New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers recently went on record criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci who, the football star said, “was given over $350 million to research this, to come up with drugs, new or repurposed to handle the AIDS pandemic. And all they came up with was AZT [azidothymidine].” Rodgers is on to something, and there’s more to the story.

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree at Cornell in 1966 but if he ever practiced medicine, it was only for a short time. In 1968 during the Vietnam War, Fauci was drafted but rather than serving in a military hospital in Vietnam, he got a cushy “yellow beret” assignment stateside with the National Institutes of Health. Fauci’s bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry but in 1984 the NIH made him head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). For leading medical scientists, Fauci was a poor choice.

“This man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there, you will know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in,” said Kary Mullis, who earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from UC Berkeley and won a Nobel Prize for invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

Fauci’s favored cure for AIDS was indeed AZT, also known as azidothymidine and Zidovudine, a DNA-chain terminator found to be useless against cancer. The highly toxic drug failed to prevent or cure AIDS but Fauci inflicted AZT and other dangerous drugs on foster children in New York City. That sort of abuse was justified by NIH nurse Christine Grady in her 1995 bookThe Search for an AIDS Vaccine, which touts “the availability and effectiveness of AZT” as a boon to research. Grady’s book justifies drug trials on children and pregnant women, and there’s another problem. The author, who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown, failed to reveal that at the time of the book’s publication she had been married to Fauci for 10 years.

Fauci contended that AIDS was caused by HIV, a claim disputed by Mullis, Peter Duesberg, Charles A. Thomas, and colleagues in “The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.” These leading medical scientists had never seen a retrovirus with such destructive capabilities. “What kind of virus, one day, out of nowhere, springs into action to destroy a person’s immune system with no provocation?” wondered Duesberg, a UC Berkeley molecular biologist. Never had a retrovirus been shown to cause a human disease, or even a disease in animals.

Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert found “no animal model for AIDS,” and Dr. Harvey Bialy, scientific editor of Biotechnology, could locate “no pathogenic relative” for the virus. Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV, found it benign and harmless. “Tragically for humanity,” wrote Montagnier in his endorsement of RFK Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci, “there are many, many untruths emanating from Dr. Fauci and his minions.”

Instead of debating Mullis, Duesberg, Thomas et al, Fauci branded them “AIDS denialists,” worked to cancel their media appearances, and whenever possible cut their funding. The HIV hypothesis became an orthodoxy, and the ticket to government support. More recently, that hypothesis has been challenged by biologist Rebecca V. Culshaw in The Real AIDS Epidemic (2023). As Culshaw contends, the rush to approve mRNA vaccines in 2020 was “essentially a massive clinical trial conducted in real time on the entire population.” The back story here has also escaped notice.

In 2012, Fauci’s wife Cristine Grady became deputy director of the Department of Bioethics of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center. The official NIH announcement also made no mention of Grady’s marriage to NIAID boss Fauci, a huge conflict of interest. As the NIH ethics official, Grady was fine with her husband pushing untested vaccines on children, the group least vulnerable to COVID.

To this day, those who challenge Fauci are labeled with the epithet “conspiracy theorists.” On the other hand, critics of Fauci have ways to respond to such accusers. They can start by asking if the NIAID boss, who said “I represent science” ever said or did anything wrong. Fauci now admits the six-foot distancing rule was not based on science but “sort of just appeared.” And was it based on science to wear no mask, one mask, or two masks, as Fauci claimed? The NIAID boss also funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Be sure and get the accusers’ take on that, but don’t leave it there.

Determine whether the accuser has earned advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, and if he or she has written anything on HIV and AIDS under his or her own name. Find out if the accuser has received any funding from NIAID or the NIH. Ask if the accuser is familiar with cases of AIDS without HIV.

Find out if the accuser ever interacted with professor Duesberg or any colleagues who challenged the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Back in 1994, Mullis and Harvard molecular biologist Charles Thomas co-authored this article on the cause of AIDS. Find out what the accuser thinks of it. Find out if the accuser has read or reviewed Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus, a virtual post-grad course in virology. Ask about The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento, and Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story by John Lauritsen. As Duesberg notes in the foreword, AZT is a DNA chain terminator and “there was no evidence that AZT would cure or prevent AIDS.”

As Aaron Rodgers should know, Fauci also tried Nevirapine as a cure for AIDS, and when NIH official Dr. Jonathan Fishbein flagged misconduct in the clinical trial, Fauci had him fired. Fishbein was fully vindicated and now compares Fauci to “the Godfather,” with “the ultimate power to fix everything, control every narrative, escape all consequences, and sweep all the dirt and all the bodies under the carpet and to terrorize and destroy anyone who crosses him.” Consider, for example, the case of Peter Duesberg.

As Jeanne Lenzer noted in Discover Magazine, Duesberg arrived at UC Berkeley in 1964 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, one of the most prestigious and coveted grants.

In March 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 NIAID boss Fauci, who controlled both AIDS policy and spending on medical research. By 2008, Duesberg’s once thriving laboratory was down to a single graduate student. Had Duesberg received the funding his research deserved, a cure for cancer might be closer at hand. During the COVID pandemic the professor held back, but Inventing the AIDS Virus had already exposed the forces in play:

The modern biomedical research establishment differs radically from any previous scientific program in history. 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.

Nobody embodies that more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, a Lysenko-like figure who claims to represent science. Aaron Rodgers has good reason to wonder about Fauci’s profits from vaccine manufacturers, and AZT offers some clues.

AZT became a “superstar product” for Burroughs Wellcome, which charged $10,000 per AIDS patient per year. Burroughs Wellcome’s profits from AZT were estimated at $427 million, possibly as high as $592 million. In similar style, the swiftly approved COVID vaccines failed to prevent infection or transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but they were superstar products for their makers.

In 2022, pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s earnings reached a record $100 billion because of the COVID pandemic. In 2022, Moderna’s COVID vaccine generated approximately $18.4 billion in revenue. Moderna also projected 2023 sales of the vaccine to reach at least $5 billion.

Mandates for those vaccines, Sen. Rand Paul contends, “should not be dictated by anyone who stands to gain monetarily.” Trouble is, the NIH is not exactly up front about Fauci’s share.

White coat supremacy does have a green side. As Aaron Rodgers and all Americans should understand, the struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting.