What’s With the Sounds of Silence Around PrEP Lawsuits?

Dr. Rebecca Culshaw’s new book exposes Truvada’s life-altering adverse effects and why no one’s telling you about them—really, does no one care?

What if you woke up one day and found out that a widely prescribed drug had been producing horrible side effects for years and its manufacturer (plus certain activists) had worked really hard to keep you from learning about it?  What if that drug had been marketed almost exclusively to a single racial group, perhaps African Americans?And what if even healthy African American individuals—gay and straight, men and women—as well as a few of the worried healthy in other racial groups, had been prescribed this drug and unknowingly experienced life-changing side effects from it?

And what if a book was written about this disgraceful episode in US health policy and drug oversight but nobody ever talked about it?

In fact, a group of AIDS activists has tried its best to kill a book exposing alarming side effects experienced by people treated with Truvada (tenofovir or TDF) and/or prescribed Truvada-containing PrEP.

That book, as some of you already know, is Dr. Rebecca Culshaw’s The Truvada and PrEP Disaster.

Why? Why no outcry from ANYONE?  A couple of independent-minded physicians, maybe? ONE other journalist picking up the story?  I mean, it’s real, folks. Check out the lawsuits and the $10B slush fund that the AIDS Health Organization made the manufacturer of Truvada, Gilead Sciences, establish to cover all the lawsuits’ plaintiffs.

One of the sad truths about this situation is that independent investigative journalists get no respect. Seymour Hersh and John Hersey had The New Yorker backing them; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had the Washington Post and John Crewdson, the Chicago Tribune—all venerable journalistic institutions. 

No one asked any of them, “Why isn’t anyone else covering this”—the massacre in My Lai, Vietnam; survivors of the nuclear attack in Hiroshima, Japan; a criminal US Presidency in Washington, DC; and AIDS fraud at the US National Cancer Institute—“if it’s so important?”

(Author’s note: It’s worth knowing that Hersh’s story about possibly the worst military massacre in the history of US wars was rejected by every mainstream publication he submitted it to, until a small independent antiwar newswire published it; a couple of wars earlier, Hersey’d had to be smuggled into Hiroshima to evade the pervasive censorship enforced by the US Armed Forces.)

Independent investigative journalists don’t get the respect that journalists at mainstream publications do, end of story.  So, their reporting can take decades to penetrate the public consciousness.  Just ask Hillary Johnson, the best-known journalist covering ME/CFS for four decades. Johnson’s latest book, The Why: The Historic ME/CFS Call to Arms, describes the struggles she (and others) have faced in fighting the US government’s campaign to diminish—if not destroy—evidence that ME/CFS is a very serious—and yes, deadly—disease.

I don’t know where you live, but where I am, fall is casting its shadow over the trees and flowers and grass. And what’s next in Fall? Halloween and the new crop of horror movies that accompany it, of course. 

Here are some horror movie openings that I can imagine:

• A 52-year-old man wakes up one morning and realizes half of his teeth have broken or fallen out as an effect of a medication he thought was saving his life, Truvada. Spoiler alert: the drug’s manufacturer was actively concealing that the drug’s attack on bone density could also destroy teeth.

• A woman who’d taken Truvada for five years was confined to a wheelchair when both of her hips failed. Spoiler alert: She had both hips replaced and had to have her heart restarted seven times following that surgery.

• A 30-year-old man took Truvada for three years until—Spoiler alert! He experienced such bone necrosis (death) and bone density loss that he, too, needed to have both hips replaced.

Sounds like beginnings of a horror movie or two to me. And there are at least 26,000 more horror stories in the current lawsuits against Truvada’s manufacturer Gilead Sciences.

There could be many more Truvada lawsuits to come. Happy Fall.