Fauci and AIDS/HIV

Before Covid, the Mother-of-All politicized diseases was AIDS/HIV, which is where and when Anthony Fauci emerged as the world’s arbiter of ‘authorized’ science.

Fauci’s principal life skill is that, in Kennedy’s words, he’s a “master of bureaucratic survival.”

For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a story about Anthony Fauci and the response to the AIDS/HIV crisis. In my opinion, genuine science became “politicized” (and probably perished) in the mid-1980s with this alleged universal healthcare crisis.

As it turns out, I don’t have to write this article because Jeffrey H. Anderson has just done this.

The following essay (“Fauci was just a symptom”) focusses on the Fauci-led AIDS/HIV response. The author uses research from Robert Kennedy, Jr. to support points made in his essay.

Mr. Anderson shared this essay with Jeffrey Tucker of The Brownstone Institute and Jeffrey forwarded it to the group of writers who submit stories to Brownstone. 

I don’t think the author would mind me re-publishing his intro email and an excerpt from his excellent and important essay. (Emphasis and sub-headlines added by myself).

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“This essay on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s provocative book, The Real Anthony Fauci, highlights that whether it’s public health research or “climate change” research, most science funding in America now funnels through a small cabal of self-interested bureaucrats—and those who don’t tow the party line don’t get the funding. This arrangement, which badly compromises both genuine science and republican government, is what enabled the unscrupulous, power-mongering, slithering Fauci to do great damage for 40 years, from AIDS to Covid—and he used the same playbook for each.”

Article excerpt: AIDS/HIV provided

playbook for Covid response

… As Kennedy makes clear, the general playbook for much of the public health establishment’s response to Covid—with the big exception of the lockdowns—traces to the AIDS crisis. Fauci, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Deborah Birx, and Trump’s CDC director Robert Redfield—the troika of mediocrities whom Scott Atlas (an advisor in the Trump White House) says “shared thought processes and views to an uncanny level”—all emerged from the AIDS world. So did Walensky.

Kennedy writes that by 1987, his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, “was beginning to suspect that Dr. Fauci was either inept or ‘in the tank’ with Pharma.” The eclectic list of people dissatisfied with the Fauci-led efforts at that point included not only Kennedy but Representative Henry Waxman, Representative Nancy Pelosi, and President Ronald Reagan. 

But Fauci’s principal life skill is that, in Kennedy’s words, he’s a “master of bureaucratic survival.” He survived that threat, and decades later was still in a position to help steer the country’s response to Covid using the AIDS playbook.

The AIDS experience involved a massive misinformation campaign. Almost from the beginning, the evidence clearly pointed toward AIDS being almost exclusively a disease afflicting homosexual men and intravenous drug users—and especially those who were in both categories. Yet the public health establishment launched a huge propaganda effort to try to convince the citizenry of essentially the opposite—that AIDS was everyone’s disease. 

‘Anyone can get HIV/AIDS’ …

From 1987 to 1992, the federal government ran television “public service announcements” a reported 59,000 times as part of the CDC’s “America Responds to AIDS” campaign and its message that “anyone can get HIV/AIDS.” Even before that, in 1983, Fauci had said that it is “important” to note “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” This fear-stoking, anti-scientific approach should sound familiar to anyone who watched the public health establishment pretend that schoolchildren were at similar risk from the Wuhan virus as octogenarians.

If the “anyone can get HIV/AIDS” message were true, HIV/AIDS would have broken out into the general population in great numbers. But it was plainly false, as was suggested by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal article on HIV/AIDS that noted that “for most heterosexuals, the risk from a single act of sex was smaller than the risk of ever getting hit by lighting.” 

Fast-forwarding about four decades, a publication on the CDC’s own website now estimates (Figure 1) that the number of Americans with HIV peaked in the mid-1980s and has remained at less than half that peak since the early 1990s. In predicting that HIV’s reach would exponentially expand when it actually contracted by more than half, the public health establishment could hardly have been more wrong.

AIDS was cash cow for Fauci’s agency …

But being wrong has never seemed to hurt Fauci, for whom the onset of AIDS was like striking oil. Kennedy writes that the “critical foundation stone” of Fauci’s career was placed in 1984, when his colleague and ally Robert Gallo claimed to have discovered that HIV causes AIDS. Pioneering the technique that Kennedy calls “science by press release,” Gallo got his boss, Reagan’s HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler, to announce that “the probable cause of AIDS has been found”—proof to follow. 

Kennedy writes that this claim was crucial to Fauci because it allowed him “to capture the AIDS program and its attendant cash flows from the National Cancer Institute”—where federal AIDS efforts had primarily been housed—“and launch the project of building NIAID into the world’s biggest drug-production empire.”

Peter Duesberg—the first person to isolate a cancer gene and, per the Los Angeles Times, “the first virologist to map the genetic structure of retroviruses”—was utterly unconvinced by Gallo’s claim. 

Duesberg observes that HIV “was adopted as the cause of AIDS by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services…even before the first American study on the virus was published.” 

While the notion that HIV causes AIDS is now as widely accepted by the general population as the notion that wind propels kites, Kennedy argues that “no one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their [Gallo and Fauci’s] hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs.” 

When it comes to the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy—Kennedy would say dogma—Duesberg is the leading skeptic. Duesberg’s theory is basically that the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s was caused by extensive drug use (perhaps particularly of “poppers,” which Kennedy describes as “a mainstay of the gay social scene in the late 1970s”) combined with “multiple acute parasitic infections” and “chronic malnutrition”—of the type resulting from lifestyles that are unhealthy in the extreme—all over the better part of a decade or more. 

This hypothesis, if true, would shutter the gold mines full of researchers trying to develop antivirals or (after some 40 years of trying) a vaccine for HIV, as Duesberg’s explanation for the cause of AIDS points toward a largely behavioral, rather than pharmaceutical, solution. 

Is AIDS in Africa a ‘sham?’

As for AIDS in Africa, Duesberg appears to think it’s a sham—that the public health establishment has simply taken a collection of ancient diseases that bear little resemblance to the diseases that define AIDS in the West and renamed them AIDS in Africa. An AIDS patient can board an airplane in Africa, says Duesberg, and somehow no longer have AIDS upon landing in the U.S. or Europe—at least by definition.

As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, Duesberg thinks “AIDS” (in quotes) was often caused by Fauci and his cohorts telling doctors with HIV-positive patients to prescribe them azidothymidine (AZT), which destroys the immune system so similarly to how actual AIDS does that it’s essentially impossible to distinguish between the two killers. Duesberg calls this “AIDS by AZT.” 

Was Arthur Ashe one of many AZT victims?

Arthur Ashe was a family friend of the Kennedys who had tested positive for HIV antibodies after getting a blood transfusion and was then prescribed what Kennedy calls “an extremely high AZT dose.” In October 1992, Ashe wrote in the Washington Post, “The confusion for AIDS patients like me is that there is a growing school of thought that HIV may not be the sole cause of AIDS, and that standard treatments such as AZT actually make matters worse.” Yet, Ashe wrote, “the medical establishment is too rigid to change the direction of basic research and/or clinical trials.” Four months later, the 1975 Wimbledon champion was dead at 49.  

When Cochrane reviewed AZT in 2000, it found that it “is expensive and has several adverse effects including nausea, vomiting, blood problems…and myopathy,” but it “does not increase survival.” Indeed, for those who took AZT, “there was no improvement in survival in the short or long term.” 

Rather than debate Duesberg or provide persuasive evidence to debunk him, the public health establishment simply ostracized him. Kennedy writes that both Larry King and Good Morning America scheduled joint appearances with Fauci and Duesberg only to cancel on Duesberg at the last minute and give Fauci the stage to himself (presumably at Fauci’s insistence). 

He writes that, when Reagan wanted the two to have a “friendly debate” in front of him, the idea was called off because, in the words of a member of the Reagan administration, Fauci “threw a ‘small fit’…and demanded to know why the White House was interfering in scientific matters.” (Imagine the gall of a president wanting an executive branch employee to defend his theory on one of the most pressing issues of the day!)

The ‘Public Health Pope’ has spoken …

One of Duesberg’s colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley told longtime AIDS journalist Celia Farber, “Peter may be right about HIV. But there’s an industry now.” Despite trying for years, journalist and gay activist John Lauritsen couldn’t get a single NIH scientist to respond to Duesberg’s article, as NIH officials told him that the etiology of AIDS was off-limits. Lauritsen told Kennedy, “It was the secular version of the doctrine of Papal infallibility; everyone must just accept the ‘AIDS’ virus theory as a matter of fact because the public health pope declares it.”

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About the author: Jeffrey H. Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative, a think tank for everyday Americans. He served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021.

Writer gratuities via Ko-Fi.