RUTHFULLY YOURS

Peter Duesberg, former professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, turned 85 in December and hasn’t been picking up the phone or answering email. Fortunately, professor Duesberg’s experiences with Dr. Anthony Fauci are already on record, with insight for embattled Americans in 2022.

“The 71-year-old Duesberg could pass for a younger man,” noted Jeanne Lenzer in Discovery Magazine back in 2008. “AIDS ‘Dissident’ Seeks Redemption … and a Cure for Cancer,” proclaimed the headline on the 5,406-word article, with the subhead explaining, “Biologist Peter Duesberg was all but banished from science for his views on HIV.”

Born in Münster, Germany, in 1936, Duesberg earned a PhD in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in 1963. The next year he arrived at UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow “hoping to unlock the secrets of cancer” and joining the hunt for retroviruses. In 1986, at age 49, Duesberg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and given a National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award, as Lenzer noted, “one of the most prestigious and coveted grants.”

Duesberg knew that retroviruses don’t kill the host cells they infect, so he was skeptical when HIV was proclaimed to be the cause of AIDS, with no scientific study making the case. In March of 1987, Duesberg published a paper in Cancer Research questioning the role of HIV as the cause of AIDS. As Lenzer noted, the man colleagues might once have regarded as the “Einstein of biology” was then smeared as an AIDS “denier,” but there was more to it than name-calling.

For the previous 23 years, Duesberg never had an application for public funding turned down. That funding began to disappear under Anthony Fauci, who as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) controlled both AIDS policy and spending on medical research. Fauci also contrived to cancel Duesberg’s media appearances, and tailored policy to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), whose activists also harassed Duesberg.

Fauci promoted trials of AZT (azidothymidine), marketed as Zidovudine, a DNA chain terminator rejected for cancer treatment because of excessive cytotoxicity. Despite the dangers, Fauci and the AIDS activists urged those testing positive for HIV to go on AZT.

“These people are running into the gas chambers,” said Duesberg at the time. “Himmler would have been so happy if only the Jews were this cooperative.” For further reading see John Lauritsen’s Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story, with a foreword by Duesberg.

Fauci’s prediction that AIDS would ravage the general population was hopelessly wrong but he remained at the helm of NIAID.  In 1996, Duesberg authored Inventing the AIDS Virus, a virtual post-grad course on virology, a thorough investigation of AIDS controversy, and a meditation on the state of scientific research.

“The modern biomedical research establishment differs radically from any previous scientific program in history,” the Berkeley professor contended. “Driven by vast infusions of federal and commercial money, it has grown into an enormous and powerful bureaucracy that greatly amplifies its successes and mistakes all the while stifling dissent. Such a process can no longer be called science, which by definition depends on self-correction by internal challenge and debate.”

Duesberg challenged that powerful establishment, and it cost him. His laboratory once boasted two secretaries and jostled with graduate students and postdocs, but by 2008 the only occupants were Duesberg and one graduate student. Asked why he challenged the government AIDS orthodoxy when it meant financial losses, professional rejection, and social isolation, Duesberg said, “I don’t want to be a ‘good German.’”

As Dennis Prager explains, the “good German” was the term for “the average, presumably decent German, who did nothing to hurt Jews but also did nothing to help them and did nothing to undermine the Nazi regime.” Prager finds a parallel with Russians who did nothing against Stalin, Brezhnev et al, and in the “good American” who goes along with surging repressions in the United States.

The “good American” is supposed to accept Dr. Fauci’s dictates without a peep of protest. The Biden health boss, 81, gives the people good cause to be wary.

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but in 1968, to avoid treating wounded American soldiers, he took a cushy “yellow beret” job with the NIH. Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, yet he has headed NIAID since 1984. Despite colossal mistakes and repeated reversals, Fauci now claims “I represent science.”

In 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci lays down public health policy and commands medical research spending. Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, is head of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, and in charge of “human subjects.” Whatever Dr. Fauci wants to do, dutiful wife Christine will tell him it’s okay.

Fauci’s “human subjects” now include the entire populace, right down to the children and infants now targeted for vaccination. If embattled Americans, particularly the parents, see shades of Nazi Germany it would be hard to blame them. As it happens, the damage is far more extensive.

Had Dr. Fauci been shown the door in the 1980s, and professor Duesberg received the funding his research deserved, a cure for cancer might be closer at hand. Instead Peter Duesberg was all but banished from science and the people suffer under Fauci’s regime of white coat supremacy.