This is a chapter from my 2021 e-book, Pandemic Panic: Readings from Inside. Offered to any readers who are interested enough to subscribe and ask.
“Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice
And she said ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers they gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
‘Relax,’ said the night man ‘We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like but you can never leave!’”
Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Hotel California, America, 1977
After Dr. Robert Gallo of the Center for Disease Control announced his “discovery” of the AIDS virus at a televised press conference in 1984, the pandemic gloves came off for the virus hunters. They’d come up dry in a decade long search for a cancer virus, Legionnaire’s was plain old bacterium, and their syringed cure was worse than the overhyped 1976 Swine Flu Return.
Dr. Gallo’s claim and his U. S. patenting of an HIV antibody test, was shown to be hogwash, when the Pasteur Institute in France sued him. He’d stolen the credit for the retrovirus Luc Montagnier isolated in 1983, who’d called it LAV, and had sent Gallo samples on request. Gallo was elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences in 1988 because of his “brilliant discoveries.” Gallo was convicted of scientific fraud in 1992, but it didn’t hurt his career. He’s now the Scientific Director of the Global Virus Network.
The CDC doubled down on this immune deficiency cluster identified in 1980 as Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (KSOI). The early victims were all gay males who practiced receptive anal sex with multiple sexual partners, while using amyl nitrate ‘poppers’ to enhance orgasms, with extensive drug and antibiotic use. The medical research establishment fixated on a virus as the cause, sexually transmitted for sure, but who really knows? Sowing paranoia among the young and old alike.
They began expanding the diseases associated with this unidentified virus causing immunity destruction, to include illnesses suffered by poor Haitians, injectable drug users, and hemophiliacs, until in 1982 they renamed it Acute Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). At last count the CDC classifies 27 diseases as AIDS related, if the HIV virus is found in the patient.
Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Health was directing their allergic and infectious disease department in 1984, when he seized the AIDS research helms. As a retrovirologist, an even more obscure branch of virus hunters, he had been like a soldier without a war. The whole field of infectious diseases had been a Dead Zone, since polio and measles vaccines wiped out those enemies, with the virus field littered with burned bodies of work and flamed out careers searching for the golden apple of an infectious killer.
Fauci published a paper early on, claiming he had found “large amounts of HIV hiding in the lymph nodes” of infected gay men, setting off further frenzies of homophobia and calls for quarantine. The paper was never retracted although it was later discredited as an artifact of his genetic sequencing process. There were announcements of casual transmission of HIV by top officials of NIH and the CDC, and that the retrovirus could survive for long periods outside human body. Widespread nervousness about restaurants and toilets flared. Rumors of mosquito transmission were floated by top AIDS researchers.
It was a novel syndrome, a mystery with no vaccine and no therapy. AIDS experts boldly estimated the 2-3 million Americans already infected, would double every year and die within a few years. Public health authorities exercised police powers to close gay bath houses, promote condoms, predicted its widespread transmission among heterosexuals, declared only public health emergency actions could slow or stop their predicted deaths.
An NIH official wrote “The AIDS virus shows every sign of being as deadly as the plague during the middle ages. AIDS may be to the 20th century what the Black Plague was to the 14th century.” Media pointed their cameras at an Africa where whole villages of parents were disappearing, orphans were tended by grandparents. They said their children had gone off to work in the cities and send money home, but international medical funding pursued AIDS and HIV, instead of the long known major killers of Africans, polluted water, poverty and war. It didn’t greatly improve that continent’s abysmal medical system, although biomedical labs went up in Liberia and other west African nations that hadn’t signed the international treaty against bio weapons research.
Every crisis is an opportunity. Public health demanded quarantine of infected, mass testing, tourism restrictions, detention centers in socialist paradises. Medical workers required more safety equipment, the public begged for stricter measures. An entire field of immunology sprung up out of the barren soil of infectious disease, PhD’s sprouting like dragon’s teeth.
Dr. Fauci became the AIDS czar in the 80’s and pushed AZT, a chemo poison too toxic even for oncologists, as therapeutic for people without an immune system. Fauci oversaw the Burroughs Wellcome funded clinical trials of their long shelved, pharmaceutical drug AZT in HIV infected people. They became “double unblinded” because of the obvious toxic effects of AZT, yet this was scientifically Wellcomed as proof of purchase. Fauci then gave his blessing to HIV positive pregnant women using this cytotoxic teratogen, worse than thalidomide, to keep their babies safe. A few years later, a larger double blind European study showed AZT did “more harm than good.”, and a Veterans Administration trial found patients died faster and more frequently.
Those dead didn’t drag down Fauci, only spurred his career arc. Fauci was promoted to head the NIH, after helping Gallo seize credit for an influential paper based on others’ research. Like the Raven, he is quoted evermore. “The worst is yet to come from COVID-19.” Experts crowd the podium to make transitory “recommendations” to “flatten the curve.”
The establishment never looks back. All Agreed, More Money was needed to defeat AIDS. $Billions have been spent, a hundred thousand papers written, a public Manhattan Project with no victory celebration forty years on. HIV infections and AIDS deaths have not spread among the larger population. There is still no vaccine, medical treatment still causes disabling side effects and class action lawsuits, despite the cheering press.
The incubation period from infection to certain death has expanded to more than a decade from months or years. Many have lived long past medical expiration dates by adopting healthy habits, others by adhering to a prescribed regimen of pharmaceuticals. New meds are credited with saving lives and turning HIV into a chronic illness. Dissenters claim using less toxic drugs than AZT lengthened lives, while these drugs only kill or disable people more slowly.
Haitians are still dying from myriad opportunistic infections, while Africa has the fastest population growth of all continents, while still dying from their ancient enemies. Three hundred and fifty million humans are said to have died from AIDS around the globe. Any death is HIV caused if PCR tests are positive for its RNA, when funds follow hot spots and caseloads. Any death is COVID-19, for the same reasons.
A scientific fringe doubts that this “innocent retrovirus is the real pandemic killer”, since patients die from these opportunistic infections that also kill without HIV. Some immunologists claim terrain is the determinant of virulence. Others assert electron microscopic tableaus of viruses image only remnants of cellular disintegration, exosomes bearing trash to the garbage disposal our immune system is. Genetic testing through PCR multiplication merely magnifies viral traces to pathogenic prominence. There’s no money in these theories, but lack of research is not proof they’re wrong.
Now, scientists speculate about transmission of covid by violent sneezes, shaking hands or cloaks, petting dogs, viable half helixes lingering on surfaces, in the air, by the sea. They decree six feet or more social distancing that hobbles the “inessential” economy, with no evidence it works for not spreading disease.
They Call for Calm and voluntary isolation, while sowing seeds of panic and pandemonium without a panacea. They are urging a long lived public health disaster, to prevent a short lived pandemic, so we “don’t overwhelm the health care system.” The medical monopoly has no effective treatments, only futile and expensive interventions. AIDS all over again, and who’s running the show. Dr. Fauci in prime time.
*AIDS history gleaned from Why We Will Never Win the War on Aids, by Bryan Ellison and Peter H. Duesberg, Inside Story Communications, 1994