Class Action Lawsuit Against the NIH for Pandemic Negligence - ACLU

Dear ACLU Attorneys,

             There is no more fundamental right than the right to life. When doctors make an incompetent mistake, something they should have known better than to do or failed to do and a person suffers egregious bodily injury, that is grounds for a lawsuit for medical negligence or malpractice. However if a national health authority falsely informs the public that there are no drugs to treat early Covid-19 disease when they know or should have known that is not true, and at least 500,000 unnecessary excess deaths occur, what should that be called? Scientific gross negligence? Scientific malpractice? Pandemic fraud? National negligent homicide or wrongful death? If a person can sue for one injury or death due to medical malpractice or negligence, why can there not be a class action lawsuit for the unjustified deaths of 500,000? If someone can sue for damage to health caused by contaminated water at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, or lies told by Fox News, why can a person not sue to protect humanity from the next viral pandemic by forcing the government to tell people the truth about existing, safe, approved, effective, broad-spectrum, antiviral medicines? How else can we put an end to the pernicious lie that led to so much illness, long Covid, extra governmental expense, economic loss, and excess deaths?

            When governmental health authorities are entrusted to protect the health of the nation and they fail to fulfill that responsibility because they prioritize the conflicting goal of developing new drugs over that of protecting the health and lives of citizens, should there be some accountability? This constitutes a deadly conflict of goals. It is a conflict of interests – the people’s interest in survival and good health, versus the pharmaceutical industry’s interest in greater profits. When pandemics strike, the first goal of government should be to protect life, the people’s health, and national health security. Perhaps that is the job of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), but the leading government spokesperson during the Covid pandemic was Dr Anthony Fauci at the NIH, NIAID – National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. So I will focus my criticism on that direction.

            In this instance we must place the above two conflicting institutional goals on the balance scale of justice. On one hand are the lives of 1.1 million people who died in the first three years of Covid-19 in the US. That must be weighed against the benefits gained from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) new drug discovery program. In this case only one effective but far from ideal drug resulted, Paxlovid. Paxlovid could have been developed without sacrificing the estimated 500,000 excess lives that could have been saved if health authorities had applied basic scientific knowledge and logic to inform people about existing practical therapeutic solutions for Covid. Paxlovid was developed while those half million excess people died because the NIH lied to them, continuously asserting there were no drugs to treat early Covid-19. In fact there were many.

Two classes of known, safe, effective, antiviral, immunomodulating drugs could have been used by individuals and reasonably recommended by their physicians, but Anthony Fauci dissembled and claimed no such drugs existed. The lie that there were no therapies to treat early Covid infection constituted an extreme injustice to the people who were sick, developed long Covid, those who died, and their families. The failure to inform people about the availability of early therapies amounts to criminal, scientific gross negligence. That was beyond just unethical. It could even be considered a crime against humanity. This crime was committed to protect the interests of the so-called private partners of the NIH, the pharmaceutical industry. It protected their interests in developing new, higher priced drugs that would provide the industry greater profits and royalty payments to the NIH and the research principal investigators who work there to develop them. The 500,000 excess deaths from Covid in the US were quietly written off as the expendable opportunity cost for developing Paxlovid and the billions in profits it would generate. Those lives were sacrificed on the altar of higher profits for the public-private partnership formed under the auspices of the NIH. The NIH acted as if this were a zero-sum game. It was not. Those 500,000 innocent people did not have to die just to develop that drug. Their deaths were totally unnecessary and could have been prevented by using simple, off-patent medications that long have been ignored and covered up, much to the detriment of American lives and the national economy.                        

            That caused perhaps the greatest tragedy in American history. However that is not the first time this has happened. Allowing unnecessary excess deaths by ignoring existing, logical therapeutic strategies in order to develop newer therapeutics has become a recurrent theme of NIH sponsored research. The NIH actively ignores a range of off-patent, effective antiviral medications in part to instill in Americans the urgency to develop medications for each new viral disease, no matter the cost. These new drugs are sometimes one thousand times as expensive, yet often no more or sometimes even less effective than the cheaper medicines that go unrecognized as antivirals but are safe and widely available. Frequently newly developed drugs also have much higher side effect profiles. This happened with AZT in AIDS. The NIH also rejected an effective treatment against Ebola in West Africa. Now it happened once more while developing Paxlovid for Covid-19. Paxlovid could easily have been developed while still informing people that other beneficial drugs existed. However by claiming there were no early therapies, the NIH increased pressure for additional emergency funding for drug research. As Anthony Fauci publicly announced in mid-2021, “Give me two billion dollars and I will develop a drug to treat early Covid within six months.” Of course! There already were close to a dozen drugs sitting on the pharmacy shelf that would be more-or-less powerfully effective against early Covid. Fauci was not informing people about those because he wanted to promote novel research that would generate royalties. One way to accomplish that was by covering up other available, effective early therapies. The misinformation campaign claiming there were no early treatments for Covid made people more desperate for anything that would work. Those existing antiviral drugs that were ignored and covered up are called anti-inflammatories. Some anti-inflammatories are steroids that are best used later in disease progression because of the limited time one can use steroids due to their greater side effects. Others are NSAIDs – non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs, many of which can be used from day one of infection. All these drugs reduce both inflammation and viral replication because both inflammation and the rate of viral replication are controlled by the same human protein, nuclear-factor kappaB – NF-kB. If a medicine inhibits the NF-kB cellular protein, it reduces both inflammation and viral replication. Thus, anti-inflammatory drugs also work as antiviral drugs. Scientifically, this is both obvious and indisputable. Why does it remain such a state secret? The coverup and neglect of this simple fact by the NIH contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans from Covid-19 alone. The science is simple but arcane. The politics, economics, and morality of it are tortuously corrupted, convoluted, and deadly dangerous. The NIH should have informed everyone that these safe, well-known FDA approved drugs would probably be beneficial because it was logical that they would be based on well-known science. Patients could have used them from day one of the pandemic to save their lives. However the NIH failed to advise either citizens or the medical profession of that. Because of that tragic failure, one could go so far to say the NIH betrayed their follow Americans – including its taxpayers.     

            This revelation of the existence of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs questions the extremely backwards therapeutic approach the NIH takes to treating viral disease. Its ideological medical research paradigm endangers the health security of all Americans. There are more than a dozen NF-kB inhibitor anti-inflammatory drugs that act as broad-spectrum antiviral drugs that are graduated from only somewhat effective, to extremely effective in reducing viral replication and inflammation. If a drug reduces viral replication, it slows disease progression. That is like taking one’s foot off the gas pedal to slow a car down. The NIH totally ignores this scientifically sound, almost obvious but much less costly approach to antiviral treatment. Now we have witnessed the tragic results of following that one-eye-shut, restricted therapeutic approach to Covid. Unfortunately, the US will suffer even worse unprecedented death tolls once H5N1 influenza eventually jumps the species barrier. Instead of adopting available, low-cost, broad-spectrum antiviral therapies and applying a sensible “first aid” approach to viral infection, the NIH prefers to follow the HIV/AIDS model by withholding immediate solutions so it can develop new specific bespoke drugs from scratch to treat each new emerging virus. This one-track, one-hand-tied-behind-the-back approach to pandemic therapeutic intervention is doomed to catastrophic failure, as we have seen with Covid. This demonstrates the calamity of a new drug development program that prioritizes maximizing pharmaceutical profits above protecting human health, life, and the economy. Big Pharma’s gain of billions in profits results in society’s loss of trillions in extra government expense. The NIH approach focuses solely on developing new expensive medicines instead of also utilizing existing, safe, low-cost, time-tested, effective medications as both early and late therapy. It is the opposite of what a humane approach to serving We the People of the United States should be. It subverts America’s national health security. That is equivalent to allowing a foreign enemy to fully occupy a nation and only after that, starting to fight back. We already have seen the result of that self-defeating strategy – 1.1 million dead of Covid-19 in America. At least half of those lives easily could have been saved by using a combination of selenium and NF-kBIs. Thus the NIH has made the illusionary search for the prefect solution of new antiviral drugs the enemy of the excellent solution that would additionally use existing, effective, broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and then add new drugs when they became available. Considering its several negative aspects, their not quite perfect Paxlovid drug barely reaches the bar to qualify as good. Why did the NIH effort to develop that one new drug block the rational use of a dozen, more practical anti-Covid medications? This reveals a fundamental systemic flaw in the NIH viral public health strategy that eventually will cause millions more deaths in America if it is not fixed. That same problematic research paradigm and coverup once contributed to the deaths of millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Americans with HIV/AIDS. This self-destructive system that results in serial pandemic failure must be corrected. What problems exist with the current strategy based on developing new specific drugs for each new virus?      

One basic problem with the current research strategy is it takes more than two years and a billion dollars to develop a single new antiviral drug. During that development time it is obviously totally unethical to delay or deny providing those who are symptomatic with the benefits of known science, starting from the first day of infection – but that is exactly what happened. Denying early therapy is like denying water to someone who is dying from thirst and dehydration. Just as with some other deadly viral diseases, a close reading of primary source science demonstrates that Covid patients die due to deselenization – the loss of selenium. In a deadly pandemic, treatment delayed is treatment denied. Too frequently that includes a life denied. Is there any remedy for that? Yes. Our nation needs a class action lawsuit for billions of dollars to bring this medical duplicity to light so we can correct this deeply embedded systemic flaw before the next deadly pandemic strikes. That could be at any time and much worse than Covid.    

            A second problem is that when specific effective drugs for a particular virus are finally developed, they are unlikely to have any effect against the next emerging virus, just as Remdesivir, developed for Ebola, showed no benefit against Covid. The NIH strategy is to develop a new specific drug for each new virus instead of taking a two-track approach that includes allowing anyone to use broad-spectrum antiviral “first aid” from the first day of a pandemic or infection. Instead of first using a broad-based pyramid of existing broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and topping that off with new drug discoveries, the NIH strategy ignores the entire existing armamentarium of historic, cheaper antiviral medicines, pretending those do not exist just because no one ever called them antiviral before. Then the NIH celebrates when it finally discovers one limited new drug. This is the story of AZT, de-ja vu all over again. It is scientifically backwards – like looking through the wrong end of a telescope as people drop dead all around, and after developing one new drug pretending to be the prescient savior of all concerned. Urgently saving the lives of those who are infected should be the top priority of health authorities. It should not be the afterthought of a drug discovery program. The NIH should not sponsor misinformation and disinformation campaigns to deceive the American people claiming no therapies exist that can help. That was a self-serving charade. The same words are repeated like a mantra every time a new virus emerges – “There is no treatment. There is no cure.” The first part of that mantra is pure propaganda because relatively effective broad-spectrum antivirals do already exist. They work to a greater or lesser extent against most viruses by inhibiting the replication factor NF-kB, the primary stimulant to viral replication. To deny those drugs exist or minimize their benefit is a deadly scientific malpractice. It borders on criminal because it greatly increased illness and death, and most probably long Covid.              

A third problem with the current limited strategy is that a virus may mutate away from a newly developed  specific drug by becoming resistant to it. Sometimes new specific antiviral drugs may not be effective for long if the virus mutates rapidly. When the next new virus emerges, the search for a new specific drug must start again from scratch. Many antiviral drugs take years to develop and may have unforeseen side effects. It took two years to develop and approve Paxlovid, a limited drug that can only be used for five days and only when symptoms first appear. Many physicians prefer not to prescribe Paxlovid because it is contraindicated to many chronic medications. Some patients do not like it because of its unpleasant side effects. It took fifteen years to develop truly effective therapies for HIV - protease inhibitors. HIV is a “slow” virus, but most viruses are not. Most deadly viruses kill within a matter of weeks. That becomes an almost impossible challenge if authorities refuse to use existing broad-spectrum antivirals as early therapy in the beginning. The NIH’s minutely circumscribed therapeutic pandemic response was self-defeating and a death sentence for hundreds of thousands. 

Who is willing to speak up for those who died due to the NIH misinformation campaign and rejection of the logical application of known science? Should Americans just grin and bear it and move on, waiting for this to happen again, and then again? How many times must health authorities fail citizens miserably before they adopt a dual-track, rational treatment strategy that saves lives from the start? Luckily viruses do not become resistant to NF-kBIs because they work via a cellular mechanism, not by inhibiting a viral enzyme. They are not virus specific. To quote the AIDS activist group ACT UP – Silence [about this problem] Equals Death. The Covid-19 coverup did equal death for far too many. There must be accountability and a bureaucratic redirection before this ends in greater disaster next time.                      

Selenium is equally or even more important than NF-kB inhibitors (NF-kBIs) as therapy for viral disease. Although selenium also acts as an NF-kBI and possesses other antiviral effects such as being a protease inhibitor against SARS-CoV-2, it works more strategically as an immune booster and cellular and organ health restorer than just as a direct inhibitor of viral replication. Selenium has proved to slow viral disease progression but is most dramatically effective later in the severe phase of Covid, Ebola, and HIV disease. Understanding the mechanics of this requires a basic comprehension of cellular biology, immunology, and virology. In terms of viral disease, selenium is the key element that connects those three fields of knowledge and those three viral diseases. 

First, what is selenium? Selenium is an essential trace chemical element found in every cell of the body. It is concentrated in the cells and organs of the immune system. It is the key element required for the immune system to function and is the key nutrient needed to form antioxidants to keep cells healthy. It is the key element needed to increase CD4 cell count and improve immunity. And finally, selenium is the essential element that viruses need to construct the selenoproteins needed to form their outer protective envelope so they can survive when released from the cell into the hostile intercellular environment. That explains why viruses attack the cellular and human selenium supply – to get the essential ingredient they need to protect themselves.   

So what does selenium do? [ref. The importance of selenium to human health, Lancet 2000;356:233-41] Selenium protects the health of cells. It protects the human body by increasing CD4 cell count, thus boosting immune function. And it protects viruses from the oxidative bursts of our own immune system. That is why biologists call selenium the universally protective element. Every living thing needs it – animals, plants, people, cells, bacteria, and many viruses. Viruses that make us sick attack the selenium supply found mostly within cellular antioxidants. They make infected cells sick by destroying their antioxidants to steal their selenium molecules. Viruses eventually deplete the body’s selenium supply causing CD4 immune cell counts to decline, undermining immunity. The eventual dramatic depletion of selenium through rapid viral replication is the key to explaining how deadly viruses kill. But only a few specialist scientists and practically no doctors are fully aware of this because it is not taught in medical school. One must comb the scientific journal literature as I have for over three decades to discover and understand this phenomenon. Putting those various pieces of the scientific puzzle together explains the underlying cause of immune system collapse and death in HIV, Ebola, Covid, and influenza. Although these four viral diseases are quite unique, they all involve the depletion of selenium through viral replication. When enough selenium is depleted, it causes a cytokine storm, sepsis, multi-organ-failure, and death. Not all viruses deplete selenium to this extent, but deadly viruses do when they kill. As one scientist explained, when selenium levels in the body fall 20% below normal, a person develops immune deficiency, as with AIDS. When it falls 30% below normal, a person expires.   

            The fact that two effective classes of medications exist that could have saved people’s lives from Covid-19 but the NIH failed to inform the American public about them was more than unethical. It constituted negligent homicide on a national scale. The NIH had a responsibility to inform people about potential safe and effective therapies, or at least someone in the government should have had the responsibility to tell the public the truth. Why did they fail to suggest this simple way to help save lives and probably reduce the potential of long Covid? The CDC should have known this, but they also sat on this basic scientific knowledge, intellectually immobilized by the professional peer pressure exerted by Big Pharma to remain silent and not recommend reasonable therapeutic interventions in an emergency because that had not been approved by the ultimate authority, Dr Fauci. Failing or even refusing to put two and two together or to inform the public about safe, common-sense potential therapies for viral infection, this logical response to a new viral disease disappeared into the black hole of the health bureaucracy. Both the CDC and NIH failed to fulfill their obligation to the American people to protect them from pandemic disaster. They let the country down. They let people die in ignorance. They ignored basic science and covered up their malfeasance through the silence of professional omerta. It was an undetectable subversion of national health security. For two decades the NIH and CDC have pretended they did not know this rather obscure basic science when I personally know they did or at least they should have. They continued to ignore it as if it did not exist or was not true when Americans needed it most – in a contagious, respiratory, viral pandemic emergency.  

The Big Lie that undergirds this massive crime of omission that allowed hundreds of thousands of extra Americans to die on the altar of new drug development was that there were no therapies for early Covid. In fact, there are many. Although the United States believed it was the most pandemically prepared nation on earth, in the event, it made a miserable mess of its response. That resulted in the highest per capita death toll of any advanced nation. Covid-19 had the highest death toll of any disease in such a short time in American history. It exceeded all battlefield deaths in all the wars the United States has ever fought. That colossal failure was only partly due to a corrupted research paradigm that ignored potential “first aid” treatments using broad-spectrum antivirals plus selenium. The other major factor was vaccine resistance on the part of the public. However, if the health authorities had adopted the tactic of using antiviral first aid with NF-kBIs, plus selenium supplementation, hundreds of thousands of lives easily could have been saved – well over 50% of the 1.1 million who died. What kept everyone so silent about the first aid broad-spectrum antivirals? The omnipresent influence of the pharmaceutical industry, the most profitable industry in the world. Big Pharma influence dominates all health-related industries, especially at the highest professional levels such as at the NIH, CDC, and university medical research departments that are all dependent on pharmaceutical companies for their funding. That includes all the medical expert talking heads on television. With 1,500 paid lobbyists in Washington DC alone, who is more powerful? Is the ACLU willing to speak truth to power to help prevent a recurrence of this recent tragedy in the next pandemic? If someone does not do this, tragic consequences await this nation and the world. When H5N1 finally strikes, the death toll in America should dwarf the losses from Covid. Many people resist vaccines because they no longer trust government health authorities. The failure of the NIH to tell citizens the truth about early therapies to treat viral disease only confirms and reinforces that lack of faith in the national pandemic response system. That is a shame and a foreshadowing of doom.       

 The National Institutes of Health is not about health, it is about new drug development. They focus on that, irrespective of how many people’s lives may be sacrificed by ignoring existing, lower cost strategies. Their pandemic failures include past ignominious research coverups that had monumental consequences. Some may say Covid-19 is over, so why worry? But Covid and viral pandemics are not over. As of April 2023, 1,600 people continue to die of Covid each week in the US. This letter exposes the repetitious modus operandi of a series of pandemic failures driven by an invalid, inhumane, drug research paradigm. Pandemic failure happened previously with HIV. It occurred again with Ebola. Now it has transpired a third time with Covid. This medical fraud also has contributed to the development of and increased burden of long Covid that some scientists believe is triggered, like autoimmune disease, by the sudden loss of selenium. The NIH refuses to think outside the box of its pharmaceutical industry profit-maximizing agenda. It puts the lid on that box to protect its program for new, expensive drug discovery from competition from cheaper, well-known, effective, off-patent medications. They have sacrificed an incalculable number of human lives in their effort to develop new drugs to financially benefit their institute and partners in the pharmaceutical industry. Meanwhile, existing scientific knowledge goes unacknowledged, aggressively ignored, or quietly denied, to protect profits, royalties, and personal and institutional self-interests. The recent epochal death toll is the legacy of those misplaced priorities and deceit.                 

            Ask any physician about broad-spectrum, anti-viral NF-kB inhibitors and you will get a blank stare. They either do not know or will not admit they understand this. They shake their head, turn away and deny or brush it off because 99% of them are not aware of them because those drugs have never been categorized or promoted that way. Doctors have never heard of NF-kBIs. Part of their professional code is not to admit anything has medical benefits that appears to compete directly with patented western medicines to which they hold the gate key on their prescription pads. No pharmaceutical industry representative informs them that off-patent NSAID NF-kBIs work as antiviral drugs. Mostly they have never given it a thought, much less a second thought. That lack of knowledge devolves into a vicious infinity feedback loop of ignorance and denial. However the basic science establishing the critical importance of NF-kB as the primary stimulant to viral replication was discovered in 1986 in the laboratory of Nobel laurate Dr. David Baltimore. To understand the value and importance of NF-kBIs one must only put two, plus two, plus two together. In the case of Covid-19, one physician did put two and two together and thought dexamethasone might help against Covid, although he thought of it as a steroid or an anti-inflammatory, not as an NF-kBI. Dexamethasone is highly effective against Covid and SARS-CoV-2 because it is a powerful NF-kBIs. Doctors consider it a strong steroid anti-inflammatory but fail to recognize its direct antiviral power. Physicians only prescribe dexamethasone after a patient has been hospitalized. People are not told about less powerful NF-kBIs that could have kept them from requiring hospitalization in the first place. Why did the NIH and CDC fail to extend the finding that dexamethasone is effective against Covid, and fail to inform physicians about the other dozen NF-kB inhibitors that work by the same cellular mechanism? Was that institutional incompetence, a coverup, or both? Was it scientific negligence or malpractice by those we trusted at the NIH? Anthony Fauci lied to the American people telling everyone there are no drugs to treat early Covid when there are nearly a dozen drugs that do that. I reminded him of these facts when I personally informed his deputy Dr. Clifford Lane by email in March 2020. Dr Lane acknowledged receiving my communications. Those emails are in my book Understanding Covid-19. The essays I attached to those brief emails are also in that book.

The therapies I outline here should not be considered “alternative” in any way, except as an alternative to the several therapies the NIH initially recommended that did not work, including Remdesivir. NF-kBIs such as NSAIDs represent new uses for old drugs based on the 1986 discovery about how those older drugs work. These are life-saving therapies that cannot be lied away. They could probably have prevented many cases of long Covid – especially selenium could have. Why did the NIH ignore them? As a Roman judge would have asked, “Who benefited?”

Unsurprisingly, early on the NIH suggested that physicians could recommend several expensive, patented medications that turned out to be ineffective against Covid. Those included monoclonal antibodies, Remdesivir, and convalescent plasma. They recommended all the expensive medications that require prescriptions, intravenous IVs, and doctor’s care, but that were not effective. So why did they fail to suggest the many cheaper, off-patent medications that people can use themselves from the first day of infection to boost immunity, reduce viral replication and inflammation, reduce symptoms, slow disease progression, and often prevent hospitalization? It is almost impossible to believe the level of arrogance and reckless disregard it took to do that. Did the scientists at the NIH totally forget the age-old medical adage, early therapy is the best therapy? Although stronger NSAID drugs require prescriptions, less powerful but still effective ones do not. Why did the NIH never mention the essential trace element selenium that connects the disparate aspects of the disease together – from virus, to cell, to immune system collapse, sepsis and death? They should have noticed the research conducted in South Korea that determined that the nutrient that was being most heavily depleted in severe, end-stage Covid was selenium. That was reported in the International Journal of Infectious Disease (2020;100;390-393) in November 2020. It showed that selenium levels fall drastically just before the cytokine storm, sepsis, multi-organ-failure, and death. Those who retain enough selenium live. Those who do not, fail to survive. Or the NIH should have been familiar with earlier research that demonstrates selenium can help reverse sepsis, multi-organ-failure, and usually prevent death. Those medical journal references are also found in the book Understanding Covid-19. While doctors worldwide recognized and desperately tried to remedy the loss of oxygen and hypoxia in Covid, why did they ignore the drastic loss of selenium in the final severe stage of disease and try to remedy that? It would have been exceptionally cheap and easy to do that, but deselenization is not an easily observable symptom. Supplementing adequate selenium alone could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead, the NIH was mum. Consistent with nature, this same severe depletion of selenium occurs in the last two weeks before death from HIV and Ebola. Because this natural phenomenon does not fit the NIH research profit paradigm, they ignore the way nature works. Meanwhile the FDA was blocking a University of Texas study of intravenous selenium against severe Covid for almost two years. Why? The coverup of the use of selenium against viral disease stretches back twenty-five years. How many million Americans must die before this medical research injustice is corrected? Untold millions will die once highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza jumps the species barrier.      

            Dr Fauci lied and deceived the public by telling them there were no early therapies for Covid. That was fraud. At the same time he was asking for two billion dollars in additional governmental funding to develop an early therapy for Covid. That was chutzpah. Together, that takes talent. In the world of scientific coverups, now you see it. Now you don’t. That is why you do not see or hear about selenium. It is the pharmaceutical industry’s greatest fear. That is because as the strongest immune booster, selenium helps against so many other diseases and health conditions although it is not a cure for any of them except for the extreme selenium deficiency that is eventually caused by certain viral infections.     

            Now forget Covid-19 for a moment. What about the next pandemic? How many more will die if United States health authorities do not reverse their approach to treating deadly viral disease? The current one-track, half-blind, greed inspired mis-prioritization by the NIH potentially threatens the life of every American citizen, including you. This creates a gaping hole in homeland pandemic security. Short of nuclear war, this failure by the NIH and CDC represents a far greater threat to more individual American lives than any foreign army or terrorist organization ever has. When have any of those contributed to the death of 500,000 or 1.1 million Americans?       

            Although the current H5N1 variant of avian influenza virus has existed in birds since 1996, it has not yet posed a direct threat to humanity because, although it has at times infected individuals, it has not gained the ability to spread person to person. Recently the media has sounded the alarm that this danger is creeping ever closer because the virus now has infected many mammal species including minks, foxes, racoons, and seals. However that may just be a spillover into individual carnivorous animals that eat wild birds since confirmed mammal-to-mammal transmission has not yet been reported. Nonetheless, with just one or two additional mutations it could gain the ability to transmit between people. If it does, that anticipated contagious respiratory pandemic would ignite immediately. That could occur within the next few years – or maybe not. Many experts suggest that is inevitable eventually. It is only a matter of time. Today it is urgent to inform the medical profession and the public about effective antiviral therapies that can help save lives before the next pandemic strikes. A class action lawsuit can help insure a more rational public health response. There is no time to delay.   

            The deadliest flu pandemic in history, the 1918 Spanish flu killed between fifty and one hundred million people worldwide and 675,000 in the United States. That case mortality rate was two and a half times the mortality rate of Covid-19. More alarmingly, among the more than eight hundred humans the WHO reports who have been infected by H5N1, mostly from domestic fowl over the last twenty-six years, 50% have died. Although theoretically once this highly pathogenic virus becomes acclimated to humans the mortality rate should drop, no one can predict by how much. Given its extremely high mortality rate, the prospect that this could be the next pandemic the world faces is truly alarming. It would be as if Ebola had gone airborne worldwide.

To date the NIH has aggressively ignored both effective broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and an effective preventative measure against both sepsis and pneumonia - selenium. That includes ignoring effective selenium supplementation during the HIV pandemic, the West African Ebola epidemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Those warning signs point to a monumentally disastrous outcome in the next viral pandemic whether it is avian influenza or a new more pathogenic variant of SARS-CoV-2. A well-established pattern of professional gross negligence by health authorities is obvious in the last four decades of serial pandemic failure. Millions of Americans will eventually die if the NIH and CDC continue down the same path, failing to inform the public on how to protect their own health in both early and severe infection. Government health authorities will continue to fail to inform physicians about how they could improve treatment of influenza and other pandemic respiratory viral infections by adding broad-spectrum antivirals and selenium to the current standard of care for that infection. This critical but arcane scientific knowledge that the NIH has repeatedly disregarded is clearly confirmed if one makes the extreme effort to review the primary science articles that report it in medical journals. Just like the NIH’s glib recommendations to use several higher priced therapies that do not work against Covid-19 instead of cheaper ones that do, the NIH and World Health Organization (WHO) are likely to recommend such interventions as Tamiflu for H5N1 influenza. According to medical journals, Tamiflu is mostly ineffective against influenza, even though it was specifically developed and approved for that use. Despite repeated mis-recommendation of drugs that do not work against Covid, the NIH failed to even hint at a suggestion that NF-kB inhibiting broad-spectrum antiviral NSAIDs and steroid drugs would be effective, just as selenium has been proved to be effective against both influenza and influenza-related pneumonia. Why does the NIH recommend high priced drug therapies that usually require a physician’s care and IVs instead of lower priced anti-inflammatory/antiviral drugs that often do not require such care but are more effective? Is it only because of the institutional imperative to promote new drug development, or is it adherence to the Hippocratic Oath “to first do no harm” to the medical profession? Has the NIH now inverted that oath resulting in harm to the American people? Unfortunately, in the hands of conflicted, misfocused, seemingly uncaring top-level professionals, it has been.

Of course one might question the legitimacy of this jeremiad if I were recommending herbs, alternative medicine, chloroquine or ivermectin, but I am not. Instead, I am referring to mainstream, off-patent pharmaceutical drugs – standard Western medicine, plus what scientists writing in medical journals refer to as “the miracle mineral” - selenium. Incompetence, twisted priorities and coverups at the national level are also reflected at the international level in Geneva at the WHO where again the priority of pharmaceutical corporate interests in profits prevail over the people’s interest in life and health security. This reversal in the hierarchy of priorities is a major contributor to why healthcare outcomes in the United States have gradually fallen from the top of international rankings fifty years ago to a middling level today, and toward the bottom regarding Covid-19. A corrupted system yields corrupted results. The NIH cannot change Mother Nature even if it refuses to accept how killer viral diseases work. Viruses kill by depleting selenium – the oil that greases the immune system and that activates antioxidants. After witnessing its miserable performance during the Covid pandemic, one must ask, is the National Institutes of Health an oxymoron?            

            Even if they are not perfect, the backstop against viral pandemics are vaccines. Medical journals reports that flu vaccines are 60-85% effective. Given the current increase in vaccine skepticism in the United States and the time it would take to manufacture, distribute, and administer vaccines, if an H5N1 pandemic eventually occurs, the vaccination rate is unlikely to surpass 50% within the first year of a pandemic. As in 1918, specific strains of flu tend to circulate for two to three years. In most influenza pandemics, most deaths occur among those older than seventy and younger than three – those whose immune systems are weakest. However, in the 1918 H5N1 flu, those in their twenties and thirties suffered the highest mortality rates. Potentially, that could happen again with H5N1.        

            No one can predict how far the 50% mortality rate of H5N1 might drop, or if it will decline at all. It is unlikely to stay at 50% for long, but equally unlikely to plummet as low as the 1% case mortality rate for Covid-19. It could fall to any level. For comparison, the mortality rate of SARS-1 was 9.6%, Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome – MERS - was 34%, and the 1918 H5N1 flu was 2.5%. Regardless, several million Americans will likely die unless the approach to early antiviral therapy, public information and education, and the clinical standard-of-care changes. That is highly unlikely unless there is legal intervention. However, based on a reasonable projection of historic empirical scientific evidence, the intelligent application of the full range of NSAID and steroid anti-inflammatory drugs, plus selenium, should reduce influenza pandemic mortality rates by at least 50% to 70% of what it otherwise would be. A list of these NSAID drugs and their relative strengths as NF-kB inhibitors is found on page 48 of the Dear Bill Gates book.

            Will effective broad-spectrum therapies be ignored and covered up again by the NIH and in turn by the World Health Organization? Yes. Although Anthony Fauci has retired, the NIH will not change its institutional spots. Faucism is still alive. When the next pandemic strikes unexpectedly, the NIH again will fail to inform the public how to use early, first aid, broad-spectrum antiviral therapies to protect their health and in most cases avoid hospitalization, whether it is caused by H5N1 or a new variant corona virus.                 

            There is no more basic human right than the right to life, whether that was delineated as the right to Life, Liberty, and Property, or as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Life always comes first. If the NIH has deserted the American people to side with Big Pharma, who is left to defend the people’s rights to life, health, knowledge about scientific advances, truth about existing antiviral drugs, and the right to communicate that information to the public?

            The ACLU has always defended the rights of the American people, even when it was not popular to do so. In this case that includes the right to be informed of scientific information that can save people’s lives - the right to benefit from advances in science. That specific right to benefit from scientific advances is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. The NIH, CDC and WHO are all violating that right by their failure to inform the public about science first discovered in 1986 that their top scientists knew but disregarded, feigning that they do not know. The US government also should not violate the inalienable right to life and the right to benefit from accurate health information during a viral pandemic crisis. The NIH and CDC are also violating the right to free speech by forcing media and social media companies to suppress any ideas or information that disagree with elements of the NIH/CDC’s scientific doctrine that negates early therapy, no matter how valid and well-grounded in science those additional facts are. That de facto censorship eliminates the free flow of ideas such as this science-based report, and even the ability to advertise my two books. That Orwellian, government originated censorship is un-American. It is one reason you have not heard about selenium but have heard about nutrients that are more commonly known but are not significantly effective against Covid-19 such as vitamins C, D3, and zinc. It seems the less effective something is against Covid, the more likely one is to hear about it. Why? In part that is because the NIH does not inform people about things that are truly beneficial like NF-kBIs and selenium, so people search every nook and cranny of semi- and pseudoscience to find often dangerous alternatives like the poison ivermectin, the NF-kB promoter chloroquine, and unprotective mega-doses of vitamin C.    

Technical science is intimidating for most people. But certain scientific principles are easy enough because they are consistent and logical. Gravity always forces things to fall. Water is always wet unless it is frozen. The correct fuel always provides energy. A person can die due to a deficit of food, water, oxygen, or selenium. All drugs that inhibit the NF-kB protein will reduce both inflammation and viral replication because both are stimulated by activating the same protein. The immune system cannot function without enough selenium. These are simple facts. However when pure science is corrupted by commercial considerations and ignored or covered up by health authorities, that distorts the truth of science and its usefulness for the common good. Then the benefits of scientific advancement for reducing deaths and building a healthier society for all are completely negated. The chapter “The Great AIDS Drug Coverup” in Dear Bill Gates provides the details of previous research coverups that have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands in America and millions in Africa from HIV/AIDS.          

            That is why I would like to request the ACLU to consider filing a class action lawsuit to expose this scientific turpitude and help save millions of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in the approaching and future pandemics. How much does the US spend on defense annually to protect national security? 840 billion.  Unlike the NIH, does the US Department of Defense ever ignore truly effective weapon systems just to heap profits onto military contractors so they can share it back in royalties to the DoD? No. Never. According to the New York Times, the US government spent five trillion dollars to overcome the economic consequences of the Covid pandemic. Then why were American citizens left to fall ill, die, and develop long Covid because top government health officials betrayed the public trust and even increased the continuing burden and expense of long Covid? The NIH and CDC pandemic therapeutic response has amounted to a travesty of science, topped by egregious bureaucratic irresponsibility and misinformation. The ACLU can help prevent that travesty of health security from becoming a travesty of justice that has victimized those who have been damaged and suffered, even unto death, because of the dereliction of duty and the corrupt ideology of inverted priorities pursued by those irresponsible government health officials who lied to the public.

            As an independent, autodidactic AIDS, Ebola, and Covid researcher for over thirty years, I have studied these issues and NF-kB since 1990 and recently wrote two books on pandemics. Understanding Covid-19, How 500,000 American Lives Could Have Been Saved, and Dear Bill Gates, How to End Serial Pandemic Failure, HIV-1 to Covid-19 are available on Amazon.com. During the 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic I was the only person in the world to provide an effective therapy for Ebola to the Liberian Ministry of Health. In a small, quick, informal, Liberian government sponsored clinical trial at the ELWA-2 Ebola clinic in Monrovia, 1.2mg of selenium daily reduced the mortality rate of Ebola by 42.8% [visit winagainstebola.com]. It would have reduced Ebola mortality rates by 65% if the correct 2.0mg daily dose had been used. When that tremendously successful result against Ebola was presented to the NIH representatives in Liberia, they ignored it because of their conflict of interest in developing their own Ebola drugs. Selenium could have produced a similar reduction in mortality against Covid in the US. Yet the NIH refuses to recognize basic science because they and their Big Pharma partners do not benefit financially. They have sold their fellow Americans down the pandemic river without any sense of remorse. They will do it again unless some organization like the ACLU stands up and takes action to hold them accountable.     

            I would consider it an honor to work with the ACLU to try to right this historic, bureaucratic wrong and improve the health security of the American people as we look ahead to protect the nation from the next deadly pandemic challenge. A highly pathogenic avian influenza virus or a new SARS-CoV-2 variant may arrive at any time. To minimize future hospitalizations and deaths we need to correct the endemic institutional malpractice at the NIH and CDC immediately. I humbly offer my assistance, including my thirty-plus years of research on these issues to assist the ACLU to pursue a remedy for this mortal injustice. With your help our nation should Never Again suffer so horribly from such an unjustified dereliction of duty.     

            If possible, I would like to discuss the potential of filing a class action lawsuit against the government on the above issue with an attorney at the ACLU. If the damage to health at Camp Lejeune was judiciable, or the lies from Fox News, how much more significant is this case of withholding knowledge about two proven classes of broad-spectrum antiviral medications that the government should have informed people about that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prevented enormous economic costs and business and personal disruptions?

            The damages are incalculable but based on the enormity of the five trillion spent on Covid economic support alone, it might be $110 Billion - $100,000 for every person – 1.1 million - who died of Covid in the US. Those trillions in government expense will have to be duplicated if H5N1 finally hits. Correcting this deadly mistake now could save trillions next time. A multi-billion-dollar settlement will save the government fifty times that if it forces it to improve pandemic therapeutic preparedness and save lives in the next pandemic. If that amount seems unrealistic, the least that should be sought is ten billion dollars, five times the amount Tony Fauci requested to produce just one drug for early therapy for Covid. This lawsuit will reveal almost ten approved existing drugs of different strengths that are safe and effective for early therapy – a much better value than Fauci’s offer to produce only one new drug.

The qualities of being an anti-inflammatory and an antiviral drug are two sides of the same coin that cannot be separated. These two attributes go hand in hand. For anyone to prove these broad-spectrum drugs are not antivirals, they must prove they are not anti-inflammatories. That is impossible. The science is solid as a rock but largely unrecognized by the medical establishment due to politico-economic factors and self-interest. Technically, NF-kB is a viral “replication factor”. How could health authorities possibly continue to ignore the need to inhibit it? Coverups only benefit the pharmaceutical industry that aims to develop new antiviral drugs for each new disease and does not want existing, broad-spectrum antiviral drugs to be known. That is like the fossil fuel industry not wanting the competing technologies of green energy to be known. The difference is competition among energy sectors did not contribute to the excess deaths of over 500,000 Americans. The NIH and its Big Lie did. (NF-kB and viral infection, The EMBO Journal (2003)22:2252-2500)      

There are numerous minor scientific details I did not have space to elucidate here. Many of those can be gleaned by reading my two books, especially the sections that reference medical journal articles. Obviously, you are unaware of this obscure science, as are most people, including most doctors. However, this is what I have researched for over thirty years, including attending more than fifty-eight AIDS and virology conferences worldwide, reading over 3,000 medical journal articles, and one hundred books on related topics. I know some of the top selenium researchers in the world, so there are plenty of expert witnesses on selenium and scientific back-up for everything mentioned here. The science is published in medical journals but goes unheeded due to the vast power of Big Pharma that has an intense interest in suppressing it to safeguard their excessive profit generation paradigm. That is why this has been repeatedly covered up with HIV, Ebola, and now Covid. While NF-kBIs are not perfect and not “a cure”, they are highly effective, as shown by dexamethasone. Understanding the central role selenium plays is the key to understanding how deadly viral diseases work. Together NF-kBIs plus selenium could have saved the lives of 50% to 70% or more of those who died from Covid-19. If we do not learn from this historic public health mistake, when will we ever learn? But first we must recognize and then highlight the mistake.          

            Although this letter is long, I wanted to lay out most of the major issues that the ACLU needs to consider concerning the scientific and historic basis of this possible class action lawsuit. I look forward to analyzing the potential for adjudication of these crucial issues of the rights to life, health, information, and freedom of scientific speech with someone from the ACLU at your convenience. You may reach me by email or phone as listed on the above letterhead.

            Scientifically yours, 

            Howard Steel Armistead