Back in 1987, during his first run for the presidency, Senator Joe Biden plagiarized a speech by British leftist Neil Kinnock. The Delaware Democrat eventually secured a begrudging vice-presidential nomination as Barack Obama’s running mate, but otherwise went nowhere until 2020, when he won the White House without leaving his basement. The rest is history, but invites a look back.

On Sept. 12, 2022, the 60^th anniversary of President Kennedy’s “moonshot” speech, Biden proclaimed, “cancer doesn’t discriminate between red or blue, it doesn’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Beating cancer is something we can do together and that’s why I’m here today.” Here the Delaware Democrat was impersonating President Richard Nixon.

In his 1971 State of the Union address, Nixon proclaimed, “the time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease.” On Dec. 23, 1971, Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, which gave the National Cancer Institute unique autonomy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with special budgetary authority. By that time the quest to conquer cancer was attracting medical scientists from around the world.

Born in Münster, Germany, in 1936, Peter Duesberg earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in 1963. The next year he arrived at UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow hoping, as one profile put it, “to unlock the secrets of cancer.” Duesberg was the first scientist to discover a cancer gene (oncogene), which he isolated from a virus. At age 36, Duesberg earned tenure at UC Berkeley, where he served as professor of molecular and cell biology.

In 1986 the National Academy of Sciences awarded Duesberg a National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award, one of the most prestigious and coveted grants. In 1987, Duesberg was a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland. By that time, the scientist had crossed paths with Dr. Anthony Fauci, born in 1940, whose career took a different track.

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but if he ever practiced medicine, it was only for an interlude. In 1968, hoping to avoid duty treating wounded American soldiers, Fauci took a cushy “Yellow Beret” job with the NIH. Dr. Fauci’s bio showed no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology, but in 1984 the NIH made him head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Kary Mullis, who earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at UC Berkeley and won a Nobel Prize for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, believed Fauci did not understand electronic microscopy, did not understand medicine, and therefore, “should not be in a position like he’s in.” The truth of that statement would soon become apparent.

In 1983, Luc Montagnier of France’s Pasteur Institute, discovered the human immunodeficiency virus known as HIV. Fauci proclaimed that HIV was the sole cause of AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Professor Duesberg knew that retroviruses don’t kill the host cells they infect, so he was skeptical. In March 1987, in the journal Cancer Research, Duesberg published “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality,” questioning the role of HIV as the cause of AIDS.

That view was shared by Kary Mullis, Harvard professor Charles Thomas, and other medical scientists far more qualified that Fauci. Instead of debating these scientists, the NIAID boss smeared them as “AIDS denialists,” but it wasn’t just about name-calling. Fauci also contrived to cancel Duesberg’s media appearances and tailored policy to please the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT-UP militants harassed Duesberg, who for the previous 23 years, had never had an application for public funding turned down. That began to change under NIAID boss Fauci, who controlled AIDS policy and spending on medical research.

Duesberg’s laboratory once boasted two secretaries and jostled with graduate students and postdocs, but by 2008 the only occupants were Duesberg and a single graduate student. Despite the conditions, the cancer researcher never changed his views, which he set forth at length in Inventing the AIDS Virus. For his part, Fauci would get an encore in the COVID pandemic.

The NIAID boss funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform dangerous gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. The WIV also received a cargo of deadly pathogens from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) courtesy of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese national who ran the NML pathogens program. In 2017-18 alone, Qiu made at least five trips to the WIV, which collaborates with China’s military.

Fauci maintained that the COVID virus was “zoonotic,” emerging naturally in the wild. Scientists finding evidence of a laboratory origin included CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, an experienced virologist, who got death threats for his trouble. Instead of debating those of different views, Fauci smeared them as “conspiracy theorists,” fringe epidemiologists and so forth, a repeat of his campaign against the AIDS dissidents.

Fauci announced his retirement in 2023 but continued to receive government-funded transportation and security services. In December 2024, Fauci authored a paper claiming that HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, was also “zoonotic,” arising naturally in the wild. That effectively reversed Fauci’s previous campaign against Duesberg and the AIDS dissidents.

Fauci’s drug of choice for AIDS was AZT (azidothymidine, zidovudine), which had been rejected for cancer treatment because of high toxicity. As the BBC documented in Guinea Pig Kids, Fauci’s NIAID forced AZT and other toxic drugs on black and Hispanic foster children in New York City. In The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F. Kennedy showed how Fauci’s NIAID conducts drug trials in Africa, where adverse consequences are less likely to draw attention from American journalists.

During the COVID pandemic, Fauci recommended untested vaccines—even for children, the group least vulnerable to the infection. As Rebecca Culshaw showed inThe Real AIDS Epidemic, the rush to approve allegedly “lifesaving” mRNA vaccines “was essentially a massive clinical trial conducted in real time on the entire population.”

Pfizer wanted 75 years before revealing the research on the highly profitable COVID vaccines. A judge forced the company to release the information, now compiled by Naomi Wolf in The Pfizer Papers. As Bruce Bawer notes, this could be the “crime of the century.”

Before leaving the White House on Jan. 20, Joe Biden issued a pardon for Dr. Anthony Fauci, an act that “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” So Fauci, a Lysenko figure who claims to represent science, may get away with everything, a travesty of justice for the ages.

“During his tenure as my Chief Medical Advisor,” Biden said in his pardon message, Fauci “helped the country tackle a once-in-a-century pandemic. The United States is safer and healthier because of him.” It isn’t. Among other things, had Fauci been shown the door, and professor Duesberg received the funding his research deserved, a cure for cancer might be closer at hand.

The damage wrought by Fauci is truly fathomless. The Trump administration must ensure that it never happens again. Start by firing Fauci’s wife Christine Grady, the NIH bioethics chief who justified everything Fauci did, including drug trials on children and pregnant women. Also get rid of current NIAID boss Jeanne Marrazzo, a faithful Fauci disciple and DEI promoter. The NIAID director should be a qualified scientist and limited to one four-year term. No single person or group of people should set public health policy and control spending on medical research to the degree that Fauci did. Post all grants on the internet in real time. There should be no successors to the bureaucratic dictator who recently stepped down from his post.