RUTHFULLY YOURS

“This book was written by the author in her private capacity. Opinions expressed are her own. No official support or endorsement by the NINR [National Institute of Nursing Research] the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or other agencies is intended or should be inferred regarding the views presented here.”

Those are the first words a reader encounters in The Search for an AIDS Vaccine: Ethical Issues in the Development and Testing of a Preventative HIV Vaccine, by Christine Grady, from Indiana University Press back in 1995. In the acknowledgments, doubts begin to rise.

The author thanks “my mentor,” Georgetown professor Leroy Walters, along with several academics and medical doctors. Also mentioned are two officials at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the NIH, and Mary Ropka and others at the Clinical Therapeutics Laboratory at the NINR.

On the book’s final page, readers learn that “Christine Grady is Acting Clinical Director and Research Associate at the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Institutes of Health,” the very agency that that supposedly offers no support or endorsement for Grady’s book, which is “dedicated to my family.”

How strange, then, that the author includes no acknowledgement for her husband, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom she married ten years earlier in 1985. Dr. Fauci shows up on page 55, his only named appearance, as the “director of NIAID,” conveniently enough, “the branch of the NIH primarily responsible for vaccine development.” His wife finds limited success in the development of vaccines against retroviral infections and sexually transmitted diseases, and acknowledges that “HIV is an STD.”

HIV is also “associated with social deviance,” but no reference to works such as How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, from 1983, or And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, by Randy Shilts and first published in 1987. Both works outline bathhouse culture and the widespread use of amyl and butyl nitrites, also known as “poppers” and their destructive effects on health. Grady also ignores The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento, first published in 1990.

Grady does recall how the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) and other activists were “taking matters into their own hands.” In July of 1990, Dr. Anthony Fauci, announced that such activists would have representation on all committees and in all activities of NIAID’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG).

“The regulations governing the conduct for clinical trials for vaccines in the U.S.,” Grady explains, “are the same as those for clinical trials of drugs.” The drug of choice for NIAID was  AZT, azidothymidine, marketed as Zidovudine and Retrovir.

As UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg noted in 1990, AZT is a DNA chain terminator designed for treatment of leukemia but never accepted for cancer therapy. AZT is cytotoxic, lethal to body cells, and there was no evidence that AZT would cure or prevent AIDS. Professor Duesberg wrote the foreword to John Lauritsen’s Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story, published in 1992 and endorsed by, among others, UC Berkeley molecular biologist Harry Rubin, a pioneer in the field of retroviruses.

In his book, Lauritsen noted “Effects of Continuous Intravenous Infusion of Zidovudine (AZT) in Children with Symptomatic HIV Infection,” by Phillip Rizzo et al, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on October 6, 1988. Five of the 21 children in the trial died but Christine Grady, a mother of three daughters, makes no reference to Poison by Prescription and touts “the availability and effectiveness of AZT” as a boon to research.

The AIDS activists demanded the drug as their right and advanced a curious view of those participating in the clinical trials. As Grady notes, the exclusion of vulnerable groups such as children or women of childbearing age, “was called discriminatory.” Instead of being harmful, exploitative and unjust, “participation in clinical trials was seen as a benefit, so those denied access were being harmed. Some perceived participation not only as a benefit but as a right.”

The rules for clinical drug tests and vaccine development are the same, and Grady explains that children “should not be one of the first groups to bear the burdens of efficacy testing of preventive vaccines.” (emphasis added) So the bioethicist does not rule out the use of children to “bear the burdens” of drug trials. Indeed, as she wrote on page 6, “the ideal HIV vaccine should be safe enough to administer to large numbers of healthy adults and children.”

In 1992, Dr. Fauci’s NAIAD approved secretive trials of AZT and other dangerous drugs with foster children in New York, nearly all of them African American. Those trials escape detailed analysis in Grady’s narrative, which advances a new ethos for vaccine research and application. For example, on page 72:

Protection of the rights, interests, and well-being of the individual as the main consideration in ethical guidance concerning the conduct of clinical research has been criticized by international scientists, representatives of developing countries, epidemiologists, and others. Some have argued stridently for a better balance between individual interests and societies’ interests. Some critics have claimed that the research codes’ emphasis on individualism and protection of individual rights (based on a Western political liberal philosophy) is incompatible with less individualistic cultural and moral perspectives in which persons define themselves in relation to their community, and in which conflict between the interests of the individual and the community would be hard to imagine.

On page 73, Grady cites an epidemiologist who contends:

A person-dominated medical ethic that focuses primarily on individual rights and duties and does not see individuals as part of a wider social order and community is insufficient for the task of setting moral and human rights boundaries around the conduct of research populations.

Grady repeats such contentions several times, and she is pretty much on board with it.

“The primary participant and beneficiary of vaccine research is the community,” concludes Grady, who recommends research “in which the client and principal beneficiary is the community.” That was where she was going with it, and 27 years later, Christine Grady is the head of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, responsible for “human subjects.”

The Search for an AIDS Vaccine was essentially ventriloquism for Dr. Fauci, chief medical advisor to Joe Biden, who jokes that Dr. Fauci is the real president of the United States. Like his wife Christine, “individualism and protection of individual rights” mean little if anything to the NIAID boss, a government bureaucrat since 1968.

“There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision, for the greater good of society,” said Dr. Fauci last October. Dr. Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry and his prediction that AIDS would ravage vast swaths of the population was hopelessly wrong. Dr. Fauci has reversed himself many times but now claims “I represent science.” That claim gives parents plenty to ponder.

Children are low risk for COVID-19 but Dr. Fauci wants to vaccinate them, starting in the first grade. Remember, according to his wife, the rules for vaccine development are the same as for drug trials. Children should not be “one of the first groups to bear the burdens of efficacy testing of preventive vaccines,” but for Grady it’s okay to use the children to bear such burdens.

As parents might note, Pfizer wants 75 years before revealing the data on its vaccine, and harmful side effects are already turning up with others. In The Search for an AIDS Vaccine, Grady hinted at what could possibly go wrong with medical research on human subjects.

“Nazi Germany brought the difficult issues in research with human subjects to the attention of the public and medical/scientific communities,” Grady writes. “In the name of ‘experimentation,’ human torture and atrocities were performed on thousands of Jews and justified as medical research.”

Dr. Josef Mengele is not mentioned but “Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling infected more than 1,000 prisoners at Dachau with malaria without their consent.” The experiments exposed at the Nuremberg trials “forced an examination of human research,” and “the medical profession was aware that serious breaches of ethics had occurred in the past.” For someone concerned with ethics, that is not exactly a strong condemnation.

The drug Thalidomide, designed to treat nausea in pregnant women, was “thought to be exceptionally safe,” Grady writes, but left “thousands of children with severe and unusual deformities” such as hands attached to shoulders, feet attached to hips and so forth. “The harm done was the result of inadequate research,” says the wife of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who avoids some dark history about this drug once thought to be exceptionally safe.

“Some babies had no arms or legs. Others had no ears or malformed kidney,” writes Katie Thomas of the New York Times. Thalidomide was the product of the German company

Chemie Grünenthal, “whose head of research, Dr. Heinrich Mückter, was a Nazi war criminal.” If nurse-bioethicist Grady encountered that information in any of her studies, it does not emerge in The Search for an AIDS Vaccine, published two years after she earned a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University.

The Tuskegee syphilis study, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) never offered the effective therapy of penicillin to “poor black males,” some tracked for more than 40 years. Christine Grady cites an opinion that the Tuskegee program had “not provided informed consent, lacked a written protocol and was questionably designed.”

Others believed the study was “racist,” but no word from the bioethicist about violation of the black males’ individual rights, including their right to live. Grady advocates “justice as a principle requiring equitable selection of subject,” but does not invoke justice in the Tuskegee case.

Christine Grady wants research in which “the client and principal beneficiary is the community,” not the individual. Her husband, Dr. Anthony Fauci is on record that individuals must give up “what they consider” to be their right to make their own decision. Whatever decision Dr. Anthony Fauci makes, it’s a safe bet that chief NIH bioethicist Christine Grady has signed off on it. Dr. Fauci lied about funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so if Christine told him lying was ethically wrong he must have ignored her.

This casuist and her megalomaniac husband now wield executive-level power in America. It is as though Richard Nixon’s wife Pat headed the Federal Election Commission and found no ethical objection to the Watergate operation. Unlike Nixon and all other presidents, Dr. Fauci has never faced a vote of the people.

His forced lockdowns caused untold suffering and loss, but statements of sympathy from Dr. Fauci and his wife are hard to find. Their “human subjects” are now the entire populace, right down to those first-grade students, also known as children. Being a “subject” is different than being a citizen, with rights the government is bound by law to respect and preserve.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and his wife Christine Grady are the embodiment of white coat supremacy, rule over the people by unelected medical bureaucrats. White coat supremacy is incompatible with American democracy, and if embattled Americans believed it is also bad for their health and safety it would be hard to blame them.