A reading of Celia Farber’s Serious Adverse Events
From HIV to Covid-19
Previously I wrote extensively about numerous doctors, scientists, and journalists who have been invaluable resources in understanding the Covid-19 narrative landscape. In that article, I briefly mentioned Celia Farber, whom I knew little about except what I originally wrote there. Since then, I have found a copy of her difficult-to-find book Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of Aids and have finished reading it. Below are my thoughts on that book’s content and more in context to the post-2020 environment.
Summary: The past meets present
Two truths draw nearer each other. One moves from inside, one moves from outside
and where they meet we have a chance to see ourselves.
He who notices what is happening cries despairingly:
“Stop! Whatever you like, if only I avoid knowing myself.”
-Tomas Tranströmer
Celia includes the poem above in the preface to her book, and it struck a chord with me immediately. Truth exists outside of human perception. A thing is true or not. X event causes Y, or it does not. Human perception is imperfect. We are fallible regarding the truth because our interpretations are loaded with many preexisting notions and biases. The ultimate dilemma in this pursuit of the truth is the human ego’s stubborn ability to resist the challenge that a deeply held truth is a falsity. We could call the doorstep of that revelation cognitive dissonance, which we avoid.
Celia Farber wrote her book during and after the AIDs crisis. From the preface of her book, we can see similar threads that have also played out during the Covid-19 pandemic. The bold text is what stands out to me:
This book is about the twenty-year war between those who believed in the death sentence and those who did not. It was, as I say, an information war – a war of idea, values, politics, money, power and the ways that all of those things cast impossible shadows on what was called “irrefutable data,” and “overwhelming evidence.
From the ashes of that war, a new narrative is emerging from the experiences of untold millions who fell into the net, usually by the way of a single antibody test, and without any knowledge of the dissent against the official theory. The AIDS war divided those who believed and enacted its every dictum, from those who, very early on, saw a parallel reality, a sister ship loaded with a very different cargo of facts and interpretations. This could only happen at a time when the world was flooded with “information,” and yet, mass media gained unsurpassed powers of persuasion. To question the core catechism that HIV was the single and direct cause of AIDS became an act of not only heresy, but grave moral “irresponsibility,” finally escalating into open charges of murder. Questioning led to an abatement of fear, and the revolution was rooted in fear.
an information war – a war of ideas, values, politics
Information wars are not new. They have existed in every society. What has changed is the technology and the ability of the average citizen to obtain information about anything they wish. Now, most of the population in the west has access to a computer or cellphone. The early days of the internet involved very little in the way of censorship. It also lacked many valuable tools for saving and archiving information once it was found. The information war of today pits the forces of those who would like access to the public square of what is out there and those who think it preferable that the state prevents the spread of information is viewed as harmful. This censorship always flows in the direction of what is detrimental to the authority with the power to determine what constitutes harm, in this case, the state. In some ways, this is not much different from old censorship, where publishers with government actors or influence dictated what could or could not be published or what was safe and proper to report to the populace. We’ve seen similar attempts not just in the news but also in the distribution of art and entertainment. Luckily, as the ways to manipulate what is true have increased, so have the means to bypass attempts to do so. This topic seriously deserves an intense investigation another time.
What is clear is that there was most certainly a war on information brought against those who dissented against what the medical establishment proclaimed to be true of Covid-19. This campaign was directed at doctors, scientists, journalists, and the average citizen. It insisted that what the authorities said was correct, and to question them on any particular issue, whether that was the origin of the virus, its mortality, and treatment options, was responded to with accusations that they were “against science.” The same was true of HIV. The truth of the alternative claims about AIDS is not for me to say, mainly having been too young to experience the crisis in real-time. I have, however, experienced the events of the Covid-19 pandemic and followed the narrative closely as it developed. The gaslighting it has produced is not something I have ever witnessed before. Since the beginning of the pandemic, doctors, independent journalists, and data scientists directly contradicted many of the asserted facts and assurances coming from our public health institutions. I have lost count of the number of things we have been lied to about and expected to go along with. It is enough to give anyone immense anxiety and psychological whiplash even to attempt to keep up.
Villainized Scientists
“Peter is not a good scientists, a bad scientists, a mediocre scientist, a great scientist, a brilliant scientist, or an unstable one for that matter. If you must use an adjective to characterize him, use classical. Peter is a classical molecular biologist. He is only interested in rigorously testing dueling hypotheses. The twin pillars, AIDS and Oncogenes, both are crumbling because of the questions he put into motion.” – Harvey Bialy.
Peter Duesberg was a well-regarded and respected cancer scientist before the AIDs epidemic. He had tenure, and at 49, he was the youngest man elected to the National Academy of Sciences. After his paper, “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality,” was published in 1987, Duesberg became persona non grata among many of his colleagues, including those who had previously cited and praised his work. Since publishing that paper, many of those who respected him would do so cautiously and only concerning his work studying cancer. The sense I get from Celia in her book is that once the subject of AIDS came up in a conversation about Duesberg, many whom she spoke to would immediately go quiet, change the subject, or become highly critical of Duesberg’s comments. And not because they necessarily thought Peter Duesberg was wrong either: but because of how politically charged the discussion of AIDS became. There was a strong consensus, or an attempt to portray one, that the causative agent must be HIV. It appears to an outsider too young to have lived during that time that there was an obsession to find a viral agent as the cause of any disease. To find such a cause allows for massive fundraising opportunities and further grant funding for research into viral vectors and, most of all, drug research which leads to patents and more financial gains.
Duesberg’s main argument was that the HIV virus alone doesn’t meet Koch’s postulates for causation. A detailed list of this argument can be read here. His research suggested that AIDS was not and is not the result of a retrovirus but a multivariate disease exacerbated by pharmaceutical products. Logically, it makes sense to question why would a retrovirus, which does not kill cells, result years later in an individual having a severely repressed immune system due to the lack of white blood cells.
Peter Duesberg was also not alone; Dr. Joseph Sonnabend had similar theories in 1983. As Celia puts it, Sonnabend had a front-row seat to treating gay men who had various diseases before the AIDS epidemic. Celia writes of his theory on AIDS:
In AIDS Research in 1983, Sonnabend, because he had observed immuno-compromised patients, like transplant recipients, before AIDS began, proposed that there was “no specific etiologic agent of AIDS” and proposed once again that “the disease [AIDS] arises as a result of a cumulative process following a period of exposure to multiple environmental factors... The specific factors... are: (1) Immune responses to semen; (2) Repeated infections with cytomegalovirus (CMV); (3) Episodes of reactivation of Epstein Barr Virus (EBV); and (4) Infection with sexually transmitted pathogens, particularly those associated with immune complex formation such as Hepatitis B and Syphilis.”
As the demand increased for a solution to treat HIV and prevent AIDS, known risk factors such as unprotected gay sex and drug use were ignored because it risked stigmatizing a minority group. Instead, AIDs foundations and public health agencies engaged in a fearmongering campaign targeting the general public, including a campaign that suggested heterosexual couples were equally at risk. This was the final straw for Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, who also founded AmFAR, one of the first AIDS advocacy groups.
"The AIDS Medical Foundation was sending out this press release saying that nobody is safe, everybody is going to get it—and all that," he recalled. "When I heard this, I totally freaked out. It was all just nonsense. I called them up and said, 'Do you know what's going to happen as a result of what you are doing? You're going to freak out heterosexual men, you're going to destroy relationships, marriages. And another thing, you're going to promote violence against gay men. People are going to say this thing is a plague and it's coming from gay men, and they're going to beat them up at random.' All of which has come true.
Referring to Terry Beirn, the public relations director of AmFAR, Sonnabend says:
He was very determined. It was pretty clear already then that AIDS was not a significant threat to heterosexuals. He knew that this heterosexual AIDS thing was a hoax, but he said he had to do it to raise money. And certainly, you could argue that unless those heterosexual male politicians in Washington thought that sex could kill, they weren't going to release any money. But my response to that was, if you raise money on a false premise, that money's going to be put to no good. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. The money was raised to protect heterosexual men from a disease they're not going to get anyway.
Any attempt to argue that AIDS may be a disease in which HIV is not always present was met with accusations of “blaming the victims” or being a bigot. It was offensive to suggest that a combination of pathogens from risky behavior and drugs culminates in disease presentation. Celia describes an atmosphere of political correctness which surrounded the discussion on AIDs.
Despite the fact that the earliest attention to Duesberg and his conflicts with the HIV theory came from left-of-center outlets, the left cathedrals and many in the media insisted that the very idea of questioning HIV was inherently “right-wing” and pernicious. A scientist who argued that HIV did not cause AIDS became the incendiary equivalent to the religious right’s primitive accusation that AIDS was God’s punishment against homosexuals.
There is a political irony here: the same is true of the Covid-19 skeptics: many came from a traditionally left-wing or progressive persuasion. However, the narrative surrounding the topic and its politicization by the media, politicians, pharma, and public health institutions threw the sympathetic dissidents into the camp of less sympathetic Covid-19 “deniers.”
Challenging the official narrative made an individual “one of them”- a person not to be taken seriously for the guilt by association of people they never chose to be associated with. It made them, just as it did in AIDs, inherently “right-wing.” This atmosphere leads to people who are usually skeptical being less so to avoid being associated with the new smears.
“irrefutable data,” and “overwhelming evidence.”
There was a drive during 2020 and since to force a consensus on several things. The first of which was the origins of Sars-Cov2. Initial reports of the virus began in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Once the pandemic was officially announced, the public became suspicious upon discovering that the same city housed a prominent Bio Safety Lab 2 (BSL2), which studied bat coronaviruses. Moreover, that same lab did gain-of-function research with funding from the NIH. Quickly the media promoted scientists came out to project a consensus that all evidence pointed to the natural origin of the virus. The conclusion is now less argued that Sars-Cov2 was most likely made in a lab because the details have piled up too high. There were Fauci’s emails where he downplayed lab leak, the funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the presence of a Moderna patented sequence within SarsCov-2, and more. However, the topic is still not discussed in mainstream media outlets with any degree of concern. What matters here is that evidence existed early to encourage a serious debate on the matter. That debate could have led to actionable outcomes so that such gain-of-function research is never done again, or if it is done, it is done under far safer protocols with more transparency. But the truth is not a priority for these bureaucratic experts. Those who asserted that their claims about Covid-19 were irrefutable due to overwhelming evidence did not publicly recant nor apologize for misleading the public. The journalists that should be paying attention to the debate have never deigned to call them out.
To question the core catechism became an act of not only heresy, but grave moral “irresponsibility,” finally escalating into open charges of murder
In the late 1980s, “authorities were claiming that HIV would wipe out one-quarter of the U.S. population in three years.” In keeping with this trend of poor predictions, Imperial College London developed and released a model early in 2020 that predicted as many as 40 million worldwide deaths by May 2020. This incident was not the first time a model by Neil Ferguson would fail miserably. In 2005 he said swine flu would kill up to 200 million, yet only 282 individuals died between 2003 and 2009. He has made a career of failed models, but his work continued to be used to argue for lockdowns.
You’d think this would be a lesson not to trust the people producing such poor models or, at the very least, making policies based on them. The fact that they had failed so many times prior and are still listened to this day dampens that hope.
Much like there was a debate about AIDS as a disease with multiple cofactors, there was a similar debate over Covid-19 risk. Individuals A and B may have had drastically different outcomes due to the presence of comorbidities and levels of vitamin D, for instance, but not once did the public health institutions engage in a campaign to encourage citizens to lose weight to improve their health or recommend vitamin D supplementation. Instead, many of us were locked in doors and told to stay inside, lest the virus gets us even in places where it was always less likely to do so: outdoors.
Dissent against the Covid-19 narrative given by establishment authorities was met with accusations of “killing grandma,” much like those who questioned the cause or the proper treatment of those with HIV and AIDS were accused of wanting those victims to die. To challenge any of the tenets of the Covid-19 authorities, such as mask mandates, lockdowns, social distancing, novel “vaccines,” or vaccine requirements for services, one would get charged with being an anti-vaxer. This label has been thrown at Celia and others, including vaccinologists like Robert Malone and Ryan Cole and biologists like Bret Weinstein. Many of these individuals genuinely believe vaccines are a revolutionary tool for human health. And several of them and other dissenters had the initial recommended Covid-19 injections. When labels are thrown at people for whom they do not fit simply because they have the audacity to ask questions, something is rotten in the system.
Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Piere Kory, Jessica Rose, Geert Vanden Bossche, and others faced the same attitudes as Peter Duesberg did during the AIDS crisis. Like those above, Peter Duesberg threatened the modern medical establishment through their insistence on following scientific standards (based on the philosophy of science) and rigorously comparing hypotheses. The fact that this debate ongoing within the medical community was never shown to the public by the mainstream media honestly is a shame for journalism.
Risky Drugs: AZT, anti-viral cocktails / Remdesivir, Covid-19 injectable products
Before I continue, there is a critical misunderstanding to get out of the way. While the FDA is responsible for ensuring that drugs are safe and effective for their proposed use prior to approval for marketing, the FDA does none of the research themselves. The data the FDA relies on is produced by the drug manufacturers and the companies pharma contracts to run their studies: none of the data is generated by the FDA. Trust in the process means trusting the FDA to be capable and willing to sniff out manipulated data and trusting the pharmaceutical companies and the labs that run their trials to report accurate results and make consistent drugs. It also requires trusting that conflict of interest will not exist or will be disclosed where it does and not factor into the decision-making. Considering that 45 percent of the FDA’s budget comes from user fees paid to them by the drug manufacturers, I find it hard to believe that they can be trusted at their word. To beg the question, are the drug regulators for hire? To understand this further, I recommend reading Changes in Normal Drug Approval Process in Response to the AIDS Crisis. It is only ten pages long and offers some insight.
The story of HIV and AIDs is also the story of unsafe toxic drugs. AIDs produced a multibillion-dollar industry in the research of new medicines. Understandably for the victims, there was an increasing demand to lax the regulatory rules on drugs to treat sick people. This led to the expedited drug approval process we see to this day. As Celia puts it:
Prior to AIDS, it was considered right and good for the FDA to take up to ten years to check a drug for safety and approve it. In 1986, at the peak of AIDS hysteria, ACT UP scaled the walls of the FDA screaming for drugs and blaming the government for the deaths of their friends. To the pharmaceutical industry, it was a dream come true. An unlikely alliance was formed between AIDS activists and the pharmaceutical industry that looked like discord but was actually a conjoined will and agenda, one that persists to this day: to deregulate the FDA and “fast-track” drugs into the pipeline and onto the market. “Drugs into bodies” became ACT UP’s mantra, and they got their wish, starting with AZT, which was approved in a then record-breaking fourteen weeks.
The FDA approved AZT in 1987 after only one human trial. The trial was halted early because patients in the placebo group were dying, and researchers argued that it would be unethical to withhold treatment from them. In chapter 4, Celia writes:
On August 17, 1989, newspapers across America bannerheadlined that AZT had been "proven to be effective in HIV antibody-positive, asymptomatic and early ARC patients," even though one of the FDA panel's main concerns was that the drug should only be used as a last-case scenario for critically-ill AIDS patients, due to the drug's extreme toxicity. NIAID head Dr. Anthony Fauci was now pushing to expand prescription.
Four years later, the Concordia study was released and caused doubt about the effectiveness of AZT in preventing severe disease and death of HIV-positive patients. Even if AZT were as helpful as its advocates insisted, it cost HIV-positive patients upwards of $8,000 a year.
The Covid-19 pandemic elicited a similar response to drug approval. The NIAID and the CDC spent $79 billion to help Gilead develop the drug Remdesivir. To justify the R&D, Remdesivir was thrown into a six-month clinical trial in 2018 to test Remdesivir’s utility against Ebola. In December 2019, the New England Journal of medicine published news that Remdesivir was determined to be severely toxic and caused adverse events such as septic shock, organ failure, and more.
In February 2020, a month before the pandemic was officially declared, Fauci announced the enrollment of Covid-19 hospital patients in a clinical trial to study Remdesivir. This proposal didn’t come from nowhere: the same drug was also used for research purposes on coronaviruses from the same lab from which the virus likely escaped. On this matter from The Real Anthony Fauci:
[The] Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), monitors the quality and ethical performance of clinical trials. NIAID’s remdesivir trial’s original endpoint made sense: to win approval, the drug would need to demonstrate a “reduction in COVID mortality.” However, the drug didn’t show the hoped-for benefit. While fewer patients receiving remdesivir died, those receiving remdesivir were also a lot less sick than the placebo subjects when they entered the trial. So Dr. Fauci’s team decided to move the goalposts. The researchers, in fact, had changed the trial “endpoints” twice in an effort to create a meager appearance of benefit. Dr. Fauci’s new endpoints allowed the drug to demonstrate a benefit, not by improving the chances of surviving COVID, but by achieving shorter hospital stays. Yet this too was a scam, because it turned out that almost twice as many remdesivir subjects as placebo subjects had to be readmitted to the hospital after discharge—suggesting that Fauci’s improved time to recovery was due, at least in part, to discharging remdesivir patients prematurely. Altering protocols in the middle of an ongoing study is an interference commonly known as “scientific fraud” or “falsification.” UCLA Epidemiology Professor Sander Greenland explains, “You’re not supposed to change your endpoint mid-course. That’s frowned upon.” Vera Sharav agrees: “Changing primary outcomes after a study has commenced is considered dubious and suspicious.”
Before the NIAID trial was published and after the poor performance of the drug was already known from a Chinese study conducted earlier, Remdesivir was still approved for emergency use and recommended in the treatment of Covid-19 on May 1, 2020. It seems they developed a drug without any known use and then began seeking any viral agent to approve it. Remdesivir was essentially approved by dictate after Anthony Fauci announced the success of a study whose results had not yet been reviewed or published. It costs patients $3,100 per treatment and can only be administered in a hospital setting.
The other side of the coin in this discussion of drugs is the use of repurposed drugs. Sean Strub wrote a book that accuses the federal government of essentially causing the deaths of AIDs patients by refusing to recommend using repurposed drugs to treat the most severe symptoms of the disease. One of the significant causes of death in patients with prolonged AIDs is severe pneumonia(PCP). Dr. Joseph Sonnabend practiced using Bactrim as prevention against the reoccurrence of PCP in AIDS patients.
The COVID-19 pandemic also saw the repression of information on repurposed drugs known to be well-tolerated and safe, with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin chief among them. E-mails between Dr. Fauci and others show a coordinated effort to hinder the success and use of early treatment. The people who claim to care about public health while mocking critics of vaccines and other measures advocated by establishment authorities should ask themselves some crucial questions. How many lives could have been saved had the McCullough Protocol been followed early in 2020? Or how many lives might have been saved and cases of Covid-19 have been prevented if the FCCC protocol had been followed? Should critical care doctors like Piere Kory, who is in the practice of treating the illest of patients, be denied access to drugs to treat them and smeared for having done so successfully? It is essential to understand here that if the health officials had recommended any such protocol as viable for the early treatment of Covid-19, then none of their patented products would have been approved for Emergency Use Authorization:
Under section 564 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), when the Secretary of HHS declares that an emergency use authorization is appropriate, FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives. The HHS declaration to support such use must be based on one of four types of determinations of threats or potential threats by the Secretary of HHS, Homeland Security, or Defense.
a new narrative is emerging from the experiences of untold millions who fell into the net - without any knowledge of the dissent against the official theory
I want to preface one more thing here: I often refer to Covid-19 vaccines as therapeutics, shots, inoculations, injections, and jabs. Where it feels natural, I use the words interchangeably and try to distance myself from the word vaccine. This reasoning is the same as Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Jessica Rose. I take the framing of these two and others in describing the Covid-19 vaccines, in particular the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna and the J & J adenovirus product, the way I do to align with the facts of the products: A vaccine prevents the spread of a virus by establishing neutralizing antibodies. This has not been true of these products, which makes them not vaccines but emergency use authorized therapeutics mislabeled and misunderstood as vaccines. That they have been officially approved after their EUAs is an appalling story that the data will continue to tell us as the months and years continue since their introduction to the public. The data has been evident since early 2021 that they do not provide sterilizing immunity which is necessary to prevent the spread of a virus. These are novel, weak, and damaging therapeutics that do not promote any long-lasting immunity, nor are they capable of producing herd immunity. The mass vaccination “shot in every arm” policy appears to have also followed the predictions of Geert Vanden Bossche from early 2021, which is thus: that mass vaccination during a pandemic would create evolutionary pressures on the virus to escape and become more transmissible.
During the AIDS crisis, non-symptomatic HIV-positive patients were encouraged to take risky medications, resulting in serious harm, including death. Like HIV and AIDS, people during the Covid-19 pandemic were harmed due to mandates for one size fits all solutions. After the emergency use approval of Covid-19 products, the general population was encouraged and, in many cases, forced to receive the novel jabs. Some willingly accepted the risk believing they were doing a service to their community. Others reluctantly did what they were told to keep their jobs, visit their kids, travel, go to the grocery store, and more. Many of them were injured. Their stories don’t square with the public perception of the injections. The data is clear that these products are the most dangerous “vaccines” ever released to the market. Cases of myocarditis immediately after the injection is well known in children. What should be well known but isn’t is that the FDA also tried to cover up a seriously injured 12 year old from Pfizer’s clinical trial. The average person does not hear of the injured unless it’s a smear piece, much like any coverage of the contrarian doctors and researchers during the AIDs crisis.
It gets worse. The official narrative has only ever shifted slightly as revelations continue to contradict the claims previously made by authorities. It went from Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing disease and spread to Covid-19 vaccines prevent “serious disease” but not spread, so even if it doesn’t end the pandemic by creating neutralizing immunity, at least you won’t get seriously ill. But no data are given as evidence changes for the public to check. No, it is provided to us after the fact in response to dissident experts looking at the practices, procedures, and data of the studies that were conducted and demanding through Freedom of Information Act requests for more transparency. The narrative changes only minutely in response to revealed sins.
Just recently, a FOIA request by the Children’s Health Defense revealed that the CDC was not monitoring adverse events reported to VAERS; read here and here:
In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the CDC last week admitted it never analyzed VAERS for safety signals for COVID-19 vaccines.
The CDC is supposed to mine VAERS data for safety signals by calculating what are known as proportional reporting ratios (PRRs).
This is a method of comparing the proportion of different types of adverse events reported for a new vaccine to the proportion of those events reported for an older, established vaccine.
If the new vaccine shows a significantly higher reporting rate of a particular adverse event relative to the old one, it counts as a safety signal that should then trigger a more thorough investigation.
According to a briefing document, the CDC “will perform PRR data mining on a weekly basis or as needed.”
Yet in its response to CHD’s FOIA request, the agency wrote, “no PRRs were conducted by CDC” and data mining is “outside of the agency’s purview.” The agency suggested contacting the FDA, which was supposed to perform a different type of data mining, according to the briefing document.
Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying express the seriousness of what this means (the link is timestamped):
It may be lazy to reiterate, but this is a significant point: what this means is that the CDC, ahead of the vaccine roll out in January 2021, promised to monitor for safety signals and said that they would compare adverse events of the vaccines against other vaccines historically in use to determine a ratio of the prevalence of particular adverse event (PRR mentioned above). They, however, did not do what they claimed they would and further said that it was not their role to do so. Not only that, they continue to recommend the use of products they were not monitoring without any knowledge to accurately say they are “safe and effective.” The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the CDC had a foregone conclusion from the beginning that they would insist upon no matter what the data revealed. This conclusion fell in lockstep with the NIH. Considering that the NIH is part owner of the patents for these technologies should raise concern as well.
The health of women and children
Chapter 12 of Celia’s book contains the article to Harper Magazine that first through her into the HIV and AIDs controversy titled, “Out of Control: AIDS corruption of medical science.” It opens with the story of Joyce Ann Hafford, a single mother who discovers she is not only pregnant but also HIV positive. A single test determined the diagnosis. Even though Joyce was a seemingly healthy mother with no symptoms that could be associated with HIV, she was encouraged to participate in a study along with 444 other women. The PACT 1022 trial was set up to determine not only the safety but also the maximum levels of toxicity of certain drugs. One of those drugs was Nevirapine, which had similarly been discarded in the past by regulators (this time, Canadian) due to toxicity and lack of proven efficacy. Her child was born on July 29, 2004. And on August 1, Joyce Ann Hafford died of liver toxicity.
In 1998 a clinical trial on Nevirapine was conducted in Uganda called HIVNET 012 and performed by Boehringer Ingelheim. Requirements for the study demanded that it be tested against a placebo, but instead, the drug was tested against AZT. The lack of a placebo in the clinical trial made a determination of safety impossible. This action made it easier for the researchers to attribute any adverse events to the conditions of the participants and not the drugs themselves, from The Real Anthony Fauci:
The PIs admitted to systematically downgrading standardized definitions of serious adverse events to adapt to “local standards.” Injuries that researchers would score as “serious” or “deadly” if they happened to white Americans became “minor” injuries when Black Africans were the victims.
HIVNET is a perfect example of how far off protocol a clinical trial can go. Records went missing, deaths stopped being tracked, deaths of infants were not tracked properly, and more. A Lancet study in 1999 revealed that 16 infants had died in the Nevirapine group and 22 in the AZT group. Women were told this would spare their children, and instead, women and children died.
From CBS in 2004, Officials Hid AIDS Drug Dangers:
Weeks before President Bush announced a plan to protect African babies from AIDS, top U.S. health officials were warned that research on the key drug was flawed and may have underreported thousands of severe reactions including deaths, government documents show.
The 2002 warnings about the drug, nevirapine, were serious enough to suspend testing for more than a year, let Uganda's government know of the dangers and prompt the drug's maker to pull its request for permission to use the medicine to protect newborns in the United States.
But the National Institutes of Health, the government's premiere health research agency, chose not to inform the White House as it scrambled to keep its experts' concerns from scuttling the use of nevirapine, which also is known by the trade name Viramune, in Africa as a cheap solution, according to documents.
Since the rollout of the Covid-19 products, women were encouraged like the rest of the public to accept novel treatments for a novel virus without informed consent regarding their future reproductive health. This feature was never studied as part of the Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials. Dr. Jessica Rose has covered some of the harms done to women post-Covid-19 injection in her research into VAERS. Rebel News also interviewed her on this matter. Josh Guetzkow, a Ph.D. lecturer in Israel, has noticed an increase in stillbirths, miscarriages, and spontaneous abortions from these products, which can be read here. For more information, there is also A.R. Brocks, “Spontaneous Abortions and Policies on COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Use During Pregnancy,” who suggests that unexpected pregnancy terminations were 7-8 times more common in Covid-19 vaccinated pregnant women when compared to the baseline rate of women during the period studied. Now the FDA has since approved these products for children five and under.
Returning to HIV, Celia Farber assisted Liam Scheff in producing a documentary called Guinea Pig Kids. The short film covers the testing of children at New York City’s Incarnation Children Center with unproven HIV treatments. These children were wards of the state, and as such, consent for any treatment couldn’t be given by parents or by the kids: it was provided by the state. What the state chose to do with this power is test toxic products such as AZT and Nevirapine in clinical trials run by the NIAID. It also covers the story of children who were taken away from their foster parents for refusing to continue medicating them.
From the introduction to Liam Scheff’s article The House That AIDS Built, which preceded the making of the documentary:
In New York’s Washington Heights is a 4-story brick building called Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC). This former convent houses a revolving stable of children who’ve been removed from their own homes by the Agency for Child Services. These children are black, Hispanic and poor. Many of their mothers had a history of drug abuse and have died. Once taken into ICC, the children become subjects of drug trials sponsored by NIAID (National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, a division of the NIH), NICHD (the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) in conjunction with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies – GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Genentech, Chiron/Biocine and others.
The drugs being given to the children are toxic – they’re known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage and fatal skin disorders. If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and have them force fed. If the children continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their intestines.
As Celia writes about the matter in chapter 11:
In 2003, freelance journalist Liam Scheff went undercover and broke a story about children being forcibly treated with powerful AIDS drugs, experimental AIDS vaccines, and other mediations as part of a vast network of pediatric trials that used foster kids from New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). The children were under the auspices of a well-funded “nursing facility” for HIV-positive orphans called Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC), a facility located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Some children in the trials were as young as three months old. Those who refused, or tried to refuse, the medications had gastronomy tubes inserted into their abdomens, which dispensed the drugs straight into their digestive tracts. It was a new and draconian development in the treatment of “pediatric AIDS”—code for mere HIV antibodies, which do not in reality signal inevitable progression to AIDS.
A 2004 paper in the journal Pediatric, titled “Gastronomy Tube Insertion for Improvement of Adherence to Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy in Pediatric Patients with Human Immunodeficiency Virus,” describes seventeen children who had tubes inserted after they refused drugs. Reasons for non-adherence, the paper states, “include refusal, drug tolerability, and adverse reactions.” The authors found that after the tube insertions, for which eight children required general anesthesia, “adherence” to the drug regimens was 100 percent. Making it sound routine, clinical, and rational, gastronomy tubes for children and babies are now simply “GT.” “GT placement,” the authors wrote, “allowed for the use of more potent antiretroviral drugs, e.g., Ritonavir, which are often unpalatable and difficult to administer to younger children.” They also found that there were no significant differences in virologic response (viral load and CD4 counts), but gave no other clues about how the children had fared, health wise, after a year of follow-up. All the studys authors were really looking at was whether “adherence” had been improved, results which one could anticipate from feeding drugs directly into the children’s stomachs through a device that they cannot remove.
Conclusion
Author Matias Desmet mentions in The Psychology of Totalitarianism the drug Thalidomide. It was approved for use in pregnant women in 1958. In 1961 it became apparent that the drug was causing tens of thousands of birth defects. The drug continued to be marketed until 1969 under the following reasoning:
The government first wanted to be 100 percent sure that there was, indeed, a link between the drug and fetal malformation [harm].
This attitude proves a double standard that has become clearer and clearer to me since reading Bad Pharma, Serious Adverse Events, and The Real Anthony Fauci. Regulators demand proof of harm after the fact, but they rarely force drug manufacturers to rigorously prove safety before approval. The standards for the burden of proof are skewed in favor of the pharmaceutical companies and against the public who are recommended or mandated drugs. The AIDs epidemic exacerbated the problem by enabling further fast-tracking of drug approval, which continues to this day.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, the demand for evidence is paltry for establishment-made claims and disproportionately large for critics and dissenters of said establishment. One must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that harm is done. And one must do so while being ignored by the federal bodies tasked with the duty to make sure a drug is safe. It must also be done with an unsupportive public media and a legal system that favors pharmaceutical companies and federal regulators.
Safety barely has to be indicated by pharma, and neither does efficacy. To question whether either has ever been reached and to ask for evidence that it has is to mark oneself as against ‘The Science.’ The barrier is riddled with cracks for a drug to get approval, be provided, and even be mandated to citizens. Current policies serve the pharmaceutical companies and government agencies they pay, who own patents on the products they approve. This standard cannot remain in a society that is expected to be democratic and free.
Celia’s work and others illustrate that the public concerns about FDA-approved products, including the Covid-19 injections, are more than warranted. Unsafe and ineffective drugs were previously tested on vulnerable people, and the same is being done on a larger scale today. We mustn’t forget the track record of corrupt actors, whether they are government agents like Anthony Fauci or faceless pharmaceutical companies.
Above all, I have discovered in reading Celia’s book that it is one thing to read someone in the present, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in The Real Anthony Fauci, discuss the parallels between HIV and COVID-19 pandemic. It is quite another to pick up a book written nearly two decades earlier and see the similarities for yourself. To say that it feels profound is an understatement.
Such a good overview of this time and how it relates. Really enjoyed reading and appreciate your writing on this, thank you.
Thank you for this amazing and astute review of my book. It is coming out in a new edition with some new material, in April. I will let you know when. Thank you again. I really appreciate your thoughtfulness, thoroughness and writing.