A Tale of Three Roberts, part 2: Robert Gallo
by John Massaro
ROBERT GALLO WAS BORN in 1937 in Connecticut and went on to pursue a career in biology, viruses, and medical research, eventually becoming a muckety-muck at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), one of the many tentacles of the Department of Health and Human Services leviathan. He’s now living out his sunset years in obscurity somewhere. He has no connection with Covid, but back in the 1980s and 90s he, along with a colleague named Anthony Fauci, was at the top of the AIDS research totem pole. He went on to become one of the most disgraced human beings ever to call himself a scientist. It’s a long, sordid story, even an amusing one at times, the essentials of which I can only briefly mention here.
Basically, Bob Gallo was a crude, ambitious, mediocre little man with an eye on scientific immortality, in particular a longtime obsession with winning the Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, said to cause AIDS. Gallo, however, had persuaded Luc Montagnier, a French virologist also researching AIDS, to send him a sample of this retrovirus, which Gallo then cultivated, claiming to be its original discoverer. That was the highlight of his nonstop shenanigans. There are many more details in the public record for those wanting to dig deeper.
On pages 180-184 of The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK Jr. rips Gallo to shreds, portraying him as a world-class charlatan, though in my humble opinion, as I’ve made clear, Kennedy himself qualifies for that title. He relies on a book published in 2003 that I haven’t read, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, by a Chicago Tribune reporter named John Crewdson, who “meticulously documents Gallo’s brazen flimflam, perhaps the boldest, most outrageous and most consequential con operation in the history of science.” Bobby may have resorted to a bit of hyperbole here, but judging by the many glowing reviews on Amazon, Science Fictions does appear to be a forthright and powerful work.
I flipped through a book on my shelf that I read many years ago, And the Band Played On, which delves into the people and politics behind the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The author, Randy Shilts, was an openly queer journalist based in San Francisco who died of AIDS in 1994, seven years after his book was published. I recalled that there was a lot of dirt on Gallo and I wanted to refresh my memory. It validated what I’m sure Crewdson wrote about. Anyone who gets excited by the word science, who thinks that so-called scientists are intelligent and dignified people, has another think coming. Many, if not most of them, are mean, petty creatures who form cliques and frequently engage their rivals in nasty catfights. What’s funny about Gallo is that he was a flaming lowlife who rubbed so many people the wrong way, yet so full of himself that he never seemed to consider that he would be exposed.
The rancor between the NCI and the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where Montagnier was based, became a soap opera. It reached a point where the French institute filed a lawsuit against the NCI. Big money over the AIDS blood test patent was at stake, but beyond that there was a great deal of resentment among French researchers that their man Montagnier had been upstaged by an American punk who was trying to steal the show. There was very little media coverage of this, but it sparked a huge ruckus in the international scientific community, almost like a disputed referee’s call in deciding the World Cup soccer match. In the end, in 1987, a compromise was reached with both men being recognized as “co-discoverers” of the AIDS virus — a settlement that went all the way to the top, finalized at a White House ceremony by President Ronald Reagan and French president Jacques Chirac! But there was no co-discovery because Gallo was a thief, plain and simple, and his team at the NCI knew it. In 2008, justice prevailed when Montagnier was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery, and Gallo snubbed by the Nobel committee.
One more story is worth bringing out. In Edward Hooper’s wonderful book The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, Gallo is mentioned several times. One great thing about The River, published in 1999, is that Hooper goes into detail about his personal interactions with many of the people he interviewed in conducting his research. In 1990, while talking with a senior scientist in a lab at the NCI in Bethesda, Maryland, Gallo, who had heard about Hooper’s arrival and knew about his project, unexpectedly walked into the room, smiling, his hand extended to Hooper before reaching him, and said, “Now why do I get the feeling that you and I are going to get along?” That immediately tells me something about a man, something amiss. The next day, Gallo took Hooper out to breakfast at a fancy restaurant, Hooper’s tape recorder on the table, and he was to see him one more time at the main NCI building. Hooper asked him many questions. At breakfast, “I found him to be a sympathetic listener and a good talker, with a decent sense of humor to boot. Only occasionally, when I probed a little deeper, did he show that he could also be prickly.” He noted that Gallo became quite indignant and garbled in his explanation when the conversation turned to an ongoing dispute with the Pasteur Institute over the nomenclature of the AIDS virus. During their last brief chat, Gallo offered a slippery explanation as to why his name appeared on an erroneous paper concerning the virus. It was only two years later that Hooper realized that Gallo had flat-out lied to him.
It was also years later, as Hooper recounts many chapters further on, that he learned that Gallo had been a stalwart defender of Hilary Koprowski, who had sued Rolling Stone magazine for defamation over an article published on March 19, 1992, asserting that Koprowski may have inadvertently spawned the AIDS epidemic in central Africa by way of a mass oral polio vaccination campaign he supervised in the late 1950s. I read that article, written by a Tom Curtis, and thought it was very fair — indeed, too fair to a slimy creature like Koprowski — and that the charge of defamation was absurd. Koprowski, whom Hooper interviewed twice, is a major figure in The River. He was twenty years older than Gallo. Hooper went on to learn that, not only had Gallo spoken and written warmly about Koprowski, but even though their careers and backgrounds did not overlap, the two helped each other out professionally, and shared a close father-son relationship. I wrote a fair amount about Koprowski in my own book. In my opinion, prior to the Age of Covid, and with the possible exception of Bill Gates, he was the most homicidal vaccine-pushing beast who ever lived. Anyone who would stick up for him must be extremely defective in his own right, and that’s all I’ll say about Robert Gallo.
Before moving on to Robert number three, I want to say a few words about Ed Hooper, The River, and related matters. Hooper is an honorable man of exceptional intellectual honesty. This shines through in a way that’s absent from anything Robert Kennedy Jr. has written. The River, at more than a thousand pages long, is the greatest scientific enquiry I have ever read. I was so taken by this book that I wrote a separate chapter about it in my own book. And — wonder of wonders — like RFK Jr., Ed Hooper is a flaming liberal, and most incongruously, given the content of his book, pro-vaccine as well. But that’s where the similarity between the two men ends.
Those of us who believe we’ve made an important and original contribution to the repository of knowledge — whether for the progress of our own people, or for humanity as a whole — want to be recognized for it. I readily admit that I want to be recognized for the book I’ve written, and for being one of the very few openly calling out vaccines for the total fraud that they are. If that makes me vain in your eyes, so be it, but I don’t see it that way. It’s certainly not about money in my case — I’ve always lived very frugally and like it that way — nor do I want to be on national television, or in any other spotlight. If there was a way of knowing that people everywhere would read of my accomplishment posthumously — in the manner of Ignaz Semmelweis or Gregor Mendel, for example — I’d be most happy to live out my remaining years as the simple, private man I’ve always been. What resonates for me is a favorite saying of the great Dr. William Pierce, from an old Norse saga: “Kinsmen die and cattle die, and so must one die oneself. But there is one thing I know which never dies, and that is the fame of a dead man’s deeds.”
Being human, I’m resentful towards some of these people who have suddenly appeared on the scene in the last few years, and seem hell-bent on taking undue credit for exposing the dangers of the Covid jab — especially those who continue to be pro-vaccine. Where the hell were they before all this Covid nonsense started? And I’m not saying that they’re bad people (though a few of them are), or that they haven’t done some good. It’s just that they haven’t paid their dues, they haven’t earned their place in the sun, and furthermore, most of them appear to be quite wealthy or well-connected or both. I don’t feel that way at all towards people like Suzanne Humphries and Ed Hooper, who toiled in obscurity, putting many years of blood, sweat, and tears into their investigations. Dr. Humphries sacrificed a lucrative career as a nephrologist in a Maine hospital, after seeing the terrible effects of vaccines, mainly the flu shot, on her dialysis patients. She became an outcast in her profession, and co-authored what I consider the definitive book on the history of vaccines, mentioned above. If that book, and not mine, should stand as the final word on the subject — if I live to be 200 I guess I’ll find out — I wouldn’t be jealous in the least. For all her efforts, and for her boldness in forsaking modern medicine, she deserves the fame.
Then take a guy like Ed Hooper, who spent nine years researching his masterpiece, traveling extensively around Europe, North America, and Africa, and interviewing more than 600 people, some of them world-famous in the field of vaccines and viruses, to get to the truth of how and where AIDS originated. The River was published in 1999, and what does he have to show for it? Although the book got many excellent reviews on Amazon, I’ve never seen it for sale in any bookstore, and a computer check years ago revealed that only two of the 107 public libraries on Long Island stocked it. How many people have heard of this man, compared to Robert Kennedy, whose book sold over a million copies before Anthony Fauci knew what hit him? Ed and his great book are now far advanced on the road to oblivion, it seems. I notice that he hasn’t updated his Web site, aidsorigins.com, since May 31, 2022. Forgotten as he is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s now a bitter old man, and if so, I sympathize with him. Justice is hard to come by in this world.
To be continued. Next subject: Robert Malone
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Source: Author
Again, another very interesting and illuminating article by John Massaro. I have to say that Robert Gallo looks very Jewish, although that may be just a coincidence and, perhaps, the man’s ugly face is not the consequence of Jewish ethnic influence. Having said that, he resembles Bernie Madoff…