Sunday, May 29, 2016

AIDS War. Profiteering with PrEP



Abstract _____________________________________________________________________________
America’s AIDS czar for almost 30 years, Dr. Anthony Fauci has promoted and shepherded human experimental research that has exposed HIV negative Third World men and women to toxic chemotherapy, many already health-challenged from lack of clean water, poor sanitation, malnutrition and old diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. The experiments were to demonstrate “Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis” (PrEP) for the anti-viral drug Truvada. Like other nucleoside analogs, Truvada has well-assessed adverse (“side”) effects. Funded with tax dollars and non-profit grants, including tens of millions from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as from the CDC and USAID, studies have accrued to the sole benefit of a politically well- connected U.S. drug corporation, Gilead, the only company to “donate” pills for the clinical trials.
When PrEP was discussed initially in mainstream media, including in a New York Times article published January 22, 2006 (later critically reviewed by independent journalist Liam Scheff), human guinea pigs, almost all impoverished Third World subjects, were already in early phase trials, designed to produce results that would allow Gilead eventually to seek FDA approval for re- purposing its “Viread” but later only its “Truvada” chemotherapy for use by HIV antibody negative Americans, for theoretical protection from a virus proclaimed by the U.S. government in 1984 as a discrete pathogen responsible for the amorphous health condition described since 1982 as “acquired immune deficiency syndrome,” or “AIDS.” Under patent protection until 2021, Truvada remains more profitable for Gilead than Viread, for which a generic can be sold as early as December 2016.
Four main Phase 3 trials were initiated before the FDA approved the only drug studied in all four, Gilead’s Truvada--two with heterosexual Third World women, one with “discordant” (“one negative, one positive”) Third World heterosexual couples, but only one with the original “risk group,”gay men, over 90% of them in the Third World. Two of the heterosexual trials were halted early, when investigators began to see no difference between drugged and placebo cohorts. Reports on the gay male study, iPREX PrEP, and the discordant straight couples trial, Partners PrEP, grossly overstated drug prophylaxis, by using a spurious calculation technique. A valid methodology, dividing sero-conversions in each drug and placebo cohort by cohort size, would have resulted in slight percentage differences between those receiving Truvada and those getting “sugar pills.” [See below full article and summary chart, for a complete explanation.]