Class Action Lawsuit for Wrongful Excess Deaths Due to Covid-19 - Addendum

Dear ACLU Foundation,   

            Based on its review of news coverage of all the events since it was founded in 1843, the Economist magazine rated the Covid-19 pandemic the most intensely reported news event in all that time. Covid-19 had a huge impact on the United States with over 1.1 million deaths within three years. Most of those deaths could have been prevented by using both early and late-stage broad-spectrum antiviral medications that were not used. It is difficult to imagine that the vaunted American health care system with Dr Anthony Fauci at the helm could have made such an enormous mistake to ignore existing effective medicines when the United States was supposed to be the most pandemically prepared nation on earth. Our overconfidence became our downfall. The ancient Jewish admonition that “Pride Goes Before a Fall” could never have been more apt.    

            When effective ways to treat viral disease were ignored and covered up in HIV research, and then again in Ebola research, what should one expect from those same government officials and institutions when Covid struck? When the death toll from Covid gradually exceeded one million, the number of lives that could have been saved by using broad-spectrum antiviral therapeutics far exceeded the 200,000 American lives that many predicted might die at the beginning of the pandemic. 90% of experts now predict the H5N1 avian flu will eventually jump the species barrier. However no one can predict what month or year that might happen, or if it will continue to kill 50% of those it infects as it has in the past, or how much or how soon its mortality rate will fall once it begins spreading human-to-human like an aerosolized Ebola. Thus, the class action lawsuit proposed in my attached letter is not just about money or the human right to life and the right to benefit from scientific advancements, it is about saving people’s lives from the onslaught of the next viral pandemic in the near or midterm future. Everyone is at risk. The coverup and ignorance about effective broad spectrum antiviral therapies must end.    

            A week before Christmas 2019 at the International Conference on AIDS and STDs in Africa (ICASA) in Kigali, Rwanda, I personally handed Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization a packet of information about how selenium could help against HIV and other viral infections. He accepted my packet of scientific documents, but his advisors evidently told him to ignore them. At that exact moment the SARS-CoV-2 virus was circulating at the Wuhan Seafood Wet Animal Market, ready to ignite the worst viral pandemic the world has seen since 1920. Ignoring science does not benefit humanity no matter how comforting the rhetoric one may espouse about improving health, fighting disease, and making this a healthier world for all.    

            For three decades I have been a serious campaigner for the rights of people in Africa and worldwide with HIV and other viral diseases to have access to affordable, effective therapies. In 2014 I was the only person in the world to provide an effective therapy for Ebola. But one person with science politely raging against the machine of the pharmaceutical industrial complex (PIC) is not an equal contest. By lying and withholding common sense therapies that could have saved lives, the NIH allowed Covid to devour the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Isn’t it time for someone to stand up for the people’s right to benefit from the advances of science, a right guaranteed to all in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? If we do not stand up for those rights now, when will we? That is why I ask the ACLU to help. If this issue is not worth a class action lawsuit, what is?

            It seems impossible to believe our own American government allowed this to happen. Why would they not inform people about science that could save people’s lives? This reflects a global-sized conflict of interest where the interest of the PIC rules and individual’s lives do not matter. It was obvious during this pandemic that pursuing money, greed, and excess profits makes the world go round. Everyone else be damned. Who cares about people’s inalienable or constitutional rights when profits are at stake? Will the ACLU act to right this global wrong.?”

            Anthony Fauci polished his skill set during the 1980s AIDS Crisis. The NIH focused on developing high-cost, high side effect, low benefit reverse transcriptase inhibitors (RTIs) just as the mechanism of lower cost, lower side effect, existing drugs based on inhibiting NF-kB (NF-kBIs) was discovered in 1986. But initially, no one realized how to apply that new science, neither AIDS activists nor the medical profession. In 1990 an NF-kBI, 5-ASA, was shown to be effective against HIV. Then it was totally ignored. Between 1991 and 1996, when life-saving  protease inhibitors first came on-line, the lives of tens of thousands of people living with HIV in the US could have been saved by adding NF-kBIs to RTI drugs. Instead, research on NF-kBIs was ignored by the NIH because the PIC needed to make money and did not want competition for RTIs from cheaper NF-kBI drugs. They did not care about saving lives. America finally paid the price for those research oversights with Covid-19.

            In 2014, after I explained to the Liberian Ministry of Health (MoH) how selenium could probably help against Ebola and sent them the background science showing how selenium had helped reduce the mortality rates of other hemorrhagic fever viruses, they called me to come to Monrovia immediately to test selenium. After their Doctor Jerry Brown showed 1.2mg of selenium daily could reduce Ebola mortality rates by at least 42.8%, the MoH ordered one bottle of selenium for every Ebola patient they had. But when Dr Brown showed those spectacularly positive results to the US NIH in Liberia, the Americans ignored it. They were not interested because they wanted to test their own potential Ebola drugs in the future. So instead of saving lives during the 2014-2016 West African Ebola crisis at the cost of approximately $14 for each additional life saved, the NIH waited three years until the next Ebola epidemic broke out in Kivu Province, Eastern Congo to test Remdesivir, a drug that requires intravenous administration and can save lives for approximately $1,000 or more for each additional life saved. Who cared that the lives lost in 2014 were only West Africans until that coverup contributed to the lack of learning that ended with the loss of 1.1 American lives starting six years later in 2020. One research coverup led to another, and then another. Pride Goes Before a Fall.

            In the past the ACLU has achieved great progress for American society, but few things are more fundamental than standing up for the right to life against those who place economic greed above that most basic human right and the right to know how to protect one’s own life. For those who are unfamiliar with the science of NF-kBIs and selenium, this may seem highly technical. However it is no more complex than understanding how to control a thermostat, turning down the viral heat by inhibiting NF-KB. A person cannot survive if a virus depletes too much selenium from the body, just as they cannot when too much water or oxygen are lost.

            Tony Fauci’s and the NIH’s response to the Covid-19 crisis has included one of the biggest, most dangerous coverups and denials of human rights in American history. The NIH failed to protect the people because they refused to learn from their own scientific research coverups of HIV in 1990 and Ebola in 2014. The NIH covered up science once, then covered up science twice. Finally they covered it up a third time and 1.1 million Americans died. I was there each time, investigating, researching, and warning. Now I am pleading for the ACLU to file a class action lawsuit that will expose and end this research coverup that has cost too many lives in the recent past. I plead for Truth, Justice, and compensation. We need to recognize the knowledge that was lost so that when H5N1 finally explodes we will not end up with twenty million dead Americans. The world has entered the Pandemic Age. We need to end serial viral pandemic failure before it escalates exponentially. We will rue the day if we do not act now. The NIH wanted to build a new high-cost road to effective therapy, while denying that the parallel low-cost road already exists. We need to use both roads to get to the promised land of national health security.          

            One year ago I returned to the United States after twenty years in Africa because I saw 15,000 Americans dying from Covid each week. More were dying in one month from Covid than American soldiers died in the entire twelve years of the Viet Nam War. If Covid had been a military war instead of a health war, General Tony Fauci would have been fired or charged with treason. Although he is not entirely responsible, he is primarily responsible. Yet I hold no personal animosity. I just know we need to expose this scientific coverup for what it is and prevent it from ever happening again. Too many lives were needlessly lost. We can never allow that to happen again.             

            Please contact me to discuss the possibility of filing a class action lawsuit to compensate those families who have lost loved ones due to the failure of US health authorities to protect the health of the American people.

Scientifically yours,

Howard Steel Armistead