Aletho News

Tribute to John Lauritsen, Author of ‘Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story’

By Celia Farber | The Defender | April 26, 2022

John Lauritsen — author, scholar, gay historian and critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s HIV/AIDS empire — has passed away. He is believed to have died on his birthday, March 5, at his home in Dorchester, Massachusetts at the age of 83.

He was in good health, and his death was unexpected.

Here’s a recent tribute video made by Jamie Dlux, just weeks before Lauritsen’s death:

“In my time I’ve been an antiwar activist, a gay liberationist, an AIDS dissident, a publisher, and an all-around freethinker,” Lauritsen wrote at Pagan Press, the publishing imprint he founded in 1982.

“I’ve spoken out when people with common sense kept their mouth shut. I’ve exposed fraud, punctured group fantasies and blasphemed against the prevailing superstitions.”

Though he wrote books on a wide range of esoteric subjects, Lauritsen was best known for his works that demolished the AIDS drug azidothymidine (AZT), including “Poison By Prescription.”

Links to several of John’s AZT articles and documents can be found here.

A Harvard-educated market research executive and analyst and member of Mensa, Lauritsen grew up in Nebraska. His father, an attorney, instilled in him a deep aversion to fraud that would run counter to the HIV/AIDS narrative, about which no questions were to be asked.

Lauritsen said about his HIV/AIDS books:

“I want them to stand for the record, so that no one, when the truth finally prevails, can pretend that there were no AIDS critics, or that we didn’t speak out.

“The terrible suffering, loss of life, propaganda, censorship, rumors, hysteria, profiteering, espionage and sabotage …. I maintain that AIDS reporters should be regarded as war correspondents … and that the salient characteristics of war coverage are also those of AIDS coverage.”

Lauritsen devoted his scholarship to aspects of gay history, but never went along with the revolutionary dictates ushered in by Larry Kramer’s ACT UP in the 1980s — beginning with Kramer’s demand that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve a drug to treat AIDS fast, with no concern for safety or efficacy studies.

Lauritsen documented, meticulously and in a wry, distinctive voice, the bedrock of fraud that gave rise to AZT’s meteoric rise in the late 1980s. He did not mince words.

“I don’t think ‘murder ‘is too strong a word to use when you have a drug like AZT, approved on the basis of fraudulent research,” he said in an interview.

About Kramer’s ACT UP, he said simply: “The group as a whole was a shill for Big Pharma.”

Lauritsen’s searing exposés on HIV/AIDS and AZT appeared frequently as cover stories in The New York Native, a biweekly gay periodical founded by Charles Ortleb in 1980 that went on to publish more than 50 of his articles.

The New York Native was the first periodical anywhere in the world to report on the then-new disease called AIDS, in 1981 — months before The New York Times.

It was also the first to publish an interview (by Lauritsen) of University of California, Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., as early as July of 1987 — the same year Duesberg’s seminal and controversial paper came out in Cancer Research dispatching HIV as the cause of AIDS, and retroviruses as causes of cancer.

The New York Native also was the first to publish Larry Kramer’s historic 1983 tirade, 1,112 and Counting, at the same time as Lauritsen published his first warnings to the gay community about the potentially lethal toxicities of amyl nitrites, or “poppers.”

Lauritsen compellingly documented the key role poppers played in the etiology of Kaposi sarcoma and immune collapse among gay men, and the nefarious role Fauci played in downplaying this association.

The principal manufacturer of poppers was AZT distributor Burroughs Wellcome, the company that, with Fauci’s help, became a primary beneficiary of the AIDS crisis.

Lauritsen and Kramer would stake out diametrically opposed positions on the post-AIDS gay political map.

Lauritsen was far better equipped to analyze and assess the growing, utterly dysfunctional field of HIV research and therapeutics, yet Kramer was the one who, despite his extreme temper, grew an immense and iconic reputation, leading to the formation of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP.

The mainstream, red-ribbon and AZT-adherent dominant gay community grew increasingly furious with The New York Native, especially over Lauritsen’s “HIV denial” and AZT criticism.

They urged a community-wide boycott of the paper, which led to its demise on Jan. 13, 1997.

The AZT crusade thus became the hill Ortleb, Lauritsen and The New York Native died on, many years before it was called “cancel culture.”

“‘Cancel culture’ is too mild a term,” Lauritsen said in an interview. “These sanctimonious savages are culture destroyers.”

The tragic irony is this: In everything Lauritsen wrote about AZT, he was vindicated and proven correct, as documented in “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

It is estimated some 300,000 gay men perished directly from exposure to high-dose AZT at the initial high doses given — anywhere between 1200 mg and 1800 mg.

In an interview with Tony Brown on PBS, Lauritsen said:

“What these drugs do — ACT and DDI and d4T — is very terrible. They take what’s called DNA synthesis, which is a process the body goes through whenever a new cell forms or when cells grow.

“It’s basically the life process. And these drugs terminate it. In other words, they believe that by stopping the life process they will stop HIV from replicating. And in fact, HIV is not replicating, no. So the theory behind it is crazy and the toxicities are deadly.”

AIDS itself he referred to as a “phony construct” and he despaired of the use of the word “queer” to describe gay men.

“John was funny, coolly intelligent, detached and yet passionate, a brilliant writer and journalist who saw through the illusions spun around the ‘AIDS epidemic’ right from the start,” Neville Hodgkinson, former science editor of the Sunday Times of London and veteran critic of HIV science, told The Defender.

It is impossible today to describe what an act of sustained courage and nerves of steel it took for Lauritsen to publish such stark critiques of AZT during those feverish years when it was billed as, and understood as, a life-saving drug — one that conferred sainthood upon ACT UP and the role it played in the lightning-fast FDA approval.

The U.K. documentary team Meditel, under the auspices of Joan Shenton, interviewed Lauritsen many times over the years, in several countries. Those interviews can be seen at Immunity Resource Foundation.

Lauritsen recently reflected, on Facebook, on history repeating itself:

“Re-reading ‘The AIDS War’s’ digital proof, I was struck by the horrors of the AIDS era that we’ve lived through — the ruthlessness and dishonesty of the AIDS Establishment — the comparisons with the COVID-19 horrors that we are going through now. May Truth finally prevail!”

Celia Farber is an investigative reporter who chronicled Anthony Fauci and Dark Pharma’s war on science and biology for various magazines since the late 80s, bringing wrath upon her name.

April 26, 2022 - Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | ACT UP, Anthony Fauci, HIV/AIDS, United States