Zidovudine

In other words, over a third of the outbreaks that year were actually vaccine reactions in vaccinated kids rather than natural infections.

So it was like giving people with HIV infections and AIDS the most toxic drug ever given to the American public, AZT.

But in the brochure, it says side effects are AIDS symptoms.

So then...

So they, you know, they work through that.

Another one is, you know, the ultrasound, 3D ultrasound, AZT, which ultimately came from some research that Gertrude Elion, she got the Nobel Prize, came here with Burr's Welcome with George Hitchings in the early 1970s.

We're known for, probably a lot of people don't realize this, but our area is one of the top life science biotech centers in the country, in the world.

And a lot of that is because of the foresight of our leaders back in 1980, when that industry really started.

I mean, we put things in front of clinicians.

You know, a rule would pop up patients on AZT, one of the medicines for HIV.

And, you know, their white count is going down.

You know, maybe you ought to think about changing the dose or holding the dose.

The bankers and traders are coming up out of the subway with coffee in paper cups.

The week before, the government approved the first medicine for AIDS, a drug called AZT.

It is a real step forward.

It is also priced at around $10,000 a year, one of the most expensive medicines ever sold.

She is in her 50s, married, straight, a quiet woman from Queens with a soft voice.

She grew up in New York and studied chemistry at Hunter College.

For 11 years, she worked at the Sloan Kettering Institute, studying a family of molecules called nucleosides, which happens to be the very family that AZT belongs to.

she had stepped back from her work to care for her mother who was unwell but she had been reading about this new illness and she wanted to help she had tried offering what she knew to officials and other groups and had mostly been ignored So, around that same March, she comes to a meeting at the center, and when there is a chance to speak, she stands up and explains, in her calm voice, what the government's drug trials actually are, which medicines are being tested.

A film that tells the true story of a cowboy, a Texas cowboy named Ron Woodruff, who was diagnosed with AIDS, very advanced AIDS in the late 80s, and was horrified by this because he was sick.

not able to secure any sort of a treatment, not able to get into an AZT study at the time, and felt that he should have some sort of opportunity to try to save his life.

And what he wound up doing was going down to Mexico and getting a lot of alternative treatments that worked for him, smuggling them across the border.

And he opened what he called a buyer's club in Dallas, where people could come in.

But the Anne Rice episode is obviously very much about AIDS.

And I was in New York in the early 90s before AZT and the other drug cocktails were there when it was still a death sentence and people I knew were HIV positive and dying.

And watching this movie, and there's, man, there's a moment when, I mean, on the one hand, Sigourney Weaver does say at one point they think you're crud, which might be one of the all-time great tenured pieces of dialogue ever written.

But you're looking at her talk to this room full of men with shaved heads who are gaunt, who are at the ass end of their universe, who no one cares about.

There's no money to be made on it.

You know, they were, they were selling AZT.

Put time on your side, take AZT.

No, 300,000-plus people died taking AZT, and nobody apologized.

We've seen that a lot in science.

In fact, I directed the film Science for Hire just this past year.

And my clinic, both as a senior research fellow, uh, for 36 years, and the director of the Anti-Aging Division at the Institute of Applied Biology, similar to the Pasteur Institute, as well as the Tri-State Healing Center.

So whatever they were saying, like, "Use, uh, AZT," and I debated them on national television, "No, you're going to kill people." They killed about 325,000.

That was all Anthony Fauci.

[clears throat] Fauci is, would not debate Kary Mullis.