“In July 1981, CDC reported a unique outbreak of immune deficiency– related health problems in a group of highly promiscuous gay men in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. A May 1983 Science article by French Institute Pasteur virologist Luc Montagnier first identified a retrovirus that would later earn the name HIV.7 Montagnier believed he had detected signals of HIV in the lymph nodes of some of the AIDS victims he had sampled. After hearing a lecture by Montagnier, Dr. Robert Gallo, a blustering, ambitious National Cancer Institute (NCI) researcher, entrepreneur, and homophobe, persuaded the Frenchman to send him a sample of the newly discovered retrovirus, promising to use his considerable influence with the journal Science to get Montagnier’s work published expeditiously. Instead, Dr. Gallo stalled the publication to give himself time to cultivate and steal Montagnier’s virus. With the help of other HHS officials, Gallo then claimed Montagnier’s pilfered virus as his own discovery and used an imaginative and cunning retinue of subterfuges and intricate frauds to obscure his larceny. In his book, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson meticulously documents Gallo’s brazen flimflam, perhaps the boldest, most outrageous, and most consequential con operation in the history of science.”
Scientists who worked for Gallo described his NIH lab, where he presided over some fifty scientists and a budget of $13 million, as a “den of thieves.” One of Gallo’s scientists told Crewdson, “It’s hard to be an honest person in this place.” She said she knew three employees who committed suicide. Gallo confided to a henchman that he liked to hire foreigners “because if they don’t do what he wants, he can deport them.”
Gallo’s former mistress and lab employee, Flossie Wong-Staal, reported that Gallo voiced his craven need for the Nobel Prize and his bitterness at being denied the honor so frequently that it was practically a “rhetorical device.”
It was natural that Gallo found a powerful and reliable ally in Tony Fauci. Gallo’s “proof” that the cause of AIDS was a virus—as opposed to toxic exposures—provided the critical foundation stone of Dr. Fauci’s career. This claim allowed Dr. Fauci to capture the AIDS program and its attendant cash flows from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and launch the project of building NIAID into the world’s leading drug-production empire.
Extract from the Real Anthony Facui by Robert Kennedy Jr