Why James Curran Should Not be a Dean at Emory University

An Excerpt from Truth to Power by Charles Ortleb

Here's how the foundations of AIDS fraud led to decades of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome fraud.

     On April 21, the New York Native published one of its most revealing pieces on the real nature of the fake epidemiology that the CDC was then doing on AIDS and the same kind of epidemiology they would eventually do on chronic fatigue syndrome. “A Place to Die and a Drink of Water,” by Ann Fettner, asked, “why the CDC was studying AIDS in Belle Glade when they’ve already decided to ignore the facts.” The CDC investigated the epidemic in the small, poverty-stricken Florida community in order to put to rest the suspicion that AIDS was spread in ways that the CDC had not informed the public about. Fettner described the investigation in a brutal, uncompromising manner: “In lockstep with local health authorities, the CDC is busy predetermining exactly the results it will find in the four-month epidemiological survey currently underway. This is cosmetics, a public relations initiative to rescue the town’s reputation while furthering the CDC’s control over the shaping of the epidemic. Epidemiology it isn’t. They’re after sexual and drug use transmission, and any evidence of an unusual cofactor will be sidestepped.”

     According to Fettner, what the CDC didn’t like was “too many non-identifiable risk (NIR) cases” of AIDS which threatened their prevailing paradigm. The CDC wouldn’t believe people who said that did not fit into the official gay or drug-taking risk groups. Darlene Lee, the Chief Nursing Officer at a clinic in Belle Glade, made fun of the CDC’s sex and drug presumptions to Fettner: “ ‘There’s something about their lifestyles that they’re hiding, you keep getting that. They’re all closet homosexuals or shooting up,’ she says sarcastically. ‘We have 25 people right now who’re in their 50s and 60s; nowhere else are they seeing these 50- and 60-year-olds, and I’m saying, Sure! They’re turning tricks on the side!’ ”

     Fettner reported, “When the CDC surveyed 250 people from the poor southwest neighborhood in Belle Glade, the overall rate was 8% positive. Belle Glade proper was 11% positive in the CDC pilot study, and 60% of all the positives had no risk factors.” What a high percentage of the patients did have, according to Fettner, was a significant percentage of insect-borne viruses. Mark Whiteside, a physician who treated patients in Belle Glade told Fettner, “It’s incredible that we should still be arguing about NIR [No Identifiable Risk] cases . . . . The disease is not explained by heterosexual transmission in the NIR patients, none of whom have had sex with members of so-called high-risk groups. . . . We’re seeing non-characteristic disease and in general it’s not explained by heterosexual transmission. For example, I have a 56-year-old woman who has been married for 27 years to her 77-year-old husband. He’s healthy, exonerative for HTLV-III. They’ve had no outside sexual contact—none, zero—and she now has AIDS manifested by disseminated histoplasmosis. Her only chance for a risk is a blood transfusion in 1981.” But Fettner reported they tracked all the donors and they were negative for the virus. Interestingly, Whiteside told Fettner “She lives in the same apartment as two other AIDS cases, including one of our original NIR cases, a 30-some-year-old who had fewer than ten lifetime sexual partners and had lived with a woman for seven years—and the woman is still healthy. He’s dead.”

     The health care workers who were seeing inconvenient things the CDC didn’t want people to know about were treated in the way most people were when they came in contact with any of the abnormal science of the epidemic. The nurse, Darlene Lee, said, “Everything is fine as long as you don’t make waves. You do as you’re told and as long as you comply with everything they want, it’s okay. But when you’re a little bit independent or start asking questions—or God forbid, you do something on your own and try to help these people!” Whiteside and his colleague, according to Fettner, were “perceived by the CDC as an annoyance, objects of ridicule because of their insistence that more is going on in Belle Glade than is explained by the CDC party line. The two physicians had done a door-to-door survey and came up “with 9% positive for HTLV-III, and most did not have an identifiable risk factor.”

     In her Native piece on Belle Glade, Fettner also reported the shocking story of Gus Sermos who had been a CDC surveillance officer for two-and-one-half years in Florida. When Sermos started to raise some serious questions about what was going on in the CDC’s AIDS efforts in Florida, it inspired an investigative series of articles in the Miami Herald, and he was punished by being summarily transferred back to a temporary assignment at the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta, in what appeared to be a humiliating demotion. Sermos had suggested that CDC AIDS funds were not being properly used.[i] He told Fettner that while on the job in Florida, he had “uncovered fraud and mismanagement, cavalier attitudes on the part of the CDC, and general lying and cheating.” He also told Fettner, “They hired me to do surveillance, but I found out that wasn’t what they wanted at all. They didn’t want to know anything about what’s going on. [CDC AIDS officials] Curran or Jaffe come down and all they want to talk about is fishing, not AIDS. When I started in Florida, I had one supervisor. Then there were two, then three—this raft of people doing nothing but waiting for my reports to come in.”

     But those Sermos reports were not appreciated. According to Fettner, he said it was like, “I was digging manure and putting it on their plates.” He told her, “90% of what they’re doing up in Atlanta is public relations. For AIDS there’re four people in the field and 40 in Atlanta. If all they’re doing with AIDS is lying about it, creating subterfuge, then why not disband them? He described the scientists working on AIDS with Curran and Jaffe in Atlanta as “a bunch of kids right out of medical school, because it’s politically so unhealthy to get involved with the CDC AIDS Task Force that older doctors with experience don’t want anything to do with it.”

     One of the epidemiologically embarrassing things that Sermos uncovered in his surveillance was the presence of older people in Florida who had AIDS without risk factors, which was clearly a threat to the CDC’s AIDS paradigm. Sermos was accused of not asking strong enough questions to prove that the people really did belong in the CDC’s politically crafted risk groups. He told Fettner, “I’ll tell you the truth, in my wildest dreams I would never have thought they’d get away with what those guys have gotten away with as far as just being, if nothing else, just being bad showmen. And for forgetting that the show has any substance. Basically it’s like an old vaudeville show that’s been running too long. I can’t believe that house of cards in Atlanta can just stand up and take all the wind. But boy, evidently—I’ve told my wife and I hate admitting it—but they are totally impervious to anything. If you say something disagreeable, you’re either unpatriotic or you’re a kook. . . . I’m like a citizen who sees a robber running out of the store and calls the cops, and the police arrest you and lock you up for reporting a crime. I wasn’t going to be a whore for them; I felt like I was a guard at Auschwitz, a traitor. But they’re traitors to their profession and [James] Curran [head of the CDC’s Task Force on AIDS] is not a scientist by any definition. He should be selling cars like his father.”

     What is so uncanny about his story is that his description of the CDC’s behavior in the investigation of AIDS would be echoed in everything the CDC eventually did in its fake investigation of chronic fatigue syndrome. The fact that the CDC was able to behave this way for three decades shows that powerful institutional forces were keeping Sermos’s so-called house of cards safely in place. It may have seemed like a “vaudeville” act, but we have to remind ourselves that there were those in Germany who didn’t think the Nazi leaders would amount to much because they resembled clowns.

     What made these Sermos revelations so historically important was that for the first time word was publicly coming from an insider that there was something rotten in Denmark. People on the outside with growing doubts about the integrity of the CDC and its story about AIDS were not crazy. Everything about what happened to him lends support to the notion that what could be called totalitarian or abnormal science (as well as “homodemiology”) had already become the official culture of AIDS. The CDC didn’t want to know what was really going on. Or they did know all too well and they didn’t want the public to know the truth. To borrow a notion from Hannah Arendt, they had manufactured a false epidemiological image of what was going on and used powerful public relations resources to make it the conventional wisdom for America and the rest of the world.[ii] An honest, courageous man warned the world from inside the belly of a authoritarian beast that public health had turned itself into something evil. His reference to “Auschwitz” was downright prophetic.

To learm more about the corrupt public health science at the CDC and NIH, read Truth to Power (Available at Amazon).