The Real Anthony Fauci

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Skyhorse, 2021, 450 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

hen I started reading this book, smoke started rising from it and I felt a burning sensation. Fortunately it was just a false alarm: I had the heater too close to me. It wasn't that hot of a book at all. Maybe a bit warm. And now a little singed.

Fauci's institute, the NIAID, shot to prominence back in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic struck. The AIDS activists who poured onto the Bethesda campus demanding a cure bypassed the building I was in and went straight to Building 37, where Bob Gallo was busy stealing the credit for HIV and HTLV. Gallo was famous on campus for his presentations that had one word per slide, starting with one that simply said “CD4” in giant letters.

Out of self-preservation, I have to remain mum about some other things, but Kennedy's portrayal of NIH as dominated by bigshots with gigantic egos and huge armies of postdocs is eerily accurate. Kennedy portrays Fauci as a power-mad administrator who owes his loyalty to Big Pharma and uses his power over funding to ruthlessly destroy the career of anyone who disagrees with him, most notably Peter Duesberg, a brilliant virologist who disputed Gallo's claim that HIV was the cause of AIDS. Duesberg's 1987 Cancer Research paper, “Retroviruses as carcinogens and pathogens: expectations and reality” said that the virus is merely what we now call a biomarker, and vaccination won't help. And so far he appears to have been right: there is still no vaccine.

Before 1987, Duesberg had never had a grant rejected. After challenging Fauci, Duesberg's grant was pulled. Since then, according to Kennedy, he has submitted over thirty more, and NIH rejected every one. Even today, for a scientist to question the hypothesis is career suicide.

Fauci's baby was azidothymidine (AZT), a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor that, after metabolism to its active form, acts as a chain terminator for DNA synthesis. Kennedy says that many scientists think AZT killed more people than AIDS.

Verification of this and many other public health claims made in this book is remarkably hard to find. Kennedy writes “The entire field of virology is Dr. Fauci's Janissary corps,” the implication being that they have a vested interest in keeping schtum to maintain their NIH funding.

The atmosphere so clearly portrayed in this book points to a deficiency in the culture at NIH that desperately needs to be fixed.

But this book won't do the job. Kennedy has a weak background in science and makes numerous misstatements. He incorrectly claims that the CDC admitted that PCR tests can't distinguish Covid from other diseases. He repeats the myth that HCQ's supposed therapeutic effect is to act as a zinc ionophore. He falsely states that molnupiravir is a protease inhibitor and uses an identical mechanism of action as ivermectin. He suggests that mercury (once used as a treatment for syphilis) is responsible for the CNS problems in tertiary syphilis and that AIDS could be caused by amyl nitrite, mycoplasma, or HHV6. He misrepresents the research on hydroxy­chloro­quine and ivermectin. He claims that virologist Thomas Verstraeten found that patients given Hep B vaccine containing thimerosal (aka thiomersal) had 1135% higher rate of autism. He provides incomplete numbers on the pentavalent vaccine (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus-hepatitis B-hemophilus influenza type B), saying that it killed 14 people here, five babies there, and 27 babies somewhere else.

These are certainly problems. Admittedly some of the research on HCQ was biased, and few would trust the WHO's claim that the pentavalent vaccine is “safe, effective, and of assured quality”, but in the context of 467 million doses the case looks a little different. There are many generations of vaccines; early polio and rotavirus vaccines were nasty. That's not to say vaccines today are all safe, either.

As for thiomersal, certainly it can be toxic at high enough doses. It's sometimes used in research to induce ASD-like features in rats, but I could find nothing to substantiate Kennedy's claim about the levels found in vaccines. On the contrary, Verstraeten's 2003 paper found no significant risks for autism or attention-deficit disorder. The reference Kennedy gives is a link to his own website.

There are also many contradictions in this book. At one point he criticizes Fauci (p.160–170) for insisting on placebo controlled trials. Then he criticizes him for not using them (p. 259). Then again on page 328 he criticizes Bill Gates, the inventor of the Blue Screen of Death, for using a ‘fauxebo’ instead of a real placebo. He criticizes pharma companies for testing their drugs in Africa while pricing them too high for Africans to purchase, calling it a form of colonialism. Then he criticizes the drugs for killing more people than they save. But if the drugs are as bad as he says, shouldn't the Africans be grateful they can't get them? They should be feeling sorry for us poor overmedicated bastards in the West.

Granted, public health officials have an agenda. Bill Gates likes money. NIH lab chiefs like glory. Big Pharma likes selling vaccines. Government and Big Tech like to censor essential debate. Officials and others like simple answers and attack and dismiss views that oppose medical orthodoxy. But this book was written by a trial lawyer who is not trying to educate you, but to generate outrage to convince you the defendant is guilty.

Last but not least, if I were related to Ted Kennedy, the last thing I'd do is brag about it. In fact I'd probably change my name to Bob Smith.

No index.

dec 22 2022

The truth about COVID-19: Exposing the great reset, lockdowns, vaccine passports, and the New Normal

by Joseph Mercola, D.O. and Ronnie Cummins
Chelsea Green, 2021, 208 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

oseph Mercola is the owner of www.mercola.com, which until recently featured articles about vitamins and beautiful pictures of herbs and spices said to have medicinal properties. Now he's being attacked and censored for claims of “misinformation.”

It's true that fringe opinions, like the claim that deuterium is toxic and glyphosate destroys resistance to Covid, have occasionally shown up on his site. But censorship is unacceptable. It's hard to understand the viciousness of the attacks by the press and science publications on fringe science. After all, much of what they say is derived from peer-reviewed journals, and practicing scientists like myself sometimes get new ideas from them and often find them highly entertaining.

The authors say that everyone must now decide whether liberty or security are more important. This is true, but it misses the bigger picture. There are people out there who are livid with rage toward the unvaxxed and not only demand all doubt be silenced but literally wish the unvaxxed dead, and will celebrate if it happens. Much of the news media lives by inciting this hatred and confabulating tales designed to intensify it. This hatred is all the more incomprehensible considering what we now know about the disease.

What we're seeing is not just a question of liberty vs security. It's the question of whether an individual has any rights at all in the face of a threat to the collective, whether the threat is real or not.

This question has restructured American politics. Many now believe that the response to Covid was an expansion of the power of public health officials to rule us with an iron fist. That makes it all the more important for anyone concerned about science to understand what the dissidents are saying. But it's not easy. Take this statement on Mercola's website:

In one analysis, comparing more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher.

That's a direct quote from an article in Science. But what Science is actually talking about is the well-documented fact that natural immunity from a previous infection protects better against re-infection than the vax. A close reading of Mercola shows that he too is saying it, but in a way that could confuse an inattentive reader. So what's happening is not misinformation, but a communication gap, either due to bad writing style or because of bias held by the reporter trying to generate outrage about this book.

Accordingly, we must disentangle Mercola's facts from the statements by his co-author Ronnie Cummins, who comes across as a health-food nut who complains about GMOs and advocates banning junk food. Cummins misunderstands antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE (which Mercola describes accurately on page 133) and is not very knowledgeable about science, making many incorrect statements like claiming the 1918 Spanish Flu virus was a coronavirus (it wasn't). Given the stakes, one would think the authors would have had the book reviewed by an expert before publication.

By contrast, Mercola has a solid understanding of modern medicine, though as one might expect he favors ‘natural’ remedies. Even so, a few questionable claims show up, such as the still-unresolved claim about hydroxy­chloroquine's efficacy and the persistent myth that it acts therapeut­ically as a zinc ionophore. Interestingly, a recent paper by Tummino et al., while trying to dismiss HCQ, accidentally found that a synergistic effect between HCQ and azithromycin might account for Raoult's original finding.

Then there's my pet peeve: complaining when pharma companies report relative rather than absolute risk reduction. The comparison I always give is to auto accidents. There were about 3,500,000 vehicle accidents in the USA in 2020, resulting in 38,680 deaths. If the deaths were somehow reduced by 50%, it would be a miraculous achievement, but it would only be a 0.55% absolute risk reduction. So complaining about absolute risk reduction by a vax being only 1% is misleading. We need to know both numbers.

About half the book is focused on the so-called Great Reset. Nobody seems to know what that is because discussion of it on the Internet is being censored, but the general idea seems to be something like this (page 72):

... the pandemic is being exaggerated for a reason, and it's not because there's concern for life. Quite the contrary. It's a ploy to quite literally enslave the global population within a digital surveillance system—a system so unnatural and inhumane that no rational population would ever voluntarily go down that road.

Perhaps the most important section is the chapter on vaccine safety. We don't yet know how bad the long-term adverse effects will be. Claims made elsewhere that the mRNA vaccine will cause genetic damage are easy enough to dismiss, but ADE is not, and there have been many cases of systemic inflammatory syndrome, autoimmune reactions, and deaths from the vaccines. The authors say that some experts think Covid vaccines could turn out to be the worst public health disaster in history.

Mercola makes a good case that the average person need not be afraid of the virus. Some research suggests that up to 80% of us are already partially immune by virtue of pre-exposure to coronaviruses in the common cold.

Unfortunately, the virus has become so politicized that it's no longer safe, even for Mercola, to cite scientific studies. We need leadership to help in keeping the dialogue civil. Unfortunately, we're not getting it.

oct 16, 2021