Dear Professor Siddhartha Mukherjee,             I fully enjoyed reading your book The Emperor of All Maladies ten years ago when I was in South Africa, and recently bought your new book The Song of the Cell . I am an autodidactic AIDS, Ebola, and Covid researcher who has been HIV+ since 1983 and participated in the MACS AIDS study at UCLA from 1984 until 2015. In 2014 I provided the Liberian Ministry of Health the only medicine that showed a significant benefit against Ebola during the entire 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic. Added to the WHO standard of care for Ebola, 1.2mg of selenium reduced the mortality rate by 42.8% compared to the WHO standard alone.             When I noticed The Song of the Cell at the bookstore, I examined the index to see if it included the subjects I focus on. I looked for NF-kB, selenium, and antioxidants. None of those were mentioned. ...

Dear White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response.             I was infected with HIV in Los Angeles in 1983. After participating in the MACS study at UCLA for many years and then experimenting on myself and noting the effect an NF-kB inhibitor had increasing my CD4 count, in 1990 I became an autodidactic AIDS researcher and eventually attended over fifty-seven AIDS and virology conferences worldwide. In 2014 I provided the Liberian Ministry of Health the only effective therapy for Ebola virus disease discovered during the entire 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic. When Covid first struck I sent several emails from South Africa to Anthony Fauci’s long-term deputy Clifford Lane to remind him how they could save lives from Covid. However, saving people’s lives with existing therapies was not the priority at the NIH. Developing preventative vaccines and new drug development were prioritized because those two routes led ...