How many victims of AZT were there?

Open thread — lest we forget

As we know, AZT was the first “anti-HIV” drug to be approved in 1987, after a clinical trial was cut short because the results were so “miraculous”—19 died in the placebo group, versus only 1 in the AZT group. But of course, as we also know, clinical trial results have a strange habit of dissipating when the medication being trialed is released into the wild (hello, mRNA vaccines).

Indeed, AZT has fallen so far out of favor with the medical community due to its massive toxicities (recall it was repurposed from a cancer drug that had been shelved for being too toxic) that it is only included in one relatively unpopular “anti-HIV” drug today, Combivir.

Regardless, it was going to be another seven years before the advent of the game changing protease inhibitors that are also barely prescribed today. In that time, the medication ddI was also approved out of desperation, and it turned out to be even worse. From the New York Times in 1990:

Odd Surge in Deaths Found In Those Taking AIDS Drug

Lest we forget (emphasis mine throughout):

AIDS patients who have taken an experimental drug in a new and controversial distribution system have been dying at more than 10 times the rate of those who are taking the drug in standard tests, its manufacturer says.

Of 8,000 patients taking the new drug, DDI, in the free distribution system known as expanded access, 290 have died. But only 2 of 700 taking it in the clinical trials by the drug's manufacturer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, have died, the company said Friday.

So in the trial, the death rate was 0.3% of the raw total, whereas “in the wild,” ddI performed more than ten times worse than it did in trials, at almost 4%. We ought to keep this in mind when interpreting the results of, say, trials of long acting injectable drugs for PrEP. Just one more quote:

Five deaths in the expanded access program were caused by pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas that has previously been linked to the DDI. One clinical trial death was from pancreatitis. The rates are not markedly different.

[…]

Dr. Fauci said the pancreatitis deaths concerned him, but added: ''We knew that sooner or later we would run into complications with the expanded access program. We're dealing with a lethal disease and drugs that are very powerful.''

[…]

He explained that when AZT was studied, ''there was a constant monitoring of the data,'' so that the study could be stopped immediately when it looked like the drug was effective. ''Alternatively, it would have been stopped immediately if it had looked like AZT was killing people,'' Dr. Laurence said. But with DDI, he said: ''It's not clear that that would happen. We clinical researchers are having to learn from each other.''

You might be surprised to know that ddI has not been recalled. Now go back and reread the opening paragraph of this post. “It would have been stopped immediately if it had looked like AZT was killing people”??? Really? Is that why it was stopped after only sixteen weeks? Also, what do we think of Fauci’s statement that we are dealing with “drugs that are very powerful”? They’re powerfully toxic, that’s for sure. Thirty-seven years after AZT’s approval, the landscape of toxic “anti-HIV” drugs has exploded in its scope, as we know from the 26,000+ victims of the Truvada disaster.

So here is my question for you, since the powers that be will do anything they can to bury this: How many people would you estimate have died from AZT? And how much worse could things potentially get for those unfortunate enough to be “retained in care” if Gilead is not held to account?