The Public Policy /Another AIDS Scam
ByronYork & Johns, Joe
In the next few months the govern/ ment's AIDS bureaucracy will spend millions of dollars to test a drug most experts say is useless against AIDS. Just last year, the Department of Health and...
...There was tepid applause...
...That came in October, at the conference the government had asked the NMA to set up...
...Have the data analyzed by the African-American community," he said, "because even if you get highly qualified white people doing it, the African-American community would be skeptical about that, and I can understand that...
...But now, praise God, I have some...
...In April of last year, the U.S...
...Louis Stokes of Ohio, and actor Robert Guillaume, whose son had died of AIDS...
...Byron York is a producer, and Joe Johns a reporter, at WRC-TV News in Washington...
...government's AIDS Research Advisory Committee (ARAC) published its own report, in which it summarized thirteen studies done around the world by saying that Kemron was not effective, and that "low-dose oral interferon alpha in its various forms, including Kemron, is not recommended at this time for treatment of persons with HIV infection...
...He is greater than you...
...Fauci shared the panel with representatives from the NMA, the U.S...
...Fauci, you want data, this is data...
...f government doctors needed any / more evidence that Kemron had become a hot-button issue in parts of the black community, they got it the next month, when Dr...
...George Counts, head of the Clinical Research Management Branch in the Division of AIDS at the NIH' s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), says intense negative reaction from the black community to the April ARAC report caused government doctors to take a second look at testing...
...George Counts will not comment on what the whole effort might cost, but large national trials usually run into the millions of dollars...
...Anthony Fauci, head of NIAID and the government's chief AIDS fighter, appeared in a panel discussion arranged by the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust...
...Fauci was reduced to insisting again that he had no personal opinion one way or the other about low-dose alpha interferon...
...Davey Koech of the Kenya Medical Research Institute wrote that he had tested the drug on two groups of AIDS patients...
...Muhammad had often spoken of replicating the Kenyan results, and used words like "miracle" to describe high CD4 counts and HIV-negative conversion...
...He ain't got one patient that he's saved, yet he turns arrogantly away from a couple of niggers...
...Muhammad started talking about genocide," says one participant...
...said a man who called himself Minister D.C...
...Muhammad demanded the government fund large-scale testing...
...Can alpha interferon make you feel any worse...
...There's a considerable amount of controversy in this area," he said, "[the belief] that it's effective and not being recognized...
...It was a public health issue...
...The government's change of mind came not as a result of new studies but after an intense campaign of racial politics directed by the Nation of Islam—with an assist from the country's largest black medical association...
...The federal government has done the same thing when other unproven (and ultimately ineffective) drugs—dextran sulfate and AL-721 for AIDS, laetrile for cancer—attracted public attention...
...We felt the need to step in," he says...
...Last August, Muhammad told an audience at Howard University that when he and Dr...
...No, I have not seen any sero-deconversions," she said, "but I have seen the majority of my patients who were symptomatic become asymptomatic or nearly asymptomatic...
...The NMA was a voice that NIH would listen to, and the opinions of black physicians proved to be the critical element in the decision to approve testing...
...Barbara Justice, who runs the Abundant Life Clinic in New York, testified at aby Byron York and Joe Johns congressional hearing, a top NIH scientist—whom he would not name—ignored them both...
...Guillaume addressed Fauci: "At the risk of sounding like a troublemaker, I would like to ask who has AZT helped...
...The message did not convince this country's leading proponent of low-dose alpha interferon, Dr...
...I had cancer...
...The NMA invited Muhammad and Justice to speak at its convention in San Francisco last August...
...I would strongly recommend that he and his procedures be scrutinized, okay...
...The Capitol Hill meeting room was crowded with community activists...
...It was a closed-door session at Washington's Omni Shoreham Hotel...
...The only comment I could make," Fauci said, "is that if the data is available to scrutinize, we need to use the scientific method...
...Muhammad accused the white-owned media of ignoring his message, and kept his campaign alive in the Final Call and other African-American newspapers...
...She called for "an investigation of biological warfare experimentation in the laboratories...
...The racial pressures on NIH were such that the government decided essentially to turn the issue over to the black doctors...
...But it soon became clear that it wasn't enough...
...He now said that low-dose alpha interferon simply made his patients feel better...
...They agreed to help, and passed a resolution calling for government tests...
...Killen now says that after several months of outside activism and calls for testing, many researchers felt they should test low-dose alpha interferon not because it seemed to work, but because so many people seemed to think it did, and were forsaking other proven therapies to try it...
...Other AIDS experts agree with that assessment, and the same opinion prevails among government scientists.$10,000 a year for the stuff, and it's killing people, whereas we do have an effective treatment for AIDS, low-dose alpha interferon, but because it came from black folks, it's being ignored...
...After an hour of dry formal statements, the audience erupted in applause when Fauci was asked, "Any comments on .Kemron, Immunex...
...I can't...
...At the end of the day, the doctors filed into a hotel ballroom to meet reporters...
...He returned home and started buying a form of low-dose alpha interferon called Immunex from a company in Kenya...
...But at the Omni Shoreham, he apparently abandoned those amazing claims...
...Koech's statements gained worldwide publicity...
...The government's testing committee (which includes Muhammad and others present at the Omni Shoreham) is now setting up a protocol group to design the tests...
...Muhammad says he was skeptical about Kemron, but became a believer after he traveled to Kenya to check out Koech's studies...
...But, thank God, I don't have anything...
...But throughout the spring, a low-dose alpha interferon planning group has been meeting at the National Institutes of Health offices in Rockville, Maryland, to design large-scale national trials...
...Until that time, the NMA had taken no formal position on the issue, but Muhammad persuaded the doctors that further testing of low-dose alpha interferon was needed...
...Muhammad, who serves as Minister of Health for the Nation and is a confidant of Louis Farrakhan, runs a medical facility known as the Abundant Life Clinic in a Washington, D.C., housing project...
...They get There has been a debate for years on the question of whether AZT works as well in blacks as in whites...
...I have no comment on him," said one national AIDS figure interviewed by phone...
...We went to Kenya," he wrote, "found out what they were doing, and tried to faithfully follow their lead...
...She then told of .her work with Immunex...
...And his most spectacular claim was that between 10 and 20 percent became HIV-negative...
...It seems to be highly toxic...
...He prescribed it to Abundant Life patients (and sold it to them at five times the price charged by other clinics), and says he "observed the reversal of all symptoms of AIDS in most cases...
...auci's commitment had been made, Feven though there had been no official announcement on just how testing would be started...
...With their help, he created a, word of mouth that spread beyond the mostly poor community served by the Abundant Life Clinic, and into the ranks of the black professional class...
...The government doctors heard what they must have been expecting...
...Koech claimed the symptoms of AIDS disappeared in 97 percent of his patients...
...I don't know anyone of color who's done well on AZT...
...I had AIDS...
...all of them, Koech said, experienced dramatic increases of CD4 counts, an important measure of immune-system strength...
...The debate is more political than medical...
...None succeeded...
...A recent World Health Organization study of 560 Ugandans showed that Kemron produced "no difference" in survival rates or symptom alleviation...
...Rhetoric like that made it hard for white—and black—AIDS activists to question Muhammad...
...We asked [NMA] to consider convening a meeting to examine the issue," Counts says, "and we told them we were willing to abide by the result of that meeting...
...Look at this arrogant fool," Muhammad said...
...When a voice rose from the audience, he said, "I yield to the brother up front...
...Then he made what sounded like a commitment: "I think the important thing is that the answer should be gotten, and the only way to get one is to do a clinical trial...
...Fauci defended AZT, but another questioner, a doctor from Alabama, pressed the issue: "AZT is a very expensive drug manufactured by white people, and it's killing black folks...
...Abdul Alim Muhammad of the Nation of Islam...
...Goodbye...
...Muhammad stood and delivered a statement praising Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam AIDS program...
...There was an eruption of applause...
...Muhammad wrote about his results in the Final Call, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam...
...Just last year, the Department of Health and Human Services warned AIDS patients away from low-dose alpha interferon, most commonly known by two major trade names, Kemron and Immunex...
...Fauci didn't respond...
...Almost everybody involved in the Immunex controversy was there...
...Later, a questioner held up obituaries of friends who died of AIDS...
...He said other tests on Kemron/Immunex had failed to reproduce Koech's results because they had failed to follow his method...
...The applause grew...
...We do have a study for Immunex...
...He is greater than AIDS...
...Two years ago, doctors in Kenya made astonishing claims for Kemron...
...And Fauci told his black audience that simply doing a government-sponsored trial wouldn't be enough...
...He said the reason [Kemron/Immunex] wasn't being accepted was racism...
...Roxanne CoxIyamu, Director of Medical Resources at Washington's Whitman Walker Clinic, which is the primary community-based provider of HIV/AIDS services in the DC area, says doctors at the clinic have seen no difference in the clinical effectiveness of AZT in patients of different races...
...This was a significant change of posture...
...And it was black professionals—in the form of the 16,000-strong National Medical Association, the nation's largest organization of black physicians—who became Muhammad's most powerful allies...
...Thank you, Jesus...
...Commission on AIDS, Rep...
...Barbara Justice rose and accused the government of manufacturing the AIDS virus to kill black people...
...Fauci, whose agency had previously insisted that enough trials had been done, that low-dose alpha interferon was not recommended as an AIDS treatment, had given his mostly black audience the news they wanted to hear...
...the testing could not be done by just anybody...
...After the ARAC report, he accused government doctors of racism and said the white AIDS establishment wasn't taking Kemron seriously because it came from Africa...
...Fauci mentioned the Koech claims...
...I had no T-cells for so long...
...Doctors in various countries published results of more than a dozen studies, all trying to replicate Koech's results...
...Muhammad's political campaign had made its way far into the AIDS bureaucracy, and by the time the government made its commitment, he had changed even the terms of the debate...
...Jack Killen, deputy director of the Division of AIDS at NIAID, wore a red AIDS ribbon on his lapel as he announced that work to design clinical trials would begin soon...
Vol. 26 • August 1993 • No. 8
