals, university medical schools, and influential research centers in those locales. Using similar language, they offered dire warnings that I was anti-vaccine, anti- science, a “baby killer,” and that my appearance would jeopardize public health and vital funding to university medical school programs. 

The threat to interrupt money flows to the university PIs invariably trumps the traditions of speech freedom revered —in theory—by university administrators. Starting in 2019, PIs at NYU attempted to force the ouster of popular historian and propaganda expert Professor Mark Crispin Miller from its faculty roster and law professor Mary Holland from its law school faculty because they dared question reigning vaccine orthodoxies. 

Terry Michaels summarized how Dr. Fauci exploited the strategic landscapes of the HIV pandemic to launch his career on a trajectory toward the unimaginable power that would allow him to dictate official orthodoxies, control the press, set international health policies, and even to shut down the global economy: “Dr. Anthony Fauci seized an opportunity to create a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy, distributing thousands of grants to seekers of federally funded research largesse, with a disproportionate (to other diseases) number going to HIV-AIDS researchers.”121 

Tony Fauci did not create the PI system, but his inexperience both as a scientist and as an administrator meant that he relied upon it and was, at first, at its mercy. Later, he took command of those troops and organized them into a powerful juggernaut that journalist John Lauritsen calls “the Medical Industrial Complex.”122

notes

chapter 2

page 318 on the scroll

chapter 3

page 362 on the scroll @

https://resistir.info/livros/kennedy_the_real_anthony_fauci.pdf

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