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Dr. Anthony Fauci, circa 1984

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May 17, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A searing criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci penned by a prominent gay activist in 1988 as the ravages of AIDS remained in high gear began, “I have been screaming at the National Institutes of Health since I first visited your Animal House of Horrors in 1984. I called you monsters then … and now I call you murderers.” 

It went downhill from there:

You are responsible for supervising all government-funded AIDS treatment research programs. In the name of right, you make decisions that cost the lives of others. I call that murder.

At hearings on April 29 before Representative Ted Weiss and his House Subcommittee on Human Resources, after almost eight years of the worst epidemic in modern history, perhaps to be the worst in all history, you were pummeled into admitting publicly what some of us have been claiming since you took over three years ago.

You admitted that you are an incompetent idiot.

Fauci’s faults enumerated in the 1,900-word letter panning his management of what was then called “the worst epidemic in modern history” bear an eerie resemblance to those recently leveled at him for his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fauci became Director of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 1984 and has remained in that position ever since. 

The open letter’s author, Larry Kramer, was an accomplished playwright and author who became the nation’s most strident voice calling out both the apathy of gay men toward the roaring crisis and the glacial pace of the Fauci-run NIAID’s response. Kramer co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in order to mobilize resources to effectively deal with the scourge.  

Kramer quoted Rep. Henry Waxman during a U.S. House hearing: “Dr. Fauci, your own drug selection committee has named 24 drugs as high priority for development and trials. As best as I can tell, 11 of these 24 are not in trials yet. Six of these drugs have been waiting for six months to more than a year. Why the delays? I understand the need to do what you call setting priorities but it appears even with your own scientists’ choices the trials are not going on.”

Fast forward to the present:    

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said in March that “We’ve seen this very strange conflict … that many of those treatments that could save lives, instead of being promoted and investigated and studied by the health authorities, are instead being sabotaged and made … inaccessible.”

“The tragic fallout of this government strategy is now becoming apparent,” according to a CHD report. “In a recent working paper analyzing the determinants of COVID-19 fatalities, the authors — Michigan State University economics professor Mark Skidmore and co-author Hideki Toya — estimated “if the U.S. had made (hydroxychloroquine) widely available early on, 80,000 to 100,000 lives could have been saved.”

While the Fauci-led response to the AIDS epidemic in the last half the 20th century was plagued by bureaucratic paralysis, today’s coronavirus pandemic response has seen a similar slow movement regarding approval of non-vaccine drugs that have proved effective in treating COVID.   

Kramer’s 1988 missive continued: 

The gay community has, for five years, told the NIH which drugs to test because we know and hear first what is working on some of us somewhere. You couldn’t care less about what we say. You won’t answer our phone calls or letters, or listen to anyone in our stricken community. What tragic pomposity!

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Larry Kramer’s open letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci, published in the Village Voice, May 31, 1988.

Fast forward again to today. The just-published CHD report suggests that the slow, “unconscionable” movement to approve drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and  ivermectin is due to a conflict of interest favoring Big Pharma vaccine manufacturers over cheaper drugs that are already in existence and readily available. Why?

Under the law, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not allowed to award Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) status to vaccines or other unapproved medical products unless the agency determines “there are no adequate, approved and available alternatives.”

The availability of treatment options clearly rebutted the contention of vaccines being the only way forward. Nevertheless, FDA made — in quick succession — the EUA decisions that enabled the rollout of the Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) COVID injections …

The consequences of this myopic and quite possibly criminal suppression of COVID treatments are not limited to the deaths that could have been averted through appropriate treatment. Many of the individuals who have accepted COVID vaccines might have made a different decision had they known about and had access to the promising and affordable COVID treatments identified by McCullough, Kory and other ethical physicians.

“Fauci's startlingly bad medicine and bad medical policy on COVID … has in fact cost thousands of lives,” wrote American Thinker’s Monica Showalter in September. “And yes, he is very specifically to blame.” 

“Fauci's suppression of hydroxychloroquine studies, his odd devotion to the new and profitable drug Remdesivir (which we have noted many NIH officials hold monetary stakes in), and Fauci's earlier papers from years back touting the importance of hydroxychloroquine on other kinds of COVID viruses paint a damning picture of what is going on, a horrible confluence of financial interests and a desire to extend the pandemic to Get Trump at a huge cost of lives,” asserted Showalter. 

“The gay community has consistently warned that unless you move quickly your studies will be worthless because we’re already taking drugs into our bodies that we desperately locate all over the world (who can wait for you?!!),” said Kramer in 1988.  He continued: 

You continue to pass down word from On High that you don’t like this drug or that drug — when you haven’t even tested them. THERE ARE MORE AIDS VICTIMS DEAD BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T TEST DRUGS ON THEM THAN BECAUSE YOU DID.

Fast forward again: Dr. Peter McCullough, vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center, asserted in March that “as many as 85 percent of COVID deaths could have been prevented through early treatment.”  

“How wicked are the culprits of this COVID enterprise, that they violate our rights and destroy our society, while pushing dangerous experimental injections on us, and obstructing safe, affordable, and effective treatments like Ivermectin?” wondered Dr. Mark Trozzi, an emergency medicine physician for the past 25 years.  

As he neared the conclusion of his letter, Kramer said to Fauci, “Do I want you to leave?” He answered his question, “Yes.” 

Families ravaged needlessly by COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns may well answer Kramer’s question, “Yes, we want you to leave.”  

Kramer’s open letter was published in the pages of The Village Voice 33 years ago this month.