'Plandemic 3' inspires false claims about early HIV treatment

"AZT is what killed a majority of the AIDS patients. Not the virus," says John Joseph, an American musician and author, in a June 5, 2023 Instagram post.

The post includes a clip from "Plandemic 3," the latest installment in a series of conspiratorial videos about the coronavirus pandemic. AFP previously debunked false claims in parts one and two, which reached millions of people on social media.

The most recent video leads off with a family anecdote from filmmaker Mikki Willis.

"My brother -- was killed by a drug called AZT," he says in the nearly two-hour movie.

Willis continues: "Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died as a result of that prescribed poison. The pusher of AZT was none other than Dr Anthony Fauci."

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Screenshot of an Instagram post taken June 7, 2023

Similar claims circulated elsewhere on Instagram and Twitter.

"Ok so everyone knows the AIDS epidemic was just a mass AZT poisoning, right?" said Patrick Gunnels, a former Libertarian candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, in a June 2 tweet.

An estimated 40 million people worldwide have died due to AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic in the 1980s, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data (archived here). AZT, also known as zidovudine, was the first antiviral drug used for HIV infections, which can lead to AIDS if untreated.

The therapy has serious side effects -- and LGBTQ activists criticized Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), for his initial response to the epidemic and his promotion of AZT. But researchers and public health authorities told AFP the drug did not kill most AIDS patients.

"I can tell you without reservation that the claims you cite about AZT are utterly false," said Dani Bolognesi, a professor emeritus at Duke University whose laboratory contributed to the medication's discovery as an HIV treatment.

What is AZT?

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved AZT in 1987. The New York Times reported at the time that the decision was "one of the speediest approvals on record."

Scientists originally developed AZT in the 1960s as a cancer therapy, but they put it aside after the drug did not work well in mice. Pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome resurfaced the compound after the emergence of HIV/AIDS two decades later.

The drug works by interfering with HIV's replication process, thereby decreasing the amount of virus in the blood and slowing the progression of the disease, according to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) (archived here).

But AZT is not perfect -- it has a number of severe side effects, including liver problems, blood disorders and muscle disease, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of AIDS Research (archived here). And in 1989, three teams of researchers detected HIV strains resistant to the drug.

"In some people taking AZT alone, drug resistance developed in a matter of days," the NIAID says on its website (archived here). "Scientists thus tested whether combining drugs would make it difficult for the virus to become resistant to all the drugs simultaneously."

Today, the drug is "no longer commonly used or recommended as an HIV treatment in adults and adolescents," according to the NLM. However, AZT is often used in combination with dozens of other medications approved to treat the virus.

"Without the benefits to patients that AZT demonstrated, you would not have the arsenal of antivirals that have reduced a death sentence to a chronic manageable disease," said Bolognesi of Duke.

'A significant breakthrough'

Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in a June 7 email that while AZT "did have side effects and limitations, it was still considered a significant breakthrough in the early years of HIV/AIDS treatment."

Claims that AZT was responsible for most AIDS deaths are "not supported by scientific evidence," she added.

FDA spokesperson Chanapa Tantibanchachai agreed, saying in a June 7 email that the claims shared online "are not accurate." She pointed to the agency-approved package label (archived here) for Retrovir, the drug's brand name.

The label says that in trials conducted between 1986 and 1989, "monotherapy with Retrovir as compared with placebo reduced the risk of HIV-1 disease progression." A 1987 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (archived here) also found trial participants who received AZT died at a much lower rate compared to those who received a placebo.

The NLM says AZT could cause "life-threatening damage to the liver and a potentially life-threatening condition called lactic acidosis (buildup of lactic acid in the blood)." But "attributing most AIDS deaths to AZT is misleading," according to Nordlund from the CDC.

"HIV/AIDS is a complex disease that attacks the body's immune system, and its progression can lead to various complications and opportunistic infections," she said. "AZT was just one component of the evolving treatment strategies for HIV/AIDS, and its use has significantly evolved over time."

She added that "a variety of factors contribute to AIDS-related mortality, including late diagnosis, limited access to healthcare, social factors and co-infections."

"It is crucial to consider the broader context and advancements in HIV/AIDS treatment when analyzing the impact of specific drugs," Nordlund said.

AFP has fact-checked other false and misleading claims about HIV/AIDS here.