AIDS Research at the NIH: A Critical Review

Dear Fellow Warrior in the Fight Against this Plague of AIDS,

This is one of the most important documents about the AIDS plague and our present moment in this crisis that
you will ever be asked to read. I not only urge you to read it as quickly as possible, I implore you to read it as
thoroughly as you can. While it may appear, on the surface, to be dry and fact-filled, every figure, every
statistic, clothes a scandal or a tragedy or both. Never before has there been such a look at all the AIDS
programs at all the institutes that comprise the National Institutes of Health. Even the report issued by the
Institute of Medicine only dealt with broad structural issues, deferring the idea of looking at the programs
themselves in detail to some future unspecified moment in far-off time.
Why is this report so important for you to read?
Because, for the first time, eighteen institutes, each with its own programs, each with its own goals, each with
many strengths and many weaknesses, each completely unable to criticize itself, comes under a long-needed
scrutiny.
What does this report conclude?
The AIDS plague is utterly and completely devoid of leadership. At the NIH, no one is at the center, nothing is
coordinated, no one is asking the life-saving (and money-saving) questions: what is missing from our efforts,
what is being duplicated, why are we being forced into competition with our own fellow institutes, right here on
our own campus, when budgets are shrinking and shrinking?
In the middle of this tragically sad situation, as the figures of the newly infected and the newly dead mount and
mount to heights once thought inconceivable, sits the President's Point Man for AIDS, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who
some of us would like to see removed and many of us prefer to see as helpless, rendered powerless in a
quagmire -- forced as he is to bow to the brainless whims of a heartless President, a Congress which claims
compassion and a desire to increase the budget but an inability actually to do so, and an inept Secretary of
Health and Human Services whose every utterance in defence of his boss is so lie-filled as to make it hard to
accept that the man is a Christian much less a doctor.
Is it, at this late stage of this plague, intemperate or rude to ask what kind of country (or world) is this where a
plague can be allowed to rage out of control, where its supposedly premiere scientific research establishment can
be allowed to present such a second-rate face to the realities and sufferings it was founded and funded to
alleviate?
Is it, at this late stage of this plague, intemperate or rude to suggest that this present state of AIDS affairs leads
us even more to the fact that the only out that has not been tried, that still must be tried, is a Manhattan- or
Apollo-type project, wherein the leading experts in all areas are granted emergency powers and sent off into the
seclusion necessary to produce the cure that must be there if our civilization is to survive?
I salue this incredible amount of work and energy and insight and perseverance and heartfelt need that gave birth
to this report and sustained its creators to its completion. May bureaucrats learn from this report and gain
courage to speak out at last. May activists learn from this report and renew their commitment, now so
understandably wounded from discouragement. With this information, may we all enter a new stage of holding
our system - now so dreadfully and woefully off-course -- accountable.
Whoever you are, whatever you do in fighting this plague, you must know this information and respond to it.
Do not, as so many have before us, go quiet into the night.

Larry Kramer