An Open
Letter to John Kearney,
CEO of GlaxoSmithKline,South Africa
President Mbeki’s directive on 28
October 1999 that the safety of AZT be investigated
on the basis that "there is a large volume
of scientific evidence...that [AZT] is harmful to health" alerted
the South African public to the
fact that AZT is dangerously toxic.
Which shouldn't have surprised anyone, since it was synthesised
in 1961 and tried out for a couple of years
thereafter as an experimental cell poison. The reams of horrifying
medical literature to which the President was referring
are summed up in light style in my little book Debating AZT:
Mbeki and the AIDS drug controversy (*). But apart
from being very poisonous, your company is sitting on an even darker
secret about AZT: It doesn't work. It cannot and
does not have the antiretroviral effect you claim for it. Here's why.
You allege in the package insert
supplied with AZT that it's converted by
enzymes inside human cells into its active form, AZT
triphosphate. And that AZT triphosphate terminates HIV replication by
being incorporated into growing proviral DNA
chains during reverse transcription of HIV RNA. But that’s not true and
your company knows it.
In November 1986, Furman and others,
including researchers from Wellcome Research
Laboratories (a division of your company
in an earlier incarnation), reported their finding in the American
scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences that the minimum concentration of AZT triphosphate required
to inhibit proviral HIV DNA chain synthesis
significantly - in other words have an antiretroviral action - is
0.7 micromoles per million cells. (This is in the most
ideal artificial conditions in vitro, never mind the tougher real world
in vivo.) But in your company’s rush to market
the drug in 1987, after ramming it through FDA approval following completely
botched and corrupted clinical trials,
it didn't bother ascertaining whether the cells of people given AZT
are able to triphosphorylate it to such a level.
The first investigation of this only took place four years later, followed
by a dozen further published studies.
Every single study of the extent to
which patients’ cells metabolise AZT into
its active triphosphorylated form has returned
findings which reveal that they are unable to do so. Or to be more
precise, that they do so at utterly negligible levels.
Excluding the early Toyoshima study (unvalidated and slightly out
of scale with all the rest), the average finding in all
these studies is 0.14 picomoles of AZT triphosphate per million cells.
That’s five millionths of the minimum level of AZT
triphosphate determined by your own company to be necessary for the drug
to work as a nucleoside analogue reverse
transcriptase inhibitor by terminating proviral HIV DNA chain synthesis.
Why then do you claim in your AZT
package insert that "Zidovudine [AZT] is
phosphorylated in ... cells to ... the triphosphate
(TP) derivative... ", that "Zidovudine-TP acts as an inhibitor
of, and substrate for, the viral reverse transcriptase",
that "The formation of further proviral DNA is blocked by
incorporation of zidovudine-TP into the chain and
subsequent chain termination (sic)", and that AZT is thus
"an antiviral agent ... active
against ... the Human Immunodeficiency
Virus", when your crucial basic assumption about the pharmacology
of AZT – that it's triphosphorylated
within patients' cells – has been repeatedly refuted?
If the drug really stops HIV
replication by disrupting proviral HIV DNA chain
synthesis as your package insert alleges, one
would expect AZT ingestion to result in a consistent, sustained and simultaneous
fall over time in all markers conventionally
considered to indicate HIV infection levels - namely HIV DNA
("viral burden"), HIV RNA ("viral load"), detection
of p24 and reverse transcriptase ("viral isolation") and p24
antigenaemia. But all studies of
the effect of AZT on these
parameters show that the drug has no such anti-HIV effect. Which
means that AZT is all risk and no benefit.
The studies are surveyed and discussed, together with the triphosphorylation
data, in a seminal 30 000-word review of the
molecular pharmacology of the drug by Papadopulos-Eleopulos et al , published
in mid-1999 as a special supplement
to the academic medical journal Current Medical Research and Opinion
(#). You were given a copy a couple
of months after it came out. You've never responded to it.
The families and other survivors of the
thousands of people poisoned by AZT
would love to know. Their lawyers too, I’m
sure. Just one thing. In your reply addressing the triphosphorylation
issue, please spare us the "AZT has brought quality
of life to AIDS sufferers around the world" spiel. The one your company
pumped so successfully with some of its $4.7
billion marketing budget last year - resulting in AZT and 3TC sales in
the same year of $1.1 billion. Save it for the
widow and young son of a legal colleague of mine who in good health embarked
on a course of AZT and 3TC treatment
on the strength of your company's promises, immediately took very
ill on it, and then steadily wasted to a skeleton
in diapers with his muscle and gut tissue poisoned off, uncontrollably
vomiting his life away into a bucket.
ANTHONY BRINK
PIETERMARITZBURG
arbrink@iafrica.com
* Debating AZT: Mbeki and the AIDS drug
controversy can be obtained at most good bookshops in South Africa,
ordered directly from the author arbrink@iafrica.com
; 0836260945) or read online at: www.aidsmyth.addr.com/debatingazt/contents.htm
or www.virusmyth.net/aids/data2/brink/
# A Critical Analysis of AZT and its
Use in AIDS by Papadopulos-Eleopulos
et al, Current Medical Research and Opinion
Volume 15 (special supplement) is posted online at:
www.librapharm.co.uk/cmro/vol_15/supplement/main.htm
and at
www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/epazt2.htm
