Gilead and the BBC, a marriage made in hell

The BBC's Big Pharma-connected medical editor blocks questions on WPATH coverage

Fergus Walsh

When I said to Sarah Smith on my infamous Newsnight interview that Nazis* and trans activists had in common that they both enjoyed experimenting on kids, Smith treated me like I had lost my mind. But the #WPATHFiles revealed the shocking truth of that even before the Cass Review. This was an ideological, radicalised group of men conducting hormonal and surgical experiments on children, adolescents and vulnerable adults.

The documents revealed that WPATH members have been administering irreversible treatments to patients, including minors and those with severe mental health issues, without fully informed consent. The significance of the disclosures within the files is immense, especially after the Cass Report slammed the weak evidence base for ‘gender affirming’ treatments and called for more caution.

On March 5, 2024, a concerned member of the public—formerly a senior media professional—sent the WPATH Files to Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s Medical Editor. The files also contained damning information, including admissions from WPATH members, about the harm caused by their treatments and the influence of non-medical trans activists.

Despite the gravity and the urgency of the situation, Walsh did not respond. Six days later, on the 11th March, the same individual tried to send an email summarizing key points from an interview with Mia Hughes, the author of the WPATH report, only to discover that their address had been blocked.

But there’s more. It turns out that Walsh is married to Dr. Véronique Walsh, the vice president of Gilead Sciences UK and Ireland. Gilead Sciences is a pharmaceutical company that set up a $4.5 million fund to “to improve the safety, health, and wellness of the transgender community, particularly in light of the disproportionate impact of HIV on transgender individuals”.

What motives might a pharmaceutical company have for spreading trans ideology?

$4.5 million sure pays for a lot of ‘wellness’. Gilead uses its financial resources to establish itself as a dedicated ally to the ‘transgender community’, which is really a collection of autistic, troubled, abused or just confused young people, along with middle-aged autogynephiles who have nothing to do with them. Gilead’s TRANScend Community Impact Fund, launched in 2019, has distributed over $9 million to 26 organizations across the United States. While this fund ostensibly supports “strategic program development, capacity building, and direct services”, it of course does so while promoting a specific, contentious narrative around matters trans.

There’s also a $1 million partnership with grassroots, trans-led organizations, focusing on areas with high HIV infection rates. The Translatinx Network's Trans Empowerment Space project and Brave Space Alliance's HIV/AIDS prevention program have each received substantial funding. These efforts are framed as humanitarian aid, and the grants help position Gilead as a benefactor and ally within the gay and trans-identified communities.

Why HIV in particular? Well, Gilead is also exploring the potential interactions between its HIV prevention medication, Descovy, and feminizing hormone therapy.

See how much they care for gay and trans-identified people with HIV?

It is surely just a $4.5 million dollar coincidence that the promotion of gender identity could lead to a whole new market opening up for them.

Truvada

A few years ago, when the War On Women was just starting out, we published a report on Gilead, who were the subject of a mass tort, alleging that the company withheld safer HIV/AIDS drugs from sufferers and manipulated patent timing for profit.

Gilead was accused of deliberately withholding a safer version of its HIV/AIDS drugs for over a decade to maximize profits. The lawsuit claimed (or claims, as the case is ongoing) that Gilead knew about a safer formulation called tenofovir alafenamide fumarate (TAF) before 2005 but continued to market the more toxic tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) drugs until 2015.

TDF-based drugs, including Truvada, Viread, Atripla, Complera, and Stribild, allegedly caused serious complications such as chronic kidney disease, acute kidney injury, osteopenia, osteoporosis, and bone fractures. The company was accused of withholding clinical trial results and adverse event reports from the FDA, which showed that TDF drugs caused more serious complications than reported.

Gilead allegedly engaged in a patent-timing scheme, waiting to introduce the safer TAF drugs until the patents on TDF drugs were about to expire, thereby extending their market dominance until 2031.

The lawsuit estimated that Gilead earned $36 billion from sales of the older, more toxic medications between 2001 and 2015. As of May 2023, over 3,500 patients had joined the legal battle as plaintiffs. In June 2024, Gilead reached an agreement in principle to settle the federal TDF litigation for up to $40 million, covering approximately 2,625 plaintiffs.

$36 billion. That’s the kind of money at stake here, and in the light of it, the $4.5m donated to the trans community looks like nothing more than an advertising budget.

The BBC and Fergus Walsh

Fergus Walsh served as the BBC’s medical correspondent from 2004 to 2020, when he took over as medical editor for BBC News. In the years leading up to his appointment and since, the BBC has produced only one major investigation into the use of puberty blockers and the ideological basis of ‘trans healthcare’. This was the Newsnight investigation into the Tavistock by Deborah Cohen and her producer Hannah Barnes, the genesis of her acclaimed book ‘Time To Think’. With a scandal of such proportions, you would think BBC News would have turned its attention to follow-up stories, but the BBC’s interest in the issue, never what you might call ‘burning’, disappeared altogether on her exit.

And now Walsh is blocking senior industry professionals trying to alert him to the WPATH Files. Why would he do this? The Files exposed utter disregard for patient welfare and scientific rigor within the organisation, and Dr.Hilary Cass made similar points in her final report. They demonstrated that clinicians knew they were causing harm to their patients and that minors undergoing experimental medical treatment could not fully grasp the lifelong consequences of "gender-affirming care."

Despite this, the treatments continued.

What possible reason could Fergus Walsh have for ignoring this pivotal story?

Furthermore, given the contentious nature of the gender debate, how is it not at least a potential conflict of interest that the BBC’s medical editor has such close ties with a pharmaceutical company pulling in 27 billion dollars a year, a company whose prospects for increased profits stems from convincing autistic, abused, troubled teenagers that they have a ‘transgender identity’, thus potentially making them medical patients for life?

For years now, the BBC’s handling of the trans debate has been a disgrace. Prominent voices like Helen Joyce, Maya Forstater, Stella O’Malley, and Kellie-Jay Keen have been glaringly absent, even from shows like ‘Women’s Hour’. Their coverage reeks of bias, and this habit of lying by omission has done great damage to the BBC’s reputation.

As for Fergus Walsh, it’s clear that the WPATH Files aren’t going away. On Wednesday, the White House was forced to officially announce that it “does not support surgery for minors.” Why was this necessary? Because trial documents had just come to light that Biden’s crossdressing Assistant Secretary for Health and father of two, ‘Rachel Levine’ had argued that there be no age restrictions to trans surgeries whatsoever. In an interview, Levine stated that he was glad he transitioned later in life because otherwise, he wouldn’t have had his children. Now he puts his efforts into ensuring that other people’s children will never have the same chance of a family that he did.

It’s a major scandal. And I believe that the BBC’s failure to cover the release and significance of the files, combined with Walsh’s connections to Gilead Sciences, has the potential to be an equivalent one.

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My thanks to SEEN IN JOURNALISM, Douglas Bulloch and RIPNutmeg for their tweets which alerted me to this story.

*You know, I thought again of Sarah Smith shouting NAZI at me when I read in the files that WPATH doctors discussed giving a homeless man vaginoplasty, a procedure first carried out by Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt, who went on to join the Luftwaffe, and conducted hypothermia experiments on prisoners at Dachau.