Episode 3: Red Flags and Green Lights

Serum: Episode 3: Red Flags and Green Lights

Grant Hill: The date is April 12, 2004.

The location… an “undisclosed military hospital” somewhere in Ghana. Dr. Gary Davis is wearing a shirt and tie, and he is talking to four patients.

Gary Davis: In about eight weeks, the virus will start disappearing in your blood. And your blood counts will start coming up in 12 weeks. That’s a very short period of time. 

GH: One by one, they roll up their sleeves.

GD: One two, three four…husband and wife..We are trying to eliminate the virus totally from your body….that’s what this medicine is about.

GH: Davis is holding a large syringe.

He plunges the needle into the first patient’s arm. It takes some effort. The doctor’s hands tremble as he struggles to get the liquid out.

All of this is captured in a video, taken by an American photographer named Doug Henderson.

Doug Henderson: And the syringe looked like something you’d use on a horse.

GH: Doug zoomed in on this large needle. The substance inside.. thick and white, like mucus an alien might cough up.

The faces of the patients make it clear: the process hurt even worse than it looked.

Though, as far as Doug could tell at the time, the pain was worth it.

DH: And within an hour or two, these people seemed to feel better to start moving easier. And by the third day, these people were just ecstatic and happy and feeling good and ready to do stuff

GH: Within a year, these four patients – who had gotten the injection – would go missing. Doug would be asked to delete any record of this ever happening from the internet. And Gary Davis, the doctor behind it all would begin to worry he too might disappear.

DH: He was paranoid. Everybody was out to get him. He didn’t trust anybody. 

MUSIC

GH: From WHYY’s The Pulse in Philadelphia and Local Trance Media, this is SERUM. I’m Grant Hill.

My conversation with Rocky Thomas had revealed two big surprises:

First, she admitted for the first time ever that she hadn’t stolen the serum from Gary Davis to give to her daughter, Precious. She said the doctor was  in on it, he was OK with Precious receiving the unapproved Aids treatment.

The second thing was that Rocky claims she was able to get her hands on more serum long after the doctor’s death, when she says her daughter’s health had taken a sudden turn for the worse. If this really happened – then the serum was still out there. Somebody – somewhere – had it, or was making it.

Precious was still not returning my messages so I couldn’t ask her about it.

Rocky would not name the person who gave the serum to her this second time, only that the serum arrived in the mail.

Rocky Thomas: My daughter picked it up from the post office, got it to me. 

GH: And that whoever this person was, they were close to Davis.

RT: They worked right side-by-side together.

GH: I was confident the source of the serum was  from Oklahoma – that was Gary Davis’ home base. According to Jeff Nix, the attorney who had fought for the serum in court – Gary Davis had given the serum to more than one patient in Tulsa.

Jeff Nix: Gary was looking into treating busloads of people.

GH: But because of the current pandemic, traveling to Tulsa wasn’t an option at the moment.

Still I couldn’t shake the question – who was making or distributing this serum? Was there some kind of underground market for it?

It got me thinking about one of the news reports I watched about Precious Thomas – the most recent one that aired in 2009.

Not only did it feature Rocky and Precious talking about the serum.

But there was this whole other side to this story…an interview with someone who wasn’t in the previous news stories…a photographer from just outside of Tulsa named Doug Henderson.

As far as I could tell, he was the last person who had seen the serum in action. But – the place he had seen it was thousands of miles away from home, in Africa.

News anchor: This is an incredible as well as very controversial story. And it all started with a photographer who met a Tulsa doctor in Africa. Now that doctor claimed to have a cure for AIDS. In fact, the national media have covered parts of this story over the years.

GH: After rewatching the clip, I had so many questions for Doug Henderson – not just whether he knew who gave Rocky more serum – but about the doctor’s work in Africa – how and why had he ended up there?

It seemed strange – because in the years before Doug met Gary Davis, the doctor actually appeared to be making real progress at home in the U.S.

It was the beginning of a new millennium, and what seemed like a new chapter for Davis and his goat serum.

Despite the underwhelming reaction at the NIH, Rocky’s very public revelation that the serum had made Precious undetectable in 1998, thrust the doctor and his AIDS treatment into the spotlight – earning him a profile in the Washington Post and air time on local TV news.

Elected officials were now vowing to advocate for the serum in Washington.

It all amounted to a Memorandum of Understanding between Gary Davis and the NIH. researchers there were still doubtful the serum would work, but they promised to help the doctor “go back to square one,” run some lab tests, and see what came of it. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci who had previously criticized the serum – was in support.

This was a small, but important victory for the family physician from Oklahoma.

Davis had even begun speaking more freely about patients who had been treated with his serum and had seen success with it.

It wasn’t the type of evidence he needed to secure a clinical trial with the FDA, but he had a roadmap now.

If there was ever a chance of Davis gaining legitimacy for his serum, it was then. The doctor had to make the most of his moment in the sun in the states.

So again, what brought Gary Davis to Africa, just four years later? What was he doing there? I was hoping Doug Henderson had an answer.

MUSIC

GH: How often do you get calls about this?

DH: I haven’t kept count but I get one or two a year and have for a number of years here…a longtime. 

GH: Doug wasn’t surprised that I was interested to speak with him. Thanks to that past news coverage, he receives calls from strangers every so often, wanting to know more about Davis and his serum.

DH: The majority are people that the standard AIDS treatment is not working and they are in a desperate situation and hoping to connect up with this and I just don’t have anything to offer them. It’s pretty heartbreaking but it’s all I can say about that. 

GH: Doug doesn’t get annoyed by these unsolicited calls. He can sympathize, not just because of what he saw in Ghana with Gary Davis. Doug’s brother-in-law died of AIDS in 1997.

DH: Well, you know, you would like to do something and have some ray of hope to offer people, but I just don’t. I’m not a medical person. I’m a photographer, and all I can tell you is this: what I witnessed.

GH: Doug still has trouble making sense of what exactly he witnessed in Ghana. But he does know what led him there – or rather, who led him there: a spiritual leader, who was preaching at one of the biggest churches in Tulsa at the time…

MUSIC

[Singing and leading choir]

Carlton Pearson: Somebody telling me one time, I don’t wanna be a christian cause that means I gotta stop. I just said we haven’t stopped dancing we just changed partners.

GH: This is Bishop Carlton Pearson, a Christian minister – and if you don’t run in religious circles, I can’t stress this enough, he is a huge deal.

Netflix turned his story into a movie.

[Clip from movie]

Actor: That’s not the god that we worship…no that god loves us all!

GH: When Carlton Pearson was young, he attended Oral Roberts University…was mentored by the famous (or infamous) televangelist himself, but later in life, Pearson became persona non grata in the buckle of the bible belt, and in parishes around the country. He broke from his church by preaching the gospel of inclusion – the belief that people of all faiths can go to heaven.

He’s charismatic and an incredibly talented singer and performer. Doug and his wife were charmed by it all and they joined a very small group of white attendees at Carlton’s services in Tulsa – a town where faith was extremely important and incredibly segregated. Here’s Doug:

DH: I think partly because I stuck out like a sore thumb, I ended up getting acquainted with Pearson and we became friends, and let’s see, that first trip to Africa we were over there for almost a month, and you travel with one person for a month in a foreign country, you get to know them pretty well.

GH: It was the spring of 2004. Carlton Pearson was scheduled to speak at a major AIDS rally in Durban, South Africa. And he had asked Doug to come along and document the trip.

I reached out to Bishop Pearson..It feels a little weird calling him Carlton. Trying to get in touch with him was like trying to call the president. I had to go through an intermediary before I was eventually connected.

CP: Ok, you’ve spoken already to Doug Henderson?

GH: Carlton Pearson told me that right before he and Doug were supposed to leave for the rally in South Africa, he got a phone call from a local doctor he hardly knew.

CP: When he called me I was out of town and it came up on my cell phone. Not very many people I had my private number, but I didn’t know it was him. He had a reputation of being generous and helping people who don’t have insurance or coverage and he was just everybody’s hero in that sense.

GH: The two had met before, but it had been years since they spoke. Still, the doctor wasn’t shy about why he was calling.

CP: He said, ‘I think the time has come, it’s time for me to tell you and for you, and you can do with this information, whatever you want, but I feel like you need to know.’ And I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘I’ve, I’ve got a cure for AIDS. And it’s important and impacting for the world. And I don’t, I don’t know what you will do, but I think you will know what to do when I share this with you.’ And so he kind of caught me off guard with that. I kind of have a little bit of like, sure you and everybody else has a cure for AIDS. But since I’m going to be in the country, [laughs] I’ll go see. I didn’t expect much.

GH: Carlton wasn’t sure where Davis was calling from. But the doctor wanted the bishop to meet him in Ivory Coast, a country in West Africa.

Davis hoped Carlton could use his celebrity to help spread the word about his work. Despite his doubts, Carlton agreed and a plan formed quickly. Carlton and his photographer Doug were to travel to South Africa for the rally, then to Davis right after.

The rally went off without a hitch. But Carlton says they were not prepared for what awaited them when they landed in Ivory Coast.

CP: You know, it was almost like a setup, Grant, because when I got there they met my car with… there were soldiers and guns and crazy stuff and took me to this private getaway where he was hidden in this condo and it was a nice condo.

GH: Tensions in Ivory Coast were high. The country was nearing the end of the First Ivorian Civil War. And the HIV prevalence rate was spinning out of control. The year before, in 2003, the UN had estimated that somewhere between five to ten percent of adults in the country were living with HIV or AIDS.

New breakthrough treatments had dramatically reduced AIDS deaths in the United States, but – those treatments, and the infrastructure needed to combat HIV, were not really available in sub-saharan Africa then, where AIDS was claiming millions of lives each year.

The ghosts of colonialism – poverty and war – haunted the region’s response. Evidenced by what Gary Davis faced at the time in Ivory Coast.

Despite the ongoing conflict, the government in control at the time had arranged a deal with Davis. They would help fund the development of the serum, and it was unclear to Doug and Carlton what they wanted in return.

By the time the bishop and the photographer arrived at the walled-off compound where Davis had been working with the serum – the war had already impacted the project. Here’s Doug.

DH: Nobody could move around. You can’t go anywhere or do anything. The government, they’re still trying to restore order so any testing or anything is just stopped. 

GH: But if Gary Davis was worried about the future of the project, he didn’t show it right off the bat. The doctor was pleasant and, considering, you know, the whole situation, he seemed like a relatively ordinary guy.

DH: He was fairly reserved – has a shaved head and a big smile and is all maybe average height is fairly stout, not skinny, but not fat. 

GH: The doctor wasn’t alone either. Another American was holed up in the compound with him.

 

DH: He had an assistant who was a fairly attractive blonde woman, which seemed flighty to me.

GH: Her description matched that of the woman in the video Sherman had posted on his YouTube channel. Carlton remembers her as well.

CP: There was a white woman there. She knew me and she was from Texas, and she was smart. And she told me that, but she was more vocal than he was sort of protecting him and his image and the whole idea. It was somewhat secretive.

GH: She said her name was Linda Riviera and Doug says she was a staunch believer in Davis and the serum.

DH: She was so convinced of this cure’s validity that she left everything to come help Dr. Davis. She said that even her father had become ill and died and she had not been able to even go to the funeral because she was in Africa with Dr. Davis.

GH: Gary Davis and Linda briefed them on the project and some new results they had just received.

DH: They got some reports back, some lab reports, and the way that they told the story, the government had given them 100 military people who had tested positive for HIV, various stages, to try this serum on. And that here were the results and it was a stunning success. And everything was great and see here all the numbers. The evidence they were presenting meant absolutely nothing to Pearson or me. We don’t… had nothing to gauge any of that by. 

GH: But the news meant a lot to the doctor and his assistant.

DH: She was ecstatic to the point of tears at this. And Dr. Davis was smiling somewhat, maybe even a little smug. He said he knew it would do this and he wasn’t surprised at all. Oh, okay.

GH: Over the next few days there, Davis told them about his dream from God and explained how the serum worked with a PowerPoint presentation and crude computer animations. Here’s Carlton.

CP: He just broke it down. He was witty and funny and he was drinking a lot. He was drunk most of the time, to be honest with you.

GH: This was the first time I heard that Gary Davis had a problem with alcohol. But as far as Carlton could tell, at this point in the doctor’s life, his drinking didn’t seem to be making much of a difference. After all, he just received remarkable results from testing the serum on military people.

CP: He could talk very soberly and very direct and I was pretty intrigued with his mind. But there was a sense that things could suddenly end. 

GH: Something was not right. Davis pulled Carlton aside.

MUSIC

CP: He just opened up to me as if he thought he was going to die and or be killed, and he wanted to pass this on to me. He said that the John Gotti of London or Britain was after him. He said that everybody wanted this and the government was afraid and Fauci didn’t want the news out. He actually called Dr. Fauci while I was there, and there’s this real verbal, profane conversation, a lot of cursing and anger. And he was convinced that Fauci had no intentions of ever making the cure available to people, just the treatment.

GH: While the doctor seemed afraid Carlton said Davis wasn’t totally consumed by his fears. Like the drinking, he was able to work through it all. His problem was that the civil war was threatening to shut his work down completely.

Carlton and Doug couldn’t do anything about that. But they could try to find backers in a more hospitable research environment.

DH: We left to our… our next connection which was in Ghana. 

GH: The two had planned on visiting Ghana after their brief stop to see Davis. Carlton, the jet-setting bishop he is, had friends there, and connections with influential people. He wanted to make the most of his time in the region. But now he and Doug had another reason to fly across the border – to see if politicians in Ghana had any interest in bringing Davis and his serum over too. They flew to the capital of Accra. Carlton still remembers the reception they got.

CP: And I, to this day, I don’t know why media came to meet my plane and were asking me questions: Why did I come to the city? And I said, I came with good news, but it’s not the normal gospel of Jesus Christ to save people. I am aware of a possible cure to AIDS and then that went crazy throughout the country.

GH: Estimates at the time projected that up to about half a million people in Ghana were living with HIV. So the enthusiasm made a whole lot of sense. Here’s Doug.

DH: And they treated us like royalty. We breezed right through customs. They were just treating us wonderfully, put us up in an incredibly nice place there on the beach.

GH: Carlton and Doug immediately shared their story of Davis with one of Carlton’s connections.

DH: He made some phone calls. And he got us an audience with John Koufor, which is the president of Ghana at the time. And in the middle of the night, we went to the presidential palace, waited outside until a caravan of motorcycles and military trucks and limousines came in. And then they brought us in and searched us and searched all our stuff.

GH: They were taken to a meeting room inside the Presidential Palace. Doug shared the photos he took of this moment with me – Carlton smiling wide in his gray suit and pink shirt, and President Kofour looking soberly at the camera.

Here’s Carlton on his meeting with the president.

CP: He was very excited when he found out we had a cure to AIDS. He just stood up. He was just so energized about it. He said, ‘I’m in charge of the region. This is fantastic news.’

GH: But bringing Gary Davis to Ghana meant getting him out of Ivory Coast, leaving behind his compound and the people who had supported his work there, and were banking on his serum.

DH:  It was understood that if the government of Cote d’Ivoire realized that he was leaving with all they had invested in him, that they wouldn’t let him go. The fact that we were able to slip them out late at night was fairly remarkable.

 

GH: Late at night, Davis and Linda, his assistant, snuck out of the compound with all their paperwork and about a dozen vials of his serum in a briefcase and hightailed it to the airport.

Somehow, possibly thanks to some backdoor dealing, Doug tells me, Davis secured two tickets on the last commercial flight out of Ivory Coast into Accra.

DH: A day or two later, we were taken to the only military hospital in Accra. 

GH: Doug says they were greeted by a three-star general and the director of one of the largest hospitals in the city, Dr. Susu Kwawukume. Everybody calls her Dr. Susu.

Once Davis arrived, things started to move fast.

DH: They brought us four people that were infected with AIDS. There was a couple, I believe in about their 30s. There was a man in his 40s. There was, I believe, a sergeant in the Ghanaian military. And Dr. Davis interviewed them, talked to them. They seem to be obviously sick. Nobody looked well, talked well, acted well, moved easily. The one man had the lesions on his skin on his legs as people in a fairly advanced AIDS sequence have.

They took, you know, vital signs and all this and Dr. Susu was, was watching this and, and I recorded the thing and videotape and all that. And then Dr. Davis pulled out these, these big vials and they brought him up hypodermic needles. The needle was huge. This serum was kind of a thick, gray liquid. And they gave each one of these people a fairly large amount of serum. It was very thick and it was very difficult to get in. It was obviously very painful.

And within an hour or two, these people seem to feel better, to start moving easier. One of the guys asked if he could get something to eat. And so that was just dandy. And then we did essentially the same thing the second day and the third day.

And by the third day, these people were just ecstatic and happy and feeling good and ready to do stuff and then were eating better and talking stronger and everything else, did not have this lethargic malaise to them that they seemed to have before. Now

all of this is real suspicious to me.

MUSIC

GH: Remember, Doug knew what HIV could do to the human body. He saw his brother-in-law go into that tunnel and never come out. The idea that Gary Davis’ serum, this dreamed up hail mary from a family physician who lived mere minutes from his home in Oklahoma, could reverse that process so quickly seemed just too good to be true.

DH: Within an hour and a half of the first injection, they are better from something like AIDS? And in three days they’re… the word we got from Dr. Susu, was their viral count was dropping and their T cells were climbing and this is just all wonderful and great and then okay. So that’s really suspicious to me. I’m a skeptic of this deal.

GH: Doug couldn’t believe his eyes or what his camera was capturing. But everybody else around him, including the patients, were celebrating. And according to the ostensibly impartial health officials on the scene, the test results confirmed it was all really happening. The patients were recovering.

DH: This Dr. Susu had never met Davis, Riviera, or myself or Pearson ever before. She had no connection, she had no skin in the game either way. 

GH: Ghanaian officials had seen enough. Carlton says a company was formed. He was going to be a majority owner along with Dr. Davis –  he says the thought was that this new serum might attract more respect locally if it came from Americans.

And Doug and Carlton say it seemed to work. The Ghanaian government promised to provide Davis with a research facility, a lab, goats and land. Doug planned to help too.

DH: The decision was made to not even mess with the FDA, the CDC or any trials or anything in the U.S. The idea was that I would set up a website and it would be sold through the internet online and this would be you know, this just a win win win situation. It would be a huge coup for Ghana as bringing this cure to the world that all of the money and brilliance of the United States in Europe had been unable to conquer and, you know, this was just a great deal. Everything sounded wonderful.

GH: Almost too wonderful. Carlton questioned if all of it was as spontaneous as it seemed.

CP: There were certain things that were synchronicities that I would not have expected. As if somebody else knew something I didn’t know. 

But their equivalent to their Surgeon General met with me. And the head of the Noguchi Institute met with me, said to me to my face, why did you wait so long? This stuff works. Where have you been? We’ve been dying over here. It was almost angry. 

GH: But the most common emotion among officials according to Doug and Carlton was joy.

CP: It was a government sanctioned experiment. And everything seemed great. The President was happy. The patients were happy. The Brigadier General was happy. So I left the country feeling pretty good that they would carry on and do the labs and start breeding goats and things like that. 

GH: Carlton and Doug flew back to the US with plans of returning when the serum was ready for launch. Doug would periodically check-in from home – see how it all was going. But, over time, back in Oklahoma, that skepticism he first felt in Ghana returned.

DH: I was able to stay in contact with Dr. Susu. But I was never able to get a straight answer out of her like I wanted.

GH: What were you asking her?

DH: How are these people doing and what, what documentation have you got it, and what, what is your viral count… these things. And she would just say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, they’re fine. They’re doing well. Don’t worry, it’s okay.’

GH: You were looking for this information as you were kind of preparing to set up this website?

DH: Yes. 

GH: Were you worried about setting up this website without approval from the FDA? 

DH: Well, let me put it this way… out of everybody I’ve described to you, I was the most skeptical of the bunch. I was the closest thing there was brakes on this. But of what information I could get, everybody was saying this was working wonderfully.

GH: Carlton was already working on his speech to announce the release of the serum…which he planned to give in Accra.

CP: We were ready to make the announcement on the steps of the Noguchi Institute. And I was tying it in with the slaves coming from West Africa, you know, from Ghana and coming over here, and now a son of a slave comes back and brings a cure.

Dr. Davis was going to be like the “Joseph” coming back home to the homeland and feeding or taking care of his own people. 

And that’s when I found Dr. Davis. He had freaked out. He had gone through some kind of crazy mental trauma.

MUSIC

Doug says someone working with Gary Davis in Ghana called him out of the blue one day and begged him and Carlton to come back. There was a problem with the doctor. So they got on a plane to Accra.

CP: I get back. They take me from the airport to a restaurant. Dr. Davis happens to be in the restaurant. And I thought, ‘What’s he doing there? Nobody knew I was coming here.’ And there was some men around him.

DH: He had a great big bodyguard with him. Dr. Davis did not look well. Before he looked stout and healthy and confident and strong. And now he would seem to have lost weight. He looked haggard and thin. He was almost frantic. 

CP: That’s when he was talking real loud. And, and, and we had to get him out of the restaurant. We couldn’t even have a decent conversation with him.

DH: He was very angry. He was talking 90 miles an hour. You’d say he’s close to crazy. He’s the sort of person you see standing on the street corner, shouting things.

GH: It was nighttime. The restaurant was inside a hotel. So Carlton took Dr. Davis away from the upscale crowd inside, and walked him outdoors near the hotel pool. Davis paced around it in circles, as Carlton tried to keep up.

CP: He was inconsolable and uncontrollable. He was… he was paranoid. It’s like, on drugs.

GH: To be clear, Carlton doesn’t know if Davis was actually on drugs or not. But Doug tells me by then the doctor’s drinking had gotten worse. And now, Davis seemed transfixed by his fears – beyond paranoid.

DH: And of what he told us he believed that the big pharmaceuticals were trying to kill him. He believed that Ghana’s government was trying to steal his idea. That other people were trying to steal his serum. 

He said that mysteriously the lab and the living quarters he had, there had been a fire and you just barely got out with this life. And this was real mysterious how this fire started.

CP: He was yelling out, ‘Who’s there? What are you doing? What are you doing?’ That kind of thing. It’s like, somebody injected him with something and he was totally freaked out and cursing real loud. I was so disillusioned by the way he was carrying on that night and I felt somebody had thrown a wrench in the deal. 

He already told me that if anything happened to him, it was these people in different parts of the world because he just kept running from these people that were out to get him. I just read between the lines that they’d gotten to him or were getting to him. And they wanted this cure. They wanted to own the cure. And they were doing what they could to either stop it or own it.

DH: And Pearson just letting him talk, letting him decompress, trying to, you know, just ask questions and reassure him. But Davis just got wound up tighter and tighter and tighter and finally stormed off in a huff.

MUSIC

GH: The next day, Doug and Carlton visited a Ghanaian health official at the University of Accra, who reassured them that everything was going well despite Davis’ breakdown the night before. They hadn’t seen the doctor since.

DH: He told us that this was all working, the tests were coming in good and everything was great. This is the closest I’ve had to something I would consider to be a verifiable unbiased report. 

GH: Carlton asked if the serum was ready for prime time – ready for the big launch.

CP: I didn’t want to announce it to the world until I knew it was proven to be effectual. And this man said this, ‘We’ve done this before and this is the first time we’ve seen anything even close to it. This works.’ And I said, ‘So you’re ready for us to announce it? Because we wanted to announce it from Ghana and make it a big African thing.’

GH: The two were reassured the project was moving along as planned, there were just a few wrinkles that needed to be ironed out before any big official announcement. But other people Carlton and Doug talked to in Ghana expressed serious concern.

DH: We got from other people we talked to that Davis had become increasingly difficult to work with. I saw the lab that had been built for him and these healthy goats. So all of this was happening, was moving forward. 

GH: Doug asked Dr. Susu at the hospital – how are the four people who were treated with the serum? The ones he captured in the video. Where were they? Dr. Susu seemed to be hedging a bit.

She told me that, well, you know it was a real stigma to have AIDS in that country and so these people that had AIDS that had received the treatment and were now doing fine, they didn’t want to come back and talk anymore because they didn’t want to be seen as having AIDS. Then we were told that one of the men had worked in the mines and that he had gone back to work in the mines, and was killed in a mining accident. 

GH: The other participants seemed to have vanished, too. Doug and Carlton never saw any of them again.

CP: It just deteriorated after that. When the doctor was that, that paranoid the night before I knew something was wrong.

MUSIC

GH: Doug and Carlton left Ghana shortly after, more confused than ever… unsure about the future of the serum – and the future of its inventor. They still hadn’t seen Gary Davis since he stormed off from the hotel pool.

DH: Sometime after that I got a call.

GH: Coming up – things take an even more dramatic turn in Ghana – the doctor disappears – and so does the evidence from the trials.

Caller: do you call recall that research?

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Excuse me? Do I recall it?

Caller: Yes.

GH: That’s still to come, on Serum

MUSIC

GH: This is Serum, I’m Grant Hill. Photographer Doug Henderson returned to the states after witnessing some erratic behavior from the doctor. Then at home, Doug says he got a call.

It was that Ghanain health official again – the one who showed Carlton and Doug that glowing report during their second visit.

Now he wanted Doug to erase everything he had documented from the internet, from his personal photography website, including any evidence that the serum had been tried on people there.

DH: He had seen some pictures that I had put on my website, and he was demanding that these pictures be taken down because the Ghanaian government did not do experiments of unlicensed, untested drugs on people. To which I said, ‘Yes, they do. Here’s the documentation to prove it.’ He further said that Dr. Davis’s stuff did not work and that this was all a big blob of nothing. And I responded, ‘This is not what you told us when we were there.’

GH: Doug refused. Then, a little while later, he got another call – this one from Dr. Susu: someone he says made a good faith effort to help the doctor in Ghana.

He says Dr. Susu called in tears. Begged him to take down the photos – said her medical license was on the line.

DH: Sometime after that I eventually took them down.

GH: You can see evidence of this backtracking from officials in Ghanaian news stories.

I looked through a lot of them – dating from 2004 to 2005.

At first, the media reports endorse the serum as a ray of hope and urge government officials to invest in it. The coverage stays positive. One report in September of 2005 even said the serum had proven to be effective in tests.

But just two days after that story was published, health officials start debunking the serum in other news outlets: saying tests were only preliminary, and only done in goats.

One official is quoted saying “We are nowhere near human trials.”

Then in November 2005, the Ghana AIDS Commission releases a “Public statement on the goat serum issue…” and – very weirdly –  it’s written as if it is co-signed by the FDA – as in the Food and Drug Administration from the United States.

It says that Davis and his supporters believed that back in the US, the FDA had withdrawn permission for the doctor to conduct human trials “due to prejudice and pressure from the pharmaceutical industry when, in fact, the scientific tests that would support such an approval had not been done.”

The statement denies that any human trials with the serum took place in Ghana – at least not a trial with official government support. It says, quote:

“The Ghana Aids Commission and the FDA hope that this statement will make it clear to all Ghanaians, who believe in our laws and the truth, that the two agencies had been doing their work faithfully. That the use of HIV/AIDS patients, as guinea pigs, for the testing of a drug which had not been approved in its country of origin and which had not undergone pre-clinical studies and production… is a violation of the laws which cannot be tolerated.”

Remember, both Doug and Carlton told me Ghanaian government officials actively supported testing on human subjects. Doug captured these tests on video.

In their statement, Ghanaian government officials acknowledge that the video exists, by they say those tests Doug captured were unsanctioned. And the photos of Carlton Pearson and President Kufour? Just a snapshot from a preliminary meeting.

The statement claims the evidence Davis provided for his serum was “totally inadequate,” though admits that one of the nation’s most prestigious medical research institutes agreed to work with Davis anyway. That they would collaborate.

And from here, things just get stranger.

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The statement claims in the evidence Davis submitted, he said the serum proved to be effective with one patient in the US.

The statement doesn’t name this patient, but at this point, the only person treated with the serum who had come forward publicly in the states was Precious Thomas, and her viral load was confirmed to be undetectable by NIH researchers.

Thanks to that, Precious Thomas was the doctor’s best evidence that serum might work. It can’t be known for sure, but most likely, Precious was the patient this statement was referring to.

So that’s why I was shocked when I saw what came next.

The statement claims there was “no scientific evidence” this unnamed US patient really had AIDS.

Now, it’s one thing to be skeptical as to whether the serum alone saved Precious. That’s totally valid. But that’s not what this statement says.

Instead, it casts doubt on whether this US patient actually had AIDS.

If this patient really was Precious, this makes no sense. At the very least, Precious really had HIV. That’s the whole reason she was being monitored by the NIH in the first place.

And then, there’s this.

Anchor: Plano, TX, good morning.

Caller: Good morning.

GH: A clip from May 9, 2005. CSPAN had 40 minutes of air time where anyone from the public could call and ask Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the NIAID, anything. Anything at all.

Caller: Dr. Fauci. I understand that you were involved in reviewing some of the early research by Dr. Gary Davis is Tulsa, Oklahoma, do you recall that research?

AF: Excuse me? Do I recall it?

Caller: Yes.

GH: So someone from Plano, TX dials in. Asks if Dr. Fauci remembers looking at Gary Davis’ research early on.

AF: Yes, it was the use of anti Sara goat anti Sara against HIV. That was claimed to have a positive impact on developing getting people to have a major decrease in their viral load.

Caller: Exactly.

AF: Right. 

GH: Then he asks about recent clinical trials with the serum in Africa.

Caller: I understand the clinical trials in Africa were good. 

FAUCI: Right.

Caller: And it does drop the viral load to zero.

AF: Yeah.

Caller: That would be the definition of a cure wouldn’t it?

AF: Yeah, with all due respect, they were not successful if we scrutinized the data. And although conceptually, it’s a reasonable idea to use antisera, it does not work in a practical way for people with HIV.

Anchor: Are there a lot of cures out there?

AF: Yes, whenever you have a devastating disease, in which there’s despair among some people, and which people run out of options with drugs, you will always and I guess it’s human nature have claims of cures of whatever mechanism.

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GH: Fauci seems to say that Gary Davis’ clinical trials in Africa were unsuccessful… that he and his team with quote “scrutinized the data.”

My question is the data from what?

Davis was never approved for a clinical trial in the states.

And according to that statement from the Ghana AIDS Commission and the FDA, no legitimate trials took place in Ghana.

I couldn’t find evidence that official trials with the serum had been published in any other country in Africa.

So what exactly was scrutinized?

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GH: Anthony Fauci still was unavailable to answer my questions about the serum.

So I reached out to the FDA, all I wanted to know was if the agency was truly involved in that statement released by the Ghana AIDS Commission – if they really had a hand in crafting it as the statement seems to imply. The agency refused to answer my question. Instead, they provided me with links to their website on health fraud scams.

I said thank you, I appreciate that. But can someone answer my question about the FDA’s involvement in the statement? No response.

So I tried to reach the Ghanain health officials mentioned in these articles, including Dr. Susu Kwawukume, the public health director Doug remained in contact with. The person Doug says begged him to take down those photos of the trials on his website.

She’s now the chief medical director of a hospital in Accra. Month after month, I’d check in with the hospital, see if she was available to talk.

And month after month, I was told by the hospital that she was on indefinite leave.

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So after all that hype, all the hope, things had fizzled out for reasons that weren’t clear… the project was dead in the water.

And Doug and Carlton had no clue about where Davis was. But there were tons of rumors about him.

DH: We heard he went to China. We heard he went to other places. Nobody seemed to know where he went. 

DH: That seemed to kind of be a pattern that somebody, some companies, some millionaire would, would want to invest in this thing, and they would get this contract already. And at the last minute, Dr. Davis would not want to sign it. The whole thing would fall apart.

GH: Then about two years after they last saw Davis, Doug and Carlton got the news: The doctor was dead – he had passed away in Tulsa.

DH: And then that he was found dead in his home by his son. Natural causes. I believe he had a heart condition. Also, I understand he may have been addicted to painkillers because of severe back problems he had.

GH: Carlton tried to figure out how Davis had died.

CP: And I said, ‘Well, what happened, was at it a stroke?’ I think they said he had a stroke. And I could understand that he might have had one because he was on all that heavy drinking and drugs and stuff. But I just heard he had a stroke and suddenly died. There was no explanation. Nobody seemed to know or even where he was when it happened.

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GH: Others were asking questions, too. Including some bombshell ones… Here’s Doug.

DH: I did later get a call from someone who explained that he was Dr. Davis’s nephew and that was real close to him, and that no one in his family had ever seen a body or went to a funeral and they believe Davis was still alive and in hiding. 

GH: Doug didn’t believe this. He thought Davis was really dead. Carlton was approached by this person too.

CP: He came to the church three or four different times, on days that when I was going to speak and tried to see me and arrangements I think had been made for him to talk to me, I don’t know what happened that it didn’t happen. He still comes around and, or calls and says, he’s the nephew, he wanted to meet with me personally, I knew it was something related to the death and the treatment. So, I’m not sure what happened and why. If I gave my approval, I said, I’ll meet with you right there on the church grounds.

GH: And still to this day he’s, he expresses interest?

CP: Yeah, yes. He wants to, he wants to tell me something.

GH: I spoke to someone who said they’re still in contact with people who worked with Davis on the serum, and that someone who was given the serum, and they said that since his death, they have provided this person with the serum.

CP: Yes. 

GH: Do you know anything about this? Or of this happening?

CP: Well, I’ve heard of it. Yeah. I’ve heard of it. He named some people that he’d been helping for years. 

Somebody out in San Francisco would fly in here. I don’t remember who it was and what the connection was. But there were several people. He did tell me that he’d been treating some people for years. And one or two of them, I think I knew, I don’t remember who they were. But I felt comfortable with that. Because he’s known for being generous. They didn’t pay him anything. You know, he didn’t charge them anything. They would give him something he said.

GH: So that would mean that the people that he’s working with, someone is still out there, making this serum and/or providing it to people in need. Have you heard of this still happening even since his death?

CP: No, I know that the lady that was with him was aware of the ingredients of a technique. She sat there during the lecture, and she’d heard it many times. 

GH: That person was Linda Riviera, the doctor’s assistant in Ivory Coast and Ghana. I had seen her in videos with Davis, in news reports.

Linda Riviera: I know most cases if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. However, I was there and I witnessed this and it is very very real.

GH: Sometimes, she’s referred to as Linda Wilmes, but it’s the same woman. Carlton believed she knew how to make the serum. Maybe she knew what happened to Davis, too.

DH: I spoke to her a time or two. I sent her copies of the pictures. 

GH: Doug kept in contact with her briefly, but he didn’t know where she was now or how to contact her either.

DH: She goes by several names. How’s that for suspicious? 

GH: Doug was obviously wary of Linda. But I wanted to speak with her myself. And, eventually, I did. We had a couple of preliminary discussions on the phone with plans on recording for the podcast once she was comfortable. She was very sweet and generous with her time. She confirmed the things Doug and Carlton had told me about Ivory Coast and Ghana, and added in some of her own very interesting stories about her time with Davis abroad. And yes, she believed Davis was really dead.

Then suddenly, for whatever reason, Linda’s opinion of me and my interest in Davis soured. She told me she wasn’t interested in talking anymore and stopped responding to me.

If Linda knew who was out there, still making or storing the serum, she was not going to tell me. Could it be her out there doing this herself? Doug didn’t seem to think so.

DH: She did not seem to have any kind of medical training. 

She claimed at one time that Dr. Davis had taught her how to make the serum and, and she could reproduce it. My knowledge that never happened. 

GH: Doug doesn’t have a whole lot of answers when it comes to Davis outside of what he experienced first hand. He didn’t know how Davis died, he didn’t know who gave Rocky more after his death, and he didn’t really know if the serum even worked as it appeared to during the trials he witnessed.

When it comes to the goat doctor, he gave up looking for answers a long time ago.

DH: I have told you to the best of my knowledge, what I saw. Now, my interpretation of this or what was factual, I guess you have figure some of that out. It’s… It’s frustrating to me that if this is real, this should be reproducible. It should be documented somewhere. If it’s not, well, that should be told also. I’m not a medical person that I could judge any of this either way. There’s plenty of red flags, but then there’s some green lights also. So I wish you the best of luck in figuring it out.

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Credits:

GH:

Serum is a production of WHYY’s The Pulse and Local Trance Media. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram @SerumPodcast. Our engineer is Charlie Kaier. Serum is produced and edited by Maiken Scott with additional editing from Liz Tung and Jad Sleiman, and support from Lindsay Lazarski and Nichole Currie. It’s written and reported by me, Grant Hill. Serum was made possible in part with support from the Commonwealth Fund. Original music for this podcast was produced by me and Brandon Tomei. Our artwork was created by Michael Dandley. Graphic design by Myth Partners in Philadelphia. Special thanks to Mary Purcell, Joe Cashman, and the Hill family for their support.

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