For those who don’t like to click links, here’s the letter from the article. PWA’s are “People With AIDS”

“Anthony Fauci, you are a murderer and should not be the guest of honor at any event that reflects on the past decade of the AIDS crisis. Your refusal to hear the screams of AIDS activists early in the crisis resulted in the deaths of thousands of Queers. Your present inaction is causing today’s increase in HIV infection outside of the Queer community.

We are outraged that Project Inform, an organization that supposedly works on behalf of the infected community, would insult us by bringing you to our city. You can’t hide the fact that you are nothing but a despicable Reagan-era holdover and drug company mouthpiece. With 270,000 dead from AIDS and millions more infected with HIV, you should not be honored at a dinner. You should be put before a firing squad.

Clinical trials: government sanctioned mass murder of PWAs. Anthony Fauci, you are a murderer because you oversee government sponsored clinical trials that test and retest combinations of immunosuppressive, toxictherapies that kill people with HIV. The majority of U.S. clinical trials involve worthless antivirals like AZT combined with some other drug (generally another toxic antiviral). What these tests have proven is that you are able to piss away billions of dollars testing dangerous compounds that DO NOTHING to improve the quality of life, to stop opportunistic infections or to extend survival for people with HIV. AZT, 3TC, ddI, ddC, d4T and the current crop of protease inhibitors are nothing but poison. Ten years of the plague has shown us that trying to kill the virus kills people with AIDS, and you, Dr. Fauci, know it.

How long will it take you to start focusing on the immune system, how to boost it and how to prevent the opportunistic infections that are killing people with AIDS? Even you admit that “the immune response against HIV is extremely powerful and is clearly more effective than any of the therapeutic approaches currently available in controlling virus replication.” Still , you give your blessing to clinical trials of highly profitable toxins that destroy PWAs’ already compromised immune systems. CD4s and viral load: a marketing exec’s wet dream.

Anthony Fauci, you are a liar because you have known for years that CD4 counts are a travesty of a surrogate marker that, through drug company coercion, have been elevated to the status of “a standard.” Now that everyone else knows it too, you and your corporate drug company cronies are urging researchers to foist another useless marker, peripheral blood viral load counts, on our frightened, desperate community. Peripheral blood viral load fluctuates in blood circulation and offers virtually no indication of the health or disease progression in HIV+ people.

According to a recent article in the April 1995 issue of Lancet concerning viral replication, “the principle that virus suppression will produce a major clinical benefit must remain an article of faith.” Information like that isn’t stopping doctors of death like Marcus Conant from insisting that “patients should be treated earlier with combination therapy, and we should be using markers such as PCR and branched DNA to measure viral load as surrogate markers in clinical trials.”

Your scheme isn’t too difficult to figure out; promote another invalid surrogate marker that has no relation to health or life expectancy of PWAs; develop a test that costs $200-$300 to measure this invalid marker; encourage the creation of more deadly drugs that effect this invalid marker; and then compare the pathetic results you get from these deadly drugs to the more pathetic results you got from AZT and other nukes. In the eyes of the government everybody wins. Companies that sell drugs and market tests get rich and PWAs who sacrifice their bodies in your trials of death are eliminated from the face of the earth.

The fact that your clinical trials aren’t meant to save our lives is no secret. A December 1994 BETA article “A Remarkable Combination: AZT plus 3TC” reports that the Phase II/III studies of these drugs were “designed to evaluate the effect of the combination on laboratory markers of HIV disease progression, such as viral load and CD4 counts, not critical endpoints, such as opportunistic infections and survival.” AIDS activists from ACT UP San Francisco and DNCB Now! have been screaming for over a year that HIV+ people need to activate their cell mediated immunity and raise their CD8 counts. These activists were invited to the NIH to present a forum and share their knowledge and experience with researchers. Finally some researchers are coming around and hearing our voices. Doctors like Susan Buchbinder who in the August 1994 issue of AIDS stated that “elevated levels of CD8 cells in healthy long-term HIV+ individuals suggest that these cells play an important role in delaying disease progression.”

Because of your 1995 Annual Review of Immunology article we know that you know this, Dr. Fauci, but still you prattle on about those CD4s that tell us nothing at all. Selling out: from “Murderer” to “Tony”. One thing that 10 years of the plague has taught us is how easily people and organizations can be bought off. You are one of those people, Dr. Fauci. Project Inform is one of those organizations. During this time of crisis you are complacent; part of a government bureaucracy that values thriving pharmaceutical company entrepreneurism over the health of people with HIV. You are a pill-pushing pimp that cooperates with drug companies in forcing dangerous concoctions down the throats of a desperate community that is brainwashed into believing that taking a pill, any pill, will help them. AIDS drugs are not sold to help people, they are sold to make a profit. The situation is so out of control that drug companies now create and sell drugs like Marinol, a synthetic derivative of the natural compound marijuana.

The conflict of interest, so apparent between you and the pharmaceutical corporations, has now been embraced by those in the AIDS community who claim that they are leaders. In their present state, organizations like Project Inform, San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and ACT UP Golden Gate are all so embroiled in conflict of interest that they must be viewed as enemies by PWAs. Project Inform is still pushing AZT. San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s BETA reads like a promo piece for Glaxo. And many of today’s so-called AIDS activists are nothing more than public relations representatives whose job it is to create a demand for the latest overpriced cure du jour.

In the meantime, grassroots efforts like the AIDS Cure Act are assailed by these sellout AIDS organizations that have no desire to ever see a cure.

Ten years of hope? Fuck that. Try a decade of death and greed.

Go back to Washington you bastard.”