Miasma vs. Germ Theory
“Miasma theory” emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses. Miasma exponents posit that disease occurs where a weakened immune system provides germs an enfeebled target to exploit. They analogize the human immune system to the skin of an apple; with the skin intact, the fruit will last a week at room temperature and a month if refrigerated. But even a small injury to the skin triggers systemic rot within hours as the billions of opportunistic microbes—thronging on the skin of every living organism—colonize the injured terrain.
Germ theory aficionados, in contrast, blame disease on microscopic pathogens. Their approach to health is to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it. Miasmists complain that those patented poisons may themselves further weaken the immune system, or simply open the damaged terrain to a competitive germ or cause chronic disease. They point out that the world is teeming with microbes—many of them beneficial—and nearly all of them harmless to a healthy, well-nourished immune system. Miasmists argue that malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water are the ultimate stressors that make infectious diseases lethal in impoverished locales. When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response.
For better or worse, the champions of germ theory, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, proved victorious in their fierce decades-long battle with their miasmist rival Antoine Béchamp. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Will Durant suggests that germ theory found popular purchase by mimicking the traditional explanation for disease— demon possession—giving it a leg up over miasma. The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology led by “Little Napoleon” himself, Anthony Fauci, fortifies the century-old predominance of germ theory. And so with the microbe theory, the “cornerstone was laid for modern biomedicine’s basic formula with its monocausal-microbial starting-point and its search for magic bullets: one disease, one cause, one cure,” writes American sociology professor Steven Epstein.42
As Dr. Claus Köhnlein and Torsten Engelbrecht observe in Virus Mania, “The idea that certain microbes—above all fungi, bacteria, and viruses—are our great opponents in battle, causing certain diseases that must be fought with special chemical bombs, has buried itself deep into the collective conscience.”43
Imperialist ideologues find natural affinity with germ theory. A “War on Germs” rationalizes a militarized approach to public health and endless intervention in poor nations that bear heavy disease burdens. And just as the military-industrial complex prospers in war, the pharmaceutical cartel profits most from sick and malnourished populations.
On his deathbed, the victorious Pasteur is said to have recanted, “Béchamp was right,” declaring, “the microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything.”44 Miasma theory survives in marginalized, yet vibrant, pockets among integrative and functional medicine practitioners. And burgeoning science documenting the critical role of the microbiome in human health and immunity tends to vindicate Béchamp, and particularly his teachings that microorganisms are beneficial to good health. Köhnlein and Engelbrecht observe that:
[But] even for mainstream medicine, it is becoming increasingly clear that the biological terrain of our intestines—the intestinal flora, teeming with bacteria [or weighing up to 1 kg in a normal adult human, totaling 100 trillion cells.] is accorded a decisive role, because it is by far the body’s biggest and most important immune system.45
A doctrinal canon of the germ theory credits vaccines for the dramatic declines of infectious disease mortalities in North America and Europe during the twentieth century. Anthony Fauci, for example, routinely proclaims that vaccines eliminated mortalities from the infectious diseases of the early twentieth century, saving millions of lives. On July 4, 2021, he commented to NBC’s Chuck Todd, “You know, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it was my responsibility to make sure that we did the science that got us to the vaccines that as we know now have already saved millions and millions of lives.”46 Most Americans accept this claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue. Science actually gives the honor of having vanquished infectious disease mortalities to nutrition and sanitation. A comprehensive study of this foundational assertion published in 2000 in the high-gravitas journal Pediatrics by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists concluded, after reviewing a century of medical data, that “vaccination does not account for the impressive decline in mortality from infectious diseases . . . in the 20th century.”47 As noted earlier, another widely cited study, McKinlay and McKinlay—required reading in virtually every American medical school during the 1970s—found that all medical interventions including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics accounted for less than about 1 percent—and no more than 3.5 percent—of the dramatic mortality declines. The McKinlays presciently warned that profiteers among the medical establishment would seek to claim credit for the mortality declines for vaccines in order to justify government mandates for those pharmaceutical products.48
Seven years earlier, the world’s foremost virologist, Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Edward H. Kass, a founding member and first president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and founding editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, rebuked his virology colleagues for trying to take credit for that dramatic decline, scolding them for allowing the proliferation of “half-truths . . . that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc.—and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors extending life expectancy.”49 Kass recognized that the real heroes of public health were not the medical profession, but rather the engineers who brought us sewage treatment plants, railroads, roads, and highways for transporting food, electric refrigerators, and chlorinated water.50
The illustrations on the following page pose an indomitable challenge to germ theory’s central dogma and stark support for miasma’s approach to medicine. These graphs demonstrate that mortalities for virtually all the great killer diseases, infectious and otherwise, declined with advances in nutrition and sanitation. The most dramatic declines occurred prior to vaccine introduction.
Note the mortality declines occurred in both infectious and noninfectious diseases, irrespective of the availability of vaccines.
“When the tide is receding from the beach it is easy to have the illusion that one can empty the ocean by removing the water with a pail.”
—René Dubos
As Drs. Engelbrecht and Köhnlein observe:
Epidemics rarely occur in affluent societies, because these societies offer conditions (sufficient nutrition, clean drinking water, etc.) which allow many people to keep their immune systems so fit that microbes simply do not have a chance to multiply abnormally.51
(Courtesy of Brian Hooker, PhD)
As a final side note, it seems to me that a mutually respectful science-based, evidence-based marriage incorporating the best of these two clashing dogmas would best serve public health and humankind.
Fauci and Gates; Germ Theory as Foreign Policy
The arcane conflict between germ and miasma theorists has important resonance for public health policy in the developing world, where many policy advocates fiercely protest that a dollar spent on food and clean water is far more effective than a dollar spent on vaccines. As we shall see, the Gates/Fauci militarized approach to medicine has precipitated an apocalyptic battle on the African and Asian continents between the two philosophies in a zero-sum game that pits nutrition and sanitation against vaccines in a life-and-death conflict for resources and legitimacy. The historic clash between these warring philosophies offers a useful framework for understanding Bill Gates’s and Anthony Fauci’s approach to public health. In order to assess the effectiveness of their mass-vaccination projects, we would need a disciplined accounting that compares health outcomes in vaccinated populations to similarly situated unvaccinated cohorts. This is the kind of accounting that neither of these men has been willing to provide. The facts suggest that it is the absence of such reliable metrics and science-based analysis that allows Gates and Fauci to get away with their dubious claims about the efficacy and safety of their prescriptions. Any even-handed examination of the role of immunizations in Africa must acknowledge that mass-vaccination programs may serve a larger agenda in which the priorities of power, wealth, and control can eclipse quaint preoccupations with public health. And, once again, it was the Rockefeller Foundation that pioneered germ theory as a foreign policy tool.
The Triumph of Germ Theory
In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil constituted an “unreasonable monopoly” and splintered the behemoth into thirty-four companies that became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Marathon, and others. Ironically, the breakup increased rather than diminished Rockefeller’s personal wealth. Rockefeller donated an additional $100 million from that windfall to his philanthropic front group, the General Education Board, to cement the streamlining and homogenization of medical schools and hospitals. In accordance with the pharmaceutical paradigm, he simultaneously provided large grants to scientists for identifying the active chemicals in disease-curing plants utilized by the traditional doctors whom he had extirpated. Rockefeller chemists then synthesized and patented petrochemical versions of those molecules. The foundation’s philosophy of “a pill for an ill” shaped how Americans came to view health care.52
In 1913, the patriarch founded the American Cancer Society and incorporated the Rockefeller Foundation. Philanthropic foundations were an innovation of the era, and detractors criticized, as “tax evasion,” Rockefeller’s scheme to take a $56 million deduction on his donation of 72,569 shares of Standard Oil to launch a foundation that would give him perpetual control of that “donated” wealth. A congressional investigation described the foundation as a self-serving artifice posing “a menace to the future political and economic welfare of the nation.”53 Congress repeatedly denied Rockefeller a charter. Attorney General George Wickersham denounced the foundation as a “scheme for perpetuating vast wealth” and “entirely inconsistent with the public interest.”54
To reassure public, politicians, and press of its benign purposes, the Rockefeller Foundation declared its ambition to eliminate hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease sent teams of doctors, inspectors, and lab technicians to administer deworming medication across eleven Southern states.55 These ambassadors systematically exaggerated the medication’s efficacy, glossed over its regular fatalities, and—through the graces of Rockefeller’s mercenary army of journalists for hire—ignited enough favorable popular interest for the Foundation to justify the proposed expansion into the colonized world.
The Rockefeller Foundation launched a “public-private partnership” with pharmaceutical companies called the International Health Commission, which set about feverishly inoculating the hapless populations of the colonized tropics with a yellow fever jab.56 The vaccine killed its beneficiaries in droves and failed to prevent yellow fever. The Rockefeller Foundation quietly dropped the useless vaccine after the foundation’s star researcher, the yellow fever vaccine’s inventor, Hideyo Noguchi, succumbed to the disease, likely contracted through careless laboratory exposure.57 Noguchi’s flexible scruples had greased his dicey experimentation on colonized “volunteers” and fueled his meteoric rise in the ethically barren landscapes of virology. At the time of his death, the New York district attorney was investigating Noguchi for illegally experimenting on New York City orphans with syphilis vaccines without the consent of their legal guardians.58
Despite such setbacks, the Rockefeller Foundation’s yellow fever project caught the approbatory attention of army planners on the lookout for remedies against the tropical diseases that hamstrung the US military’s expanding retinue of equatorial adventures. In 1916, the board’s president made an early observation about the utility of biosecurity as a tool of imperialism: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some advantages over machine guns.”59
The Rockefeller Foundation’s carefully heralded public health attainments eclipsed popular revulsion for the many abuses Americans associated with the Standard Oil petroleum empire. After World War I, its patronage of the League of Nations Health Organization gave the Rockefeller Foundation global reach and an impressive cortège of high-level contacts among the international elites. As the century progressed, the foundation became an exquisitely connected global enterprise with regional offices in Mexico City, Paris, New Delhi, and Cali. From 1913 to 1951, the Rockefeller Foundation’s health division operated in more than eighty countries.60 The Rockefeller Foundation was the world’s de facto authority on how best to manage global diseases, with influence dwarfing all other nonprofits or government actors working in the field.61 The Rockefeller Foundation provided almost half of the budget for the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) following its founding in 1922 and populated LNHO ranks with its veterans and favorites. The RF imbued the League with its philosophy, structure, values, precepts, and ideologies, all of which its successor body, the WHO, inherited at its inauguration in 1948.
By the time John D. Rockefeller disbanded the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division in 1951, it had spent the equivalent of billions of dollars on tropical disease campaigns in almost 100 countries and colonies. But these projects were window dressing for the Foundation’s more venal preoccupations, according to a 2017 report, U.S. Philanthrocapitalism and the Global Health Agenda.62 That idée fixe was opening developing world markets for US oil, mining, pharmaceutical, telecom, and banking multinationals in which the Foundation and the Rockefeller family were also invested. That white paper made the same complaints against the Rockefeller Foundation that contemporary critics level against the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
But the RF rarely addressed the most important causes of death, notably infantile diarrhea and tuberculosis, for which technical fixes were not then available and which demanded long-term, socially oriented investments, such as improved housing, clean water, and sanitation systems. The RF avoided disease campaigns that might be costly, complex, or time-consuming (other than yellow fever, which imperiled [the military, and] commerce). Most campaigns were narrowly construed so that quantifiable targets (insecticide spraying or medication distribution, for example) could be set, met, and counted as successes, then presented in business-style quarterly reports. In the process, RF public health efforts stimulated economic productivity, expanded consumer markets, and prepared vast regions for foreign investment and incorporation into the expanding system of global capitalism.63
Here was a business model tailor-made for Bill Gates.
Philanthrocapitalism
Gates has dubbed his foundation’s operational philosophy “philanthrocapitalism.” Here is a stripped-down explanation of how philanthrocapitalism functions: Bill and Melinda Gates donated $36 billion of Microsoft stock to the BMGF between 1994 and 2020.64 Very early on, Gates created a separate entity, Bill Gates Investments (BGI), which manages his personal wealth and his foundation’s corpus. Renamed BMGI in January 2015 to include Melinda,65 the company predominantly invests that loot in multinational food, agriculture, pharmaceutical, energy, telecom, and tech companies with global operations. Federal tax laws require the BMGF to give away 7 percent of its foundation assets annually to qualify for tax exemption. Gates strategically targets BMGF’s charitable gifts to give him control of the international health and agricultural agencies and the media, allowing him to dictate global health and food policies so as to increase profitability of the large multinationals in which he and his foundation hold large investment positions. Following such tactics, the Gates Foundation has given away some $54.8 billion since 1994, but instead of depleting his wealth, those strategic gifts have magnified it.66 Strategic philanthropizing increased the Gates Foundation’s capital corpus to $49.8 billion by 2019. Moreover, Gates’s personal net worth grew from $63 billion in 2000 to $133.6 billion today.67 Gates’s wealth expanded by $23 billion just during the 2020 lockdowns that he and Dr. Fauci played key roles in orchestrating.
In 2017, the Huffington Post observed that the Gates Foundation blurs “the boundaries between philanthropy, business and nonprofits” and cautions that calling Gates’s investment strategy “philanthropy” was causing “the rapid deconstruction of the accepted term.”68
Gates’s pharmaceutical investments are particularly relevant to this chapter. Since shortly after its founding, his foundation has owned stakes in multiple drug companies. A recent investigation by The Nation revealed that the Gates Foundation currently holds corporate stocks and bonds in drug companies like Merck, GSK, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, and Sanofi.69 Gates also has heavy positions in Gilead, Biogen, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Novavax, and Inovio. The foundation’s website candidly declares its mission to “seek more effective models of collaboration with major vaccine manufacturers to better identify and pursue mutually beneficial opportunities.”70
Gates and Fauci: Colonizing the Dark Continent
After sealing their collaboration with a handshake, Gates and Dr. Fauci geared up their vaccine partnership quickly; by 2015, Gates was spending $400 million annually on AIDS drugs—mainly testing them on Africans.71, 72 If he could prove that an AIDS remedy actually worked in Africa, the subsequent payoff from US and European customers would be astronomical.
For Gates, the immediate advantage of his new alliance with Dr. Fauci was clear. The imprimatur of his partnership with the US government’s premier public health khedive anointed Gates’s public health experiments with credibility and gravitas. Moreover, Dr. Fauci was an international power broker controlling a gargantuan bankroll and wielding Brobdingnagian political wallop across Africa. A trusted presidential confidant, Dr. Fauci had made himself the indispensable rainmaker for the river of HIV funding flooding the African continent. Dr. Fauci had, by then, persuaded a succession of US presidents to burnish their humanitarian bona fides by redirecting US foreign aid away from the causes of nutrition, sanitation, and economic development and toward solving Africa’s HIV crisis with vaccines and drugs. His success in extracting a $15 billion commitment from George W. Bush in 2003 for AIDS drugs in Africa solidified Dr. Fauci’s reputation as a global powerbroker capable of delivering US dollars to any African potentate who cooperated with his AIDS enterprise.73 Despite his miserable track record at actually reducing illness over the next decade, he nevertheless persuaded President Bill Clinton, in May 1997, to set a new national goal for science by making the cure for African AIDS his JFK moonshot promise. In a speech he delivered at Morgan State University, Clinton said, “Today let us commit ourselves to developing an AIDS vaccine within the next decade.”74 Largely due to Tony Fauci’s influence, Clinton would squander billions of taxpayer dollars on this fruitless crusade during his presidency and millions more of corporate and philanthropic contributions through the Clinton Foundation during his twilight years.75
George W. Bush similarly relied on Dr. Fauci’s counsel, diverting $18 billion of the US government’s relatively anemic foreign aid contributions to Dr. Fauci’s pet global AIDS projects between 2004 and 2008 alone.76
In 2008, the Journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization published a peer-reviewed article examining how the Gates/Fauci partnership had skewed NIH funding to reflect Gates’s priorities, “The Grand Impact of the Gates Foundation. Sixty Billion Dollars and One Famous Person Can Affect the Spending and Research Focus of Public Agencies.” That article showed how, following the Gates/Fauci handshake, NIH had shifted $1 billion to Gates’s global vaccine programs “at a time when overall NIH budget experienced little growth.” The article outlines the technical details of the Gates NIH partnership; the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust funneled their donations through the NIH Foundation, which administers the money while Gates determines how it is spent.77 In this way, Gates has cloaked his pet projects with the imprimatur and credibility of the United States government. He has effectively purchased himself an agency directorate.
There is little objective evidence that all the treasure has extended or improved the lives of Africans, but every penny accrued to Fauci’s reputation as Africa’s foreign aid Golconda. When it came to public health policy in Africa, Dr. Fauci owned the keys to the kingdom. Gates needed Dr. Fauci to unlock the door.
Citing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that charity can be a “wicked dollar,” sociology Professor Linsey McGoey explains that philanthropy can have evil effect when it “places its beneficiaries under a boot rather than recognizing their equal right to foster their own independence, to realize their individuality.”78 Professor McGoey is the author of the 2015 book No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Profits of Philanthropy.
Pharma had designs on Africa; Bwana Fauci and Bwana Gates donned pith helmets, grasped their machetes, shouldered their weaponized vaccines and toxic anti-virals, and made themselves the twenty-first-century versions of the crusading European explorers Burton and Speke—bestowing the blessings of Western civilization upon the Dark Continent and requiring only obedience in return. “They are here to save the world,” says McGoey of philanthrocapitalists, “as long as the world yields to their interests.“79 Thanks to their powerful collaboration, Pharma would emerge as, perhaps, Africa’s cruelest and most deadly colonial overlord.
HIV provided Gates and Dr. Fauci a beachhead in Africa for their new brand of medical colonialism and a vehicle for the partners to build and maintain a powerful global network that came to include heads of state, health ministers, international health regulators, the WHO, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and key leaders from the financial industry and the military officials who served as command center of the burgeoning biosecurity apparatus. Their foot soldiers were the army of frontline virologists, vaccinologists, clinicians, and hospital administrators who relied on their largesse and acted as the community-based ideological commissars of this crusade.
Philanthrocapitalism’s Global Imperium
In August 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt forced Winston Churchill to sign the Atlantic Charter as a condition for US support of the Allied effort in World War II. The Charter—a heartening emblem of American idealism—required the European allies to relinquish their colonies following the war. For two centuries, unimpeded access to the colonized world’s rich national resources had been the principal source of European wealth. The Atlantic Charter and nationalist liberation movements in the 1950s and ’60s dismantled the traditional colonial model in Africa. The continent, however, quickly reopened to “soft colonization” by multinational corporations and their state sponsors.
During the Cold War, the US military and intelligence agencies largely replaced Europe’s colonial armies in those regions, supporting virtually any tinhorn dictator who proved his “anti-Communist” bona fides by rolling out red carpets for US multinationals. When the Berlin Wall fell, the United States already had 655 military bases (now 800)80 across the developing world, and US companies had blank checks in host nations to extract agricultural, mineral, petroleum, and lumber resources, and large markets for finished goods including, notably, pharmaceuticals. After the Soviet bugaboo collapsed, Islamic terrorism and biosecurity supplanted communism as the rationale for a continued US military and corporate presence all over the developing world.
Pharma’s acquisitive longing for Africa’s natural resources and its teeming and compliant populations with their elevated disease burdens helped drive the rise of biosecurity as the spear-tip of corporate imperialism. Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci offered biosecurity as the underlying rationale for their medical neocolonialism project. Paraphrasing the military’s Cold War dogma, Gates and Dr. Fauci warned that if we didn’t stop the germs in Africa, we’d end up fighting them in New York and Los Angeles. They echoed, also, the hackneyed crusaders’ narrative that they were rescuing the continent from famine, pestilence, and ignorance with superior know-how and breakthrough technologies.
The combined Gates/Fauci power to rain foreign aid dollars on capital-starved African governments made them modern imperial viceroys on the continent. WHO became their colonial vassal, legitimizing and facilitating their campaigns to open African markets for drugmakers to dump unwanted products and to experiment with promising new cures.
AIDS Vaccines in Africa
In January 2003, as Gates and Dr. Fauci opened dozens of clinical trials for experimental AIDS vaccines across Africa, Dr. Fauci’s perennial hagiographer, Michael Specter, writing in The New Yorker, raised trenchant questions about “the ethical problems associated with long-term vaccine trials in the developing world—funded by Western donors and designed, largely, by Western scientists.” Specter asks, “Has the race to save Africa from AIDS put Western science at odds with Western ethics?” The article quotes African leaders asking why their continent needed to shoulder the burden of testing expensive vaccines and medicines that—if successful—would be primarily used in Western countries. They complained about pharmaceutical companies automatically lowering safety standards for clinical trials when they stepped onto the African continent. “Why us?” a prominent African journalist asked Specter. “It seems it’s always us. For how many years does Uganda have to be the test case?”81
“I am very worried about these trials,” said Peter Lurie, the deputy director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group. Lurie and his colleague, Sidney Wolfe, complained to Specter about the cavalier attitude of American researchers toward Third World subjects. “Instead of seeing themselves as activists for better care in Africa, scientists will use the poor quality of care to justify what they want to do anyway,” Lurie said. “But you are not permitted simply to use subjects in order to collect data because it is useful to you. That is exploitation and abuse. That is what Tuskegee was.” Lurie was referring to CDC’s notorious decision to leave hundreds of Black Alabama sharecroppers with untreated syphilis for forty years beginning in 1932, in order to document the course of the disease. (I am proud that my uncle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, played a key role in exposing and ending the experiment in 1973.) Lurie added, “If we aren’t careful, we could be in for the greatest injustice in the history of medicine.”82
Later that year, Dr. Fauci’s agency announced that NIAID’s most recent AIDS vaccine experiment had failed. “Please don’t say that I am pessimistic, because I am not,” Anthony Fauci said in 2003, obliquely conceding that HIV and AIDS were not behaving the way his hypotheses predicted. “The best ways to vaccinate don’t work with H.I.V. We need to come up with something new.”83
Gates seemed to think that floods of new money could teach the virus to behave. In July 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced sixteen grants totaling $287 million to create an international network of collaborative research consortia focused on accelerating the pace of HIV vaccine development by funding more than 165 PIs to conduct vaccine trials in nineteen countries.84
Two years later, on July 18, 2008, Dr. Fauci announced the cancellation of the largest human trial to date. It was NIAID’s most promising HIV vaccine by far. Dr. Fauci contributed $140 million of taxpayer money to develop the Merck jab, and NIAID had already begun enrolling 8,500 US volunteers. It would be the first trial of an HIV jab on US citizens. Dr. Fauci said he intended the new trial to determine whether the vaccine could significantly lower the amount of HIV in the blood of those who become infected. Of course, Merck and NIAID had already by then tested the vaccine on 3,000 participants in nine African countries. The latest data were showing that the trial had not gone well. The Times reported coyly that “The PAVE trial had been postponed after a test of the Merck vaccine failed in its two main objectives: to prevent infection and to lower the amount of HIV in the blood among those who became infected.”85
Buried near the end of the New York Times article were some key facts. It turned out that the vaccine was not only ineffective, but researchers reported alarming safety signals that caused a safety monitoring committee to halt the study. Furthermore, instead of preventing infection, the Merck/NIAID researchers reported data suggesting the vaccine actually raised the risk of contracting HIV!86
Dr. Fauci said he reached his decision to abort the coming trial after meeting with scientists trying to understand why the Merck vaccine malfunctioned. Dr. Fauci’s colleagues could offer no explanation for the vaccine’s failure. Lawrence K. Altman of the New York Times reported that Dr. Fauci admitted that after a decade of effort, “scientists realized that they did not know enough about how HIV vaccines and the immune system interact.” Dr. Fauci told the Times that it was becoming clearer that more fundamental research and animal testing would be needed before an HIV vaccine was ever marketed. These were stunning admissions, which seemed to validate the critiques by Duesberg and others who predicted the inevitable failure of a vaccine based on the defective HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Dr. Fauci said he had concluded that scientists must go a step at a time because they “did not yet know fundamental facts like which immune reactions are the most important in preventing the infection.”87 Cornell University scientist Kendall A. Smith made an even broader confession of error: “We really have not understood what actually constitutes a successful vaccine, despite the more than two centuries that have elapsed since Sir Edward Jenner described the first effective vaccine for smallpox virus in 1798. Consequently, all of the vaccines currently in use were developed empirically, and only within the past 50 years, without a comprehensive understanding as to how the immune system functions.”88
“If Fauci’s HIV/AIDS hypotheses were true, they should have been able to develop a vaccine,” observes Dr. David Rasnick, a PhD biochemist who has worked for thirty years in the pharmaceutical biotech field. “Fauci’s fundamental conundrum is that he has told everybody to diagnose AIDS based on the presence of HIV antibodies. With every other disease, the presence of antibodies is the signal that the patient has vanquished the disease. With AIDS, Fauci and Gallo, and now Gates, claim it’s a sign you’re about to die. Think about it; if the objective of an AIDS vaccine is to stimulate antibody production, then success would mean that every vaccinated person would also have an AIDS diagnosis. I mean, this is fodder for a comedy bit. It’s like someone gave the Three Stooges an annual billion-dollar budget!”
On October 8, 2015, Gallo’s Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine announced the launch of its Phase 1 human trials of Gallo’s latest HIV vaccine candidate. A consortium led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $23.4 million to Gallo’s research on this vaccine. Other money came from Redfield’s pals in the US Military HIV Research Program.89
Gallo launched his clinical trial in collaboration with Profectus BioSciences, a biotech firm that he recently spun off from IHV to allow him to monetize the research he conducted with tax-deductible funding from Gates and taxpayer dollars from NIH and the military.90, 91
Gallo had already been testing his new HIV vaccines on animals, and “The results in monkeys are interesting, but they’re not perfect.” Undeterred by the vaccine’s disappointing performance in macaques, Gallo was champing at the bit to test his concoction on some higher primates. “If we keep just using monkeys, we’re never going anywhere. We need for humans to respond.”92 In May 2020, I asked Gallo what had ever happened to this experimental vaccine. Gallo claimed, in what I suspected to be an evasive nonanswer, that he was still (after six years) testing it for an immune response.93
By 2015, the BMGF was spending about $400 million a year on AIDS drug research. Gallo told me that his is only one of over 100 groups Gates has funded to find the elusive vaccine. Gates admitted publicly to Agence France-Presse that the quest for an AIDS vaccine has taken longer than expected, with many disappointments along the way.94 Despite Gates and Fauci’s impressive string of failures, Gates remained bullish. “A vaccine, that’s a big area of funding for our foundation. But even in the best case that’s five years away, and perhaps as long as 10,” he jauntily predicted during a question-and-answer session with young people. “Probably the top priority is a vaccine. If we had a vaccine that can protect people, we can stop the epidemic.”95
On February 3, 2020, Julie Steenhuysen of Reuters reported that NIAID had suddenly halted its clinical trial of its most promising HIV vaccine to date. NIAID was in the middle of Phase 3 trials on more than 5,000 South Africans when they realized that once again, the vaccine was raising the risk of AIDS in vaccinated individuals. Dr. Fauci issued another of his cheerful prognostications: “Research continues on other approaches to a safe and effective HIV vaccine, which I still believe can be achieved.”96
Since 1984, undeterred by thirty-seven years of broken promises, failed clinical trials, billions of squandered dollars, and uncounted human carnage, Dr. Fauci and his old crony Bob Gallo continue to ride the AIDS vaccine gravy train. Neither man has advanced the search for a cure, but both have built impressive institutions. Existential questions about their scientific validity still bedeviled the two intertwined disciplines of virology and vaccinology for which those institutions form key nerve centers. Dr. Fauci’s battle against AIDS is a religious crusade rooted in faith and appeals to authority rather than empiricism or rigorous scientific proof. Following the path of earlier colonial interventions in Africa, Dr. Fauci’s evangelical campaign to impose the orthodoxies of germ warfare on Africans is an exercise in raw power, domination, and the ruthless extraction of profit.
Virology; A New Janissary Corps