Is PrEP the new AZT?

Part One.

As interested readers are no doubt aware, the primary focus of AIDS activist organizations in the 2020s is the widespread dissemination of PrEP propaganda. As a brief reminder, PrEP—short for pre-exposure prophylaxis—consists of HIV-negative individuals considered “at risk” taking daily anti-HIV chemotherapy with the intention of preventing the acquisition of HIV-positivity. The most popular PrEP drugs remain tenofovir based. Tenofovir is available as TDF or TAF.

Tenofovir is a member of the drug class known as nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors, or NRTIs. NRTIs are typically used in combination with protease inhibitors to treat established HIV positivity. They work by terminating DNA synthesis, which is theorized to stop the replication of viral particles, although they have the unfortunate adverse effect of stopping the replication of non-HIV DNA as well, which leads to nonspecific cell death.

The first approved NRTI for HIV is the well-known chemotherapeutic azidothymidine, or AZT. AZT has a long and checkered history that we will touch on briefly. It was shelved as an anti cancer drug in 1964 by Dr. Jerome P. Horwitz of the Michigan Cancer Foundation, only to be resurrected in the 1980s as a potential anti-HIV drug. The pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome determined in late 1984 that AZT appeared to inhibit animal viruses in vitro. In early 1985, the same company determined that AZT could inhibit HIV in vitro as well. On July 3, 1985, AZT was administered experimentally to the first AIDS patient. Due to immense panic and political pressure on the medical community to do something—anything—about this mysterious and deadly new ailment, Burroughs Wellcome began a clinical trial enrolling about 280 patients with AIDS or AIDS-related complex. Half received AZT and half received a placebo.

In what was at the time an unprecedented, stunning move, Burroughs Wellcome announced after only 16 weeks that they were stopping the trial due to “strong evidence” that the medication was working. In the placebo arm of the trial, there were 19 fatalities, compared with only one fatality in the AZT arm. According to a Time magazine article about the history of AZT, Wellcome “reasoned that it wouldn’t be ethical to continue the trial and deprive one group of a potentially life-saving treatment.” This unfortunate decision has had catastrophic fallout in terms of the precedent set for fast-tracking approval of medications that, by design, have the potential for severe adverse effects, and, predictably, it only took a few years for the catastrophic cost of AZT to become clear.

Just one example from the Spin article linked in the previous paragraph is that of “Fred”:

Fred, a person with AIDS, was put on AZT and suffered such severe anemia from the drug that he had to be taken off it. […] “I live in a studio and my bathroom is a mere five step walk from my bed. I would just lie there for two hours; I couldn’t get up to take those five steps. When I was taken to the hospital, I had to have someone come over to dress me. It’s that kind of severe fatigue. The quality of my life was pitiful… I’ve never felt so bad… I stopped the AZT and the mental confusion, the headaches, the pains in the neck, the nausea all disappeared within a 24 hour period.”

He is far from the only victim of AZT and other NRTIs. Despite the fact that the toxicities of AZT were well known, in the early days of AZT administration, patients were put on a dose of 1500 milligrams per day, only for that dose to be slashed to 500 milligrams when the toxic effects of such a high dose became impossible to ignore. The journalist Celia Farber, author of the Spin article, reported a conversation with an AIDS doctor in which the doctor said, “Of course we knew it was toxic. Why do you think we lowered the dose?” Incredibly, even as the devastation of AZT was becoming obvious, there were still patients and advocates up in arms over how expensive AZT was, clamoring for a toxic drug at an affordable price point.

Fast forward to the present day. AZT is still in use, although it has fallen out of favor compared with newer NRTIs such as the aforementioned tenofovir. It is important to keep in mind that the newer NRTIs have a mechanism of action similar to AZT—by design. They are indiscriminate cell killers, as well as anti-inflammatory agents (the latter which may explain why these drugs appear to have some benefit to some patients, including, intriguingly, for chronic fatigue syndrome ), and as such cause such adverse effects as loss of bone density, kidney failure, and liver enlargement. Currently, there are multiple lawsuits being filed against Gilead pharmaceuticals regarding their severe adverse effects. Consider Vanessa’s story:

Vanessa L. Naisha filed a Truvada lawsuit against Gilead in Delaware on July 11, 2019. Doctors diagnosed Naisha with HIV in 1986, and she began taking Truvada as soon as the drug hit the market in 2004.  By 2009, Naisha experienced severe pain in her hips and loss of balance. In 2010, she had to use a wheelchair after her hips failed.  She had two hip replacement surgeries in 2011 and suffered complications during the second surgery. She had to go to the Intensive Care Unit for a blood transfusion and did not regain consciousness until hospital staff ran electricity through her body seven times.  Doctors said her bone mineral density was osteopenic. It wasn’t until 2018 that she discovered Truvada might be to blame.  “[Naisha] put her trust in [the] Defendant with hopes of getting treatment for HIV. She was oblivious to the fact that all these years she was ingesting poison,” the complaint said.

Her story, along with that of Tyreese Buchanan, represents merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damages inflicted to patients by pharmaceutical companies—the same pharmaceutical companies that fund prominent AIDS activist organizations. The claim that Gilead withheld the “safer” formulation of Truvada, known as TAF, in order to maximize profits from the “less safe” formulation, TDF, appears to be nothing more than a smokescreen to distract from the fact that so-called “good” Truvada (marketed most frequently under the brand name Descovy) is simply administered at a lower dose than “bad” Truvada. (“Of course we knew it was toxic. Why do you think we lowered the dose?”) As stated in the linked Poz article:

TAF is a prodrug that is absorbed more quickly than TDF and produces higher levels of the active drug, known as tenofovir diphosphate, in cells. This means that it can be given in smaller doses, leading to lower drug levels in the blood and less exposure for the kidneys, bones, and organs. [emphasis mine]

It seems not unreasonable to draw the conclusion that the switch to TAF—which is by no means universal, as many patients remain on TDF and sometimes even switch back to TDF due to weight gain and fat redistribution caused by TAF—will in the long run result in patients with similar health issues to those caused by TDF and related drugs. Indeed, in the section on adverse effects from the package insert for Descovy, adverse effects of renal impairment, fatal cases of lactic acidosis, and hepatomegaly are listed—discouraging when one considers that these are the same adverse effects as for TDF.

To conclude this introduction, I want to draw attention to the fact that these drugs are being aggressively marketed, in highly suggestive advertisements, not only to HIV-positive individuals, but to entire swaths of the HIV-negative population. This is a bridge too far and is eerily reminiscent of unethical studies such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in that informed consent is actively being eliminated by the attempts on the part of AIDS activists to censor advertisements for the Truvada lawsuits.

How much money have AIDS activists been paid by pharmaceutical companies to protect HIV fraud and toxic fraud based treatments for the fraudulent HIV causes AIDS model? How much information about the negative effects of antiretrovirals is being suppressed and hidden from the population? It’s time to pull back the veil, so that everyone can make an honest assessment of the truth and decide for themselves. Letting pharmaceutical companies bully us into making hasty decisions regarding problematic treatments and preventatives must become a distant memory.

Stay tuned for part 2.

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