AIDS, COVID Reveal Deep Corruption

A new book describes how Dr. Anthony Fauci’s actions during the AIDS and COVID crises exemplify everything wrong with our crony medical system. Learn how to get a free copy of this incredible book!

During both the COVID pandemic and the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Fauci discredited medicines that are safe, cheap, and effective in favor of dangerous, expensive, and ineffective treatments that make billions for drug companies and enrich the government cronies that steer them through approval. In both cases, Dr. Fauci showed a dogged determination to ignore the experience of frontline doctors and patients in pursuit of Big Pharma windfalls, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.

Dr. Fauci has a unique role in shaping US policy toward pandemics. Since 1984 he has served as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), a health department with over $6 billion in annual funding. Dr. Fauci wields incredible influence and power over NIAID, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other agencies in the US Department of Health and Human Services. Yet the numbers paint a lamentable picture of our performance during pandemics with Dr. Fauci holding the reins.

From the very beginning of the current pandemic, Dr. Fauci led the way in denouncing hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), an off-patent malaria drug, and, later, ivermectin, a drug to treat river blindness. Both drugs exhibited great promise in fighting COVID, as we’ve discussed previously. But to Dr. Fauci, they represented a grave threat: any recognition by federal agencies that HCQ, ivermectin, or any other set of repurposed drugs and supplements could be effective against COVID endangered the emergency use authorizations (EUAs) for the COVID vaccines in which HHS had invested heavily, since EUA’s are only granted when there are no other viable therapeutics for a disease. So, whatever the evidence said, there was a vested interest on the part of the government to downplay and discredit HCQ and ivermectin.

As early as March 2020, a paper was published discussing the mechanism by which HCQ inhibits the SARS-CoV-2 virus; there was also a clinical report on the successful use of HCQ in COVID patients. Researchers had in fact been aware for years that HCQ was effective against viruses. By April 2020, doctors in the US widely prescribed HCQ. In May, a comprehensive study of HCQ and COVID was published, stating that the evidence for HCQ is “unequivocal.” In August 2020, Dr. Peter McCullough and his colleagues published their protocol for early outpatient treatment of COVID, which includes HCQ and ivermectin; studies that utilized this approach showed an 85 percent reduction in mortality. There was compelling evidence early on that treating non-severe COVID patients early with HCQ and other compounds like zinc could save lives.

What did the government do with this data? In March 2020, Dr. Fauci denounced HCQ, stating that there was only “anecdotal evidence” of its benefit and that it should only be used in clinical trials. That same month, Big Pharma donated, at the government’s request, 63 million doses of HCQ to the Strategic National Stockpile. Clinical trials testing HCQ’s effectiveness against COVID were designed to fail: they left out zinc, crucial for HCQ’s success, used it to treat severely ill COVID patients rather than for early treatment, and administered murderously high dosage levels of the drug. In May, Dr. Fauci hailed two papers as the “nail in the coffin” of HCQ—though it later came out that these papers were based on fraudulent data from Surgisphere, leading to retractions.

Nevertheless, in June 2020, the FDA revoked the EUA that allowed HCQ from the Strategic National Stockpile to be used on hospitalized COVID patients. In July 2020, the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan published a study showing positive effects for HCQ; Dr. Fauci said the results were “flawed” and that health officials should instead rely on evidence from randomized controlled trials. On the back of these actions, governors in 33 states moved to restrict prescribing or dispensing of HCQ. Pharmacists refused orders for HCQ from physicians. In June, the FDA blocked access to the 63 billion doses of HCQ in the strategic stockpile.

Ivermectin was similarly smeared and discredited by Dr. Fauci and medical authorities despite mountains of evidence showing it was an effective COVID medicine. In January of 2021, doctors from the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), who were early champions of repurposed medicines in their protocols, testified before Congress, saying that the early use of HCQ and ivermectin could have saved 500,000 lives. FLCCC doctors were even able to convince the National Institutes of Health to change their recommendation on ivermectin from a negative to a neutral stance; Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that three members of the NIH’s drug review panel had relationships with Merck. Merck was in fact getting ready to bring a novel COVID antiviral pill, molnupiravir, to market that would cost $700. The drug is similar to ivermectin, but unlike ivermectin there were safety concerns expressed by the scientists who developed the molnupiravir.

Ivermectin was widely used across the world. One study showed that countries in which ivermectin was used widely to combat parasitic diseases experienced some of the world’s lowest case and mortality rates from COVID.

Once again, faced with overwhelming evidence of ivermectin’s benefit for COVID patients, Dr. Fauci and the government stonewalled. In March 2021, the FDA and the WHO issued statements advising against ivermectin’s use. In June 2021, the Health Department struck a deal with Merck to buy $1.2 billion worth of molnupiravir. Then the real campaign against ivermectin began in earnest. In August 2021, the CDC ordered doctors to stop prescribing ivermectin. In September, the American Medical Association and the American Pharmacists Association called on doctors to stop prescribing the drug. Molnupiravir received an EUA from the FDA at the end of November 2021. Note, again, that an EUA would not have been possible for this drug if it was acknowledged that ivermectin or HCQ were effective for the treatment of COVID.

Admitting the efficacy of HCQ and ivermectin would have also threatened the financial success of remdesivir, Dr. Fauci’s main pharmaceutical gambit for COVID. This is a drug that shows little to no clinical efficacy against COVID, yet was trumpeted by Dr. Fauci as the “new standard of care” for COVID. Importantly, remdesivir did not compete with vaccines, since the drug was for late-stage COVID disease and required hospitalization to administer. And again, admitting the clinical benefits of ivermectin and HCQ would make it impossible for remdesivir to get an EUA. It would also threaten the demand for the drug: if fewer patients are sick because they used HCQ and ivermectin early, then there is less of a need for a late-stage COVID drug.

The tragedy is that this scenario is eerily similar to the AIDS crisis that Dr. Fauci presided over. When the disease hit, there was only one drug that was ready to test, azidothymidine (AZT), a drug that was shelved because it was ineffective against cancer and was extremely toxic. In 1985, AZT was found to kill HIV in vitro, leading the Pharma company that owned it, Burroughs Wellcome (BW), to take it from the trash heap, patent it, and price it at $10,000 per year, the most expensive drug in the world at the time. Under Dr. Fauci’s watch, researchers connected to BW ran the trials meant to evaluate AZT and were on key selection committees which decided what priority to give to testing AZT’s competitors. Dr. Fauci waved the normal procedure of testing AZT in animals and allowed human trials to start (in fact, he did the same thing for the COVID vaccines and allowed remdesivir trials in which there was no real placebo). But development of AZT as an AIDS drug stalled due to its toxicity and the inability of researchers to design trials to make it look safe.

Meanwhile, doctors were achieving promising results with AIDS patients using mixtures of off-label drugs. With no other treatment options, even after millions of taxpayer dollars poured into AZT research, AIDS patients and doctors asked Dr. Fauci and the NIH to release treatment guidelines for how doctors can use off-label medicines to treat the disease and to release a statement announcing that protocol as the standard of care to help patients afford treatment, since insurance companies would have to cover it. Dr. Fauci declined, saying there were no RCTs supporting these treatments (see Bruce Nussbaum’s book, Good Intentions: How Big Business And the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight Against AIDS). Of course, NIAID could have sponsored these clinical trials, but that would have threatened the progress of AZT as a blockbuster treatment. Some estimate that Dr. Fauci’s refusal to stand behind repurposed drugs that were helping patients cost 17,000 lives; others estimate that, once the drug was finally approved, it was so toxic that it killed 330,000 between 1987 and 2019.

The similarities between these episodes are all too apparent. In both cases, the government used taxpayer dollars to develop drugs it handed off to Big Pharma. Government cronies like Dr. Fauci then rigged the game in favor of expensive, dangerous, ineffective treatments while simultaneously throttling access to natural medicines and off-patent drugs that are effective but limit profits.

These are issues we’ve discussed countless times over the years, and it is a system we strive to reform. A new book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci, stunningly recounts these episodes and more that paint a bleak picture of our crony medical system. It is a difficult but extremely important book to read, and we are making it available for free to our supporters.

We have an exciting offer. Those who donate $50 or more during our end-of-the-year fundraising campaign will receive a free copy of Kennedy’s book. Donate today and receive your free book!