New York Times Science Reporter Interview of Anthony Fauci

Dear Mr. Wallace-Wells,

            Your April 24th interview in the New York Times Magazine with Dr Anthony Fauci about what went wrong during the Covid-19 pandemic was enlightening. Although you tried to pin the tail on the donkey with questions such as “What went wrong?”, “What could we do better next time?”, and “What reforms are needed for pandemic preparedness?”, you were blind to the unrecognized but essential questions. Why were there no early therapies to treat Covid-19? Why did it take almost two years before there was any effective, early treatment for Covid-19? Why wasn’t there something available from day one to treat this viral disease? The fact that a whole class of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs exist that can treat most viral infections appears beyond the scope of knowledge of both Tony Fauci and you. You should not be expected to know that. Dr Fauci should. After all, I first handed him information about NF-kappaB inhibitors against HIV at the Yokohama AIDS Conference in July 1994. I suppose he must have ignored that then and has continued to ignore it for decades, despite my repeated attempts over the years to bring it to his attention, including in my several emails at the beginning of the current pandemic in March 2020 to his deputy at NIAID, Dr Clifford Lane. Perhaps Fauci was too busy to consider this bit of science – how viruses replicate. Obviously, many people were much too busy to consider medications that could have saved over half a million American lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. That was the origin of a genuine lack of therapeutic preparedness. That critical part of unpreparedness remains for the next pandemic. Why?

            What is NF-kB? It is a replication factor. The NF-kB protein is the impulse or signal that stimulates replication in a cell’s nucleus of both cellular and viral proteins. When viruses infect cells, they release this replication stimulant to increase production of the proteins they need to construct new viruses. The NF-kB protein not only controls the rate of viral replication, it also controls the intensity of inflammation. Drugs that inhibit NF-kB reduce both inflammation and viral replication. Luckily, many commonly available medicines, with a wide range of strengths, do this. They are called anti-inflammatory drugs. Those anti-inflammatory drugs are therefore also antiviral drugs, although no one calls them that because few recognize that aspect of their pharmacologic action. Did Tony Fauci know this? He should have. I have been trying to get him to pay attention to this particular bit of science for decades. But instead of following the science, he ignores this very basic cell biology. Why? It is not profitable. I might be wrong, but that is the only conclusion I can draw. Doctors used one strong NF-kB inhibitor against Covid, dexamethasone, but only after people were hospitalized. Why did they fail to use the other dozen steroid and non-steroid NF-kB inhibitors – NF-kBIs – to prevent people from needing to be hospitalized?  

            Dr Fauci also failed to use selenium. As he says in your article, “Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was.” The biggest thing that went wrong is he ignored not only a whole class of broad-spectrum, anti-viral, NF-kBI drugs, but also failed to consider a key understanding about how many viruses kill people. Many viruses kill people by genetically encoding and draining cells, organs, and the body of their reserves of the essential trace element selenium, the key element required for both cellular health and powering the immune system. When Fauci totally ignored two classes of antiviral and immune boosting medications in a deadly viral pandemic like Covid-19, something clearly was bound to go wrong. You rhetorically asked, “even if it wasn’t always easy to know at the time or identify later who exactly was responsible.” I hate to point fingers, but serial pandemic failures with HIV, Ebola, and Covid-19 all revert back to Dr Fauci. The buck stops with him. He was the paramount director of the national pandemic response.   

            So this was the invisible elephant in the middle of the pandemic war-room. It was not just any old elephant. It was invisible because stubbornly, no one recognized or talked about it. Like the three monkeys carved into the Shinto shrine at Nikko, across from the Shogun’s Palace in Japan, it was “see no selenium or NF-kBIs, speak no selenium or NF-kBIs, and hear no selenium or NF-kBIs”. The silence was deafening. It was the perfect coverup – and has been since at least 1990. Ignoring the above basic science paves the misinformation superhighway to failure in the next pandemic that is not twenty-five years down the road, perhaps not even twenty-five months down the road. Serial pandemic failure will haunt this nation and the world until someone pulls their scientific ostrich head out of the sand, looks at the periodic table of elements and appreciates selenium for what it is. Biologists call it, “the universally protective element”. I call selenium the key to cellular health and adequate immune function. How can it be that we know that people cannot live without enough oxygen or water, but no one recognizes we cannot live without enough selenium? Selenium is the essential fuel for the immune system. Just like with water or oxygen, if a person loses 30% of their selenium supply, the immune system collapses and they die. Replace those in time and people survive. It is just too simple, isn’t it? But it is difficult to ask people questions if they have practiced how not to see, hear, nor mention selenium or NF-kBIs for the last thirty years. These existing off-patent medications are not money spinners, so they must keep the world ignorant of them. They must believe that what we do not see, hear, or speak about will not hurt people. That is until a pandemic carries more than a million away.     

            Instead of a word salad, let me create a phrase salad from your interview with Dr Fauci. First allow me to list sentence fragments from your interview questions. David Wallace-Wells: “barely half of Americans said they trusted the country’s public-health institutions to manage a future pandemic” “there were mistakes and missteps” “What went wrong?” “was it vanity to believe…that we had the tools we needed” “you need to act early to stop exponential growth, and that earlier interventions are much more effective than later interventions.” “And what could we do better next time?” “What reforms are needed?”       

            Now a phrase salad from Dr Anthony Fauci’s answers: “Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was.” “what’s the cost-benefit balance” “there were gaps and inadequacies in preparedness” “we’re going to get screwed no matter what happens in the next one” “the emphasis strictly on the science and public health – that is what public-health people should do.” “we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.” “We were not fully appreciative…we were dealing with a highly, highly transmissible virus” “Then you look at what we didn’t do so well.” “[CDC] had a culture that was an academic culture, in which we don’t say anything until we’ve essentially written the manuscript and it goes out and it’s being published” “we just need a commitment to science…spending $5 billion… for vaccines is great.” The next pandemic may be 25 years from now.” “when there are people pushing back at you…there always appears to be a kernel of truth – maybe a small kernel of truth or a big segment of truth” “we need to reach out now and find out what exactly was it that made them push back.”

            Let me respond to your phrase salad of questions first. The answer to almost all your questions could be boiled down to the need to use both early and late therapy in the form of NF-kB inhibitors and selenium. Between 50% and 75% of all deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic could have been averted if the medical community had known how to use those two types of medicines against viral infection. The failure of the NIH and CDC to apply that basic scientific knowledge is both reprehensible and a dereliction of duty. These effective, broad spectrum, antiviral drugs of varying strengths could have been combined with other medications and made a world of difference, but they were totally ignored because the NIH focused on new drug development instead of saving American lives. When Anthony Fauci repeatedly informed the medical community and the American people that no drugs existed to treat early disease it was a propagandistic lie that benefited only the American pharmaceutical industry and the NIH, to the exclusion of everyone else. Selenium and NF-kBIs were the tools we needed to save lives, but the public health authorities incompetently failed to use them. While it might have been impossible to act early to prevent exponential growth of the pandemic itself, it was possible to treat early to prevent exponential growth of the virus in each infected individual. Early therapy is the best therapy is a basic principle of medical care. We failed to apply that simple rule. Yes, the national and global response to Covid-19 constituted a catastrophic failure. We must not repeat that. We cannot fail again to apply basic science and fail to use safe, effective, available drugs to slow viral disease progression in each person who is infected from the start. We must replace the selenium that the virus is depleting from our cells and immune system. Just like hypoxia and severe dehydration, deselenization kills. Prevent and treat that severe loss of selenium and most lives will be saved.

            Now my reply to Dr Fauci’s responses – a little pushback – a gigantic segment of truth.           

            What went wrong with the pandemic response is that the NIH focused on new drug development instead of focusing on saving people’s lives. They did that because they have a far too narrow view of drug therapy, ignoring older off-patent medicines, plus the NIH eventually receives a percentage of profits from the drugs and vaccines it helps develop. The NIH and CDC failed to use all the tools in their pharmaceutical tool kit because they are prejudiced against off-patent medications. There were over a dozen steroid and non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs that also work as antiviral drugs. Incredibly, they failed to put two plus two together to use those drugs. Likewise they ignored research that was reported by South Korean scientists in the November 2020 edition of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases (100:390-393), that in severe Covid, selenium is rapidly depleted towards the end of life. Those who can maintain selenium levels live. Those who cannot, die. Selenium replacement therapy alone could have saved 40% to 50% of those who died, but they failed to use it. The exact same severe selenium depletion phenomenon occurs in advanced AIDS and Ebola. However, if top scientists ignore that fundamental aspect of terminal stage disease in other viral diseases, why should they suddenly recognize it and try to remedy it in Covid-19 or the next highly pathogenic influenza pandemic?   

            The cost-benefit analysis of this public health failure demonstrates astronomical damage to the American economy and personal, business, and family finances. In the end it cost the American taxpayer trillions, and families billions in medical costs. If cheap, effective, safe, and available early therapy had been used, expensive hospitalizations could have been cut in half. Using the many broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, both NSAIDs and steroids, would have slowed disease progression allowing the immune system to catch up and gain better control of the infection. Adding selenium would have boosted the immune system’s ability to produce more effective, more plentiful bespoke antibodies than vaccines could provide. What bigger gap or inadequacies can there be than failing to realize that more than a dozen effective antiviral drugs exist? Instead the NIH tells the medical profession and public that no drugs existed for early therapy. Why did they disassemble? Or was it shear incompetence?

            Dr Fauci said, “we’re going to get screwed no matter what happens in the next one.” Well, to paraphrase President George Bush Jr., screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice…eh…well, you better not try to screw me twice. Yes Dr Fauci, you did screw America and perhaps the world on Covid-19. You really screwed up badly. But institutions are supposed to learn from their mistakes. Will the NIH and CDC learn about NF-kB inhibitors, selenium, and early antiviral therapy in time for the anticipated devastating H5N1 highly pathogenic influenza pandemic? If they refused to learn these same lessons based on basic science and the principle of cause and effect from the HIV and Ebola epi-pandemics, why should anyone expect them to learn them from Covid-19? Serial pandemic failure to learn is a hard habit to break, but it is not impossible. However, as long as the NIH prioritizes pharmaceutical profits above people’s lives, every American citizen is endangered – or screwed.

            Yes, the emphasis should have been on public health and the science, but it was not. Dr Fauci, the NIH and the CDC all focused on new drug development at the expense of available, affordable, broad-spectrum, antiviral NF-kBI therapies, early therapies, preventing hospitalizations, and saving lives. They did not look at it from a strictly public-health standpoint. Fauci looked at it from promoting the financial well-being of the NIH and their strategic partners in the pharmaceutical industry and dusted off the standard propaganda slogans, “There is no treatment, there is no cure.” The exact same words were used with Ebola in 2014 and HIV in 1981. Then the hogs from George Orwell’s Animal Farm were unleased chanting the chorus, “New drugs good, old drugs bad. Too bad we do not have any new drugs yet. We just have to wait.” When doctors reported benefits from using cheap, safe NSAIDs against HIV in the 1980s, they were ignored in favor of hyper-expensive, not very effective, toxic AZT.

            When Dr Fauci states, “We were not fully appreciative…we were dealing with a highly, highly transmissible virus”, I think he protests too much. Who would ever discount a new respiratory SARS corona virus when SARS-1 had a mortality rate close to 10%, and the much less transmissible corona virus that causes MERS has a mortality rate of 37%? In January 2020 the Chinese CDC already had warned SARS-CoV-2 was highly transmissible. This was known from the beginning.

            Again, Fauci seems a bit disingenuous when he says, “we just need a commitment to science…spending $5 billion…for vaccines is great.” Everyone should recognize that the NIH is a welfare agency for the pharmaceutical industry, but five billion dollars for vaccine development is absurd. How many billions did the pharmaceutical industry make from Covid-19 vaccines? Due to new technology platforms, the Pfizer RNA vaccine only took forty-three days to develop. There are already vaccines developed using the genetic sequences for the deadly H5N1 influenza virus. It would be nice if the NIH had a real commitment to science because then they might recognize all the safe and effective NF-kBI drugs that currently exist instead of trying to confuse the medical profession and the American people into believing that early drugs to treat viral diseases do not already exist. “Science” should not be used as a smoke screen for the welfare of Big Pharma. It should be used to save the lives of Norm and Norma Taxpayer from Everytown, USA. How about a grant of five billion dollars to just think outside the box of high-priced drug development for a change? Selenium and NF-kBIs are low hanging fruit – already approved and proven safe. Why are they continually ignored? Doctors used dexamethasone. Why not the rest of those drugs?

            Yes, the next pandemic may be twenty-five years from now, but it is more likely closer to twenty-five months from now, or sooner. The Earth is heating up. So is the frequency of pandemics. H5N1 “highly pathogenic” influenza is in the process of jumping the species barrier and could start spreading from mammal to mammal and then human to human at any time. According to the WHO, H5N1 has jumped directly from birds into humans over seven hundred times with a 50% mortality rate to date. One or two more mutations and this disease will be upon us. I have enclosed a letter I have written to Congress concerning this impending influenza catastrophe, so I will not go into detail here, but Dr Fauci should know we are not twenty-five years away from our next pandemic. Why minimize the danger?   

            When Dr Jerry Brown, Time Magazine’s 2014 Person of the Year, reported the results of our informal clinical trial of selenium against Ebola virus disease to the NIH representative in Monrovia, Liberia, he received a lot of pushback. Organized with the help of the Liberian Ministry of Health, this small trial showed that just 1.2mg of selenium daily reduced the mortality rate of Ebola by 42.8% (winagainstebola.com). However the NIH was totally uninterested. They had bigger fish to fry including the future trial of their own high-priced anti-Ebola drug they tested two years later in Kivu, Eastern Congo. They did not care that we could have saved 42.8% more of the people who died of Ebola in West Africa. New drug development always demands priority, and cutting out any possible competition is a priority. If the NIH had learned the lesson of selenium in 2014, or with HIV in 1997, or with NF-kBIs in 1990, we would not have lost so many Americans to Covid-19 between 2020 and 2023. The question is, is it possible for the NIH to learn lessons from its mistakes? Is America doomed to have its public health authorities repeat the same old mistakes causing serial pandemic failure from here to eternity? How many more millions need to die?  

            What is the solution? On December 18, 2019, I chatted for several minutes with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization at the Kigali, Rwanda Conference Center. He had just finished speaking at the International Conference on AIDS and STDs in Africa – ICASA. At that exact moment the SARS-CoV-2 virus was circulating in the Wuhan Seafood and Wet Animal Market, waiting to explode. Mr. Ghebreyesus took my dossier of scientific papers that detail how selenium could help against HIV and other viral infections and laid it on the long table in the WHO conference room along with the many dossiers I had passed out to other members of the WHO team. Selenium was of no importance, most of his advisors would have counselled him. Perhaps it is pseudoscience. That is how real science gets disregarded by a positive feedback loop of ignorance, disinformation, and self-interest. To protect their Big Pharma patrons, advisors who had been on their payrolls told him my information about selenium is not true, so it is not worth examining, despite dozens of medical journal articles reporting how selenium helps against viral diseases. The WHO funders in the pharmaceutical industry and their allies in the Gates Foundation frown on competition from effective off-patent medicines. It is best to bury this, they must have advised. No one will notice. One month later the Chinese CDC announced Covid-19.

            Should we call this a crime against humanity, or is that too brutal a truth? The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Right states people have the right to benefit from advances in science. Are they receiving that benefit? Or is that science hidden behind a curtain of five-billion-dollar subsidies to Big Pharma?                                   

            I have enclosed two self-published books, 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. The scientific references and journal excerpts in those books fully support the science I refer to in this letter. I have also enclosed a letter I have written to Congress concerning the impending threat of a potential H5N1 pandemic.   

            It is easy to miss the invisible elephant of safe, available, effective, broad-spectrum, antiviral, NSAID, steroid, and selenium therapies that were ignored during the Covid-19 crisis. But why do we continue to do that at the expense of neighbors, family, friends, and society? Someday someone must wake up and recognize the deselenization that is the ultimate cause of viral disease mortality. Once that happens, we can put an end to serial pandemic failure.

            Some newspaper should investigate this issue more thoroughly for the benefit of the American people and the world.

            Scientifically yours,

            Howard S. Armistead