Miracle Cure
“I know,” Sara replied, “but I never understood why. Clinics and doctors usually crave media attention.”
“Usually, yes. And I, for one, am never against seeing my smiling face on TV. But this is something different, Sara, something big. First, our treatment is experimental. In such cases even a rumor of success brings on expectations which probably cannot be met. Second, we are working with only forty patients, many of whom do not want their cases made public for obvious reasons. AIDS is still the evil plague in our society, one that inspires prejudice and discrimination of the highest order.”
“I see.”
“But a few new factors have entered the game.”
“Such as?”
“Money,” he stated flatly. “We’re running out of it and we need more badly. Without some public pressure on the federal government to extend our grant and without some outside donations, the clinic won’t survive much longer, and . . .” He stopped. “And there’s something else,” he said. “Something you have to swear to keep to yourself.”
“Go ahead.”
“Swear.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “I swear.”
He sighed deeply. “You’ve probably heard some of the rumors, Sara. No matter how hard we tried to keep things quiet, the word began to leak out. It started with the success of the drug on the isolated virus in the lab. Then we injected it in mice. Over time, the HIV was destroyed in virtually every instance. The same thing happened when we moved up to monkeys.”
Sara swallowed. “What are you trying to say?”
“You can’t keep something like this a secret for very long,” he continued, “and frankly speaking, we felt it was time to let the facts be known—a little bit at a time, of course.”
Her mouth dropped open. She had heard a vague rumor or two and dismissed them as wishful thinking. “Do you mean . . . ?”
He nodded. “We have found a cure, or at the very least a strong treatment, for the AIDS virus.”
“My God.”
“It doesn’t work all the time yet,” he continued quickly, “and it is not a wonder cure in the classic sense. It is a long, often painful regimen, but in a number of cases we have had great success.”
“But why would you want to keep that secret?”
He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the sweat from his face. Sara had never seen Harvey look so tense and strained. “A good question,” he replied. “HIV, the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is a very tricky bug. It was hard to know for sure if we were truly blocking its effect or if the virus was just taking it easy on us for a little while. HIV is constantly changing, mutating, even hiding inside human cells. We didn’t know about the true, long-term effects of what we were doing. Imagine, Sara, if we came out claiming to have a cure for AIDS only to find out we were wrong.”
“It would be catastrophic,” she agreed.
“To put it mildly. Plus we have the HHS to contend with.”
“The Department of Health and Human Services? What do they have to do with this?”
“Everything. They’re a giant bureaucracy and bureaucrats have a way of slowing things down to a crawl. The Public Health Service—hell, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health—all that is under the goddamn control of the Department of HHS.”
“Bureaucrats on top of bureaucrats.”
“Exactly. That’s one of the reasons we kept our safe house out of the country, where no one from Health and Human Services could interfere whenever they got bored or somebody’s ego was bent out of shape.”
“I’m not following you.”
“You know that I served as a medic in Vietnam, right?”
She nodded.
“Well, I spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia. It’s a quiet society. Mysterious. No one interferes with your business. Bruce and I decided to keep all our lab tests—tissue specimens, blood samples, that kind of thing—in Bangkok, where they would be not very accessible.”
“To avoid some of the bureaucracy?”
He nodded. “While their function is certainly justifiable, the FDA, for example, has a habit of testing drugs for years to make sure they’re safe. You’ve probably read about all the experimental drugs the FDA won’t allow AIDS patients to take.”
She nodded. “Never made much sense to me.”
“It’s a complex debate, but I agree with you. If AIDS is a terminal illness, what harm can it cause a poor bastard who’s already on death row to experiment? What we at the clinic hoped to do was to provide the FDA with so much evidence that any unnecessary delay would be prevented. At the same time we could test our compound without the panic and media attention that our results would cause.”
Sara thought for a moment. “But couldn’t you just show the government your results in secret? They’d be sure to allocate more funds once they saw some positive results.”
He smiled. “You forget that the people who decide these matters are politicians. Can you picture a politician being closemouthed about something this big? No way, Sara. They would try to milk this for all the votes it could get them.”
“Good point.”
“And one other thing. Not all the bigwigs are in favor of our program. Your father, for one.”
“My father’s objections to your clinic are different,” she snapped defensively. “If he knew that a cure was being found—”
“Perhaps I spoke too hastily,” he interrupted. “Your father is a dedicated healer and I would never question his commitment to stop human suffering. I don’t agree with his stand on AIDS, but I understand that it is a difference of opinion, not ideology. But there are others, Sara—men like that bastard Sanders and his lobotomized followers—who would do anything to stop our research.”
“But I don’t see what all this has to do with Bruce’s death. If you were so close to reaching your goal, why did he kill himself?”
Harvey lowered his head. His bloodshot and tired eyes stared down at his shoes. “That’s just the point.”
“What is?”
He fiddled with the mixing straw in his glass. “Let’s say I wanted to prove to you that we really have found a cure for AIDS. What could I show you to prove our claim beyond a shadow of a doubt?”
“Case studies.”