The Boy who Cried Wolf

37 years later, we're still listening

(Listen to the author read this article)

Last spring, I reviewed a book about the pharmaceutical industry’s rise to dominate the universe of medical research at major universities, medical journal gatekeepers, and press coverage of medical science in the popular media. It was the brainchild of the Sackler family, planned and executed over decades. 

The missing piece of the story is the government agencies. Why are they not doing anything to impede the pharmaceutical distortion of science? Why does NIH seem sometimes to be outdoing the pharma companies to promote expensive, ineffective treatments over everything else?

Of course, we can’t expect pharmaceutical companies to fund research in preventive medicine, healthy living, herbal cures, or even repurposed drugs that are out of patent. They are motivated only to invest in research that will yield patent-protected profits. But that’s why we have government-supported research. That’s what NIH is for.

Bobby Kennedy is no stranger to “regulatory capture”, the phenomenon where government agencies become “sock puppets of the industries they were put there to regulate.” For decades, he has documented the phenomenon in the fields of fossil fuels and the chemical industry. In his new book, Bobby Kennedy characterizes the relationship between NIH and Big Pharma as “regulatory capture on steroids”. In the “ordinary” case of regulatory capture, industry executives are appointed as regulators, and regulators look forward to a cushy sinecure with the industry if they carry water faithfully for a few years. In the case of NIH, the Federal agency actually owns patents for drugs and profits from licensing them to pharma giants. Not only does the agency have a financial interest in pushing drugs, but individual scientists who work for NIH can collect royalties for drugs that they helped to develop. Thus the bribery is built into the system, codified as law. 

FDA is no better than NIH. FDA is supposed to do independent investigations of each drug that comes up for approval. But these investigations are funded by the companies that want their drugs approved. The result is that FDA gets 45% of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry. Without this funding, a lot of regulators would lose their jobs. They know where their bread is buttered, and when a drug comes up for approval, they know that their job is to approve it. 

Moreover, when a cheap drug that is not sponsored by Big Pharma is being reviewed for a repurposed application—especially if it threatens to compete with an expensive patented drug— blocking the competitor becomes the FDA’s mission.

---

AIDS as a rehearsal for COVID (This is the story as told by RFK.)

Since 1984, Fauci has been head of NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. When Anthony Fauci was first appointed, infectious disease was a backwater, a tiny part of public health compared to cancer and heart disease and dementia; and allergies were far rarer than today. The budget of NIAID was sized for a small mission. In Fauci’s first years, along came the AIDS epidemic, and (as RFK tells the story) he saw it as a way to expand his agency and raise its profile.

It was not at all clear that AIDS was even an infectious disease. AIDS research was being conducted by the Cancer division of NIH. Everyone now “knows” that AIDS is caused exclusively by an RNA virus called HIV, and that HIV is transmitted sexually, or by contact with blood. Kennedy tells how it is that we came to “know” this, and in the process raises doubts in the minds of any thoughtful reader. 

One alternative theory was proposed by Peter Duesburg, a Berkeley professor of molecular biology with a great deal of credibility. He had hundreds of publications with 15,000 citations, and a subspecialty in the evolutionary significance of RNA viruses. Duesberg cited evidence that AIDS is caused primarily by environmental factors including the recreational drug amyl nitrite, and that HIV is an opportunistic infection when immune systems have already been weakened. In particular, there were many known cases of HIV positive tests with no symptoms for years at a time; conversely, there were other cases in which all the symptoms of AIDS appeared (including the rare cancer Kaposi Sarcoma) in patients who tested negative for HIV.

Duesberg’s proposal posed a dilemma for Fauci. The problem was that AIDS was a true emergency, an epidemic that would justify large expenditures and allocation of new personnel with new resources—yet, if it turned out to be an environmental disease, study of AIDS would procede outside his department. Kennedy describes how Fauci offered Duesberg an opportunity to recant his heresy, then, when he declined, set about to destroy his career. Rather than refuting evidence for Duesberg’s theory, Fauci first cut off funding to Duesberg, then the funding of anyone who collaborated with him, then the funding of anyone who attended a conference where Duesberg spoke. Fauci’s assault extended to the science press, where he threatened that anyone who interviewed Duesberg would no longer have access to any sources at NIH!

This is the story Kennedy relates. He does not take a position on whether HIV is the primary cause of AIDS, but he paints Duesberg as a credible person with credible theory that deserved debate, and still deserves debate today. Heresies and fixed dogmas have no place in science. The strength of the scientific community is its culture of open debate. 

Fauci went on to ignore the public health strategies that might have limited the spread of AIDS, and to ignore as well the community doctors who had experimented with safe, non-toxic treatments, some of which seemed promising to them. The remedy he promoted to the exclusion of others was AZT.

The AZT trials

AZT had earlier been tested as a chemotherapy agent for leukemia, but had been abandoned as too toxic even for short-term use. Fauci sought to fast-track AZT for approval as a long-term, daily regimen for AIDS. 

The 24-week, “placebo-controlled, double-blind” study was unblinded from the beginning. Patients in the AZT arm were so sick that they had to be given frequent blood transfusions to keep them alive. The study was terminated early, ostensibly because the patients on AZT were doing so much better than the placebo, but an FDA investigation (!) later concluded that “The Burroughs-Wellcome PIs had quickly realized that AZT was so reliably deadly that they were hard-pressed to keep the trial recruits alive for the full six-month study.” Placebo subjects were given AZT after the early termination, so that no long-term comparisons were possible. 

AZT was approved in 1987 as “the only proven treatment for AIDS.” A year’s treatment cost $10,000 (equivalent to $24,000 today). It was given not just to late-stage AIDS patients, but to anyone who was HIV positive. AIDS patient groups, in fact, demanded it. The symptoms of AZT poisoning overlapped broadly with symptoms of AIDS. In retrospect, a majority of the people who were said to die of AIDS in the 1990s were, in fact, poisoned by AZT,

Kennedy draws parallels between the way Dr Fauci handled the AIDS epidemic in 1987 and the way he is handling COVID in the present. (quote)

• “pumping up pandemic fears to lay the groundwork for larger budgets and greater powers

• incriminating an elusive pathogen

• fanning hysteria by exaggerating disease transmissibility

• periodically stoking waning fear levels by warning of mutant superstrains and future surges

• suggesting substantial changes in how people live, ostensibly to save their lives

• keeping the public and politicians engaged through confusing and contradictory pronouncements

• using faulty PCR and antibody tests and manipulating epidemiology to inflate nonverifiable case and death numbers, to maximize the perception of an imminent calamity

• ignoring and dismissing effective off-the-shelf therapeutic remedies

• directing energy and money toward profitable new patented drugs and vaccines

• championing dangerous and ineffective drugs originating in government laboratories as the only winning solution to end the pandemic

• funding and orchestrating confirmation-biased research to validate his chosen remedy

• partnering with large pharmaceutical companies and giving his partners advantages in the race for approval

• allowing preferred companies to skip key testing metrics

• curtailing clinical trials to conceal severe safety and efficacy problems

• sabotaging, discrediting, and sweeping aside more effective therapies that are established and out of patent

• subjecting competitive products to efficacy and safety studies that are designed to fail, while endorsing his favored drugs without even the pretense of such studies

• allowing thousands of sick patients to suffer and die by denying them access to demonstrably effective, cheap, available remedies, protesting the existing remedies were not subject to “randomized placebo testing”

• controlling the key “independent” committees (DSMB, VRBPAC, ACIP) that approve and mandate new drugs by populating them with people he has generously funded over the years

• presenting these agents as “independent” and trustworthy experts

• using the Emergency Use Authorization to fast-track the concoctions through a rigged and abbreviated process

• using official government propaganda to market concoctions in which he and NIAID had a financial interest

• employing ‘science by press release’ to control narratives

• using pervious and ineffective post-marketing surveillance systems to conceal mass injuries and deaths from the public

• papering over all these testing deficiencies by crafting and promoting enduring narratives about the safety, and efficacy

• citing "leading experts" to promote hypotheses that defy long-established principles of disease management

• allowing pharmaceutical companies to charge Medicare and insurance companies inflated prices out of all proportion to cost

• ensuring that research funding is restricted to projects supporting the dogma

• refusing funding and actively sabotaging research into alternative hypotheses

• preventing debate and censoring dissenting voices both in popular media and in scientific publications

• promising ultimate salvation with vaccines”

The last part of Kennedy’s book is about the militarization of healthcare, and overlap between the agendas of CIA, DoD, and NIAID. Powerful people view democracy as an impediment to their ambitions for domination, and they have planned and war-gamed for decades strategies that would use fear of invisible microbes as an excuse to impose totalitarian rule.

“Drill exercises...reinforced the lesson that censorship, isolation, the militarization of medicine, totalitarian controls, and coercive vaccine mandates are the only appropriate response to pandemics. Scenario planning, in other words, is a potent brainwashing technique for creating and fortifying anti-democratic orthodoxies among key political leaders, the press, and the technocracy, preparing the nation to tolerate a coup d’etat without resistance”

After “failed pandemics” in 2003 and 2009, COVID has been the vehicle through which they brought the world to its knees. This story is complex and involves an evil more monstrous than any of us want to admit into our realities. I leave it to you to read Kennedy’s account in Chapter 12. There are connections to global finance, to eugenics, to Gates and Rockefeller and the World Economic Forum. I believe that even these enormously rich and powerful people may be fronting for people who are even more powerful, who meticulously keep their identities private.

This leads in many directions and demands changes in the fundamental way we have thought about the world we live in. The pesent situation is urgent, and we have no time to research and understand the sources and the protagonists of this 21st Century holocaust, no time for transformative personal growth. We, the 99%, will have to come together quickly and stand firm for our freedoms before the prison doors slam shut.