At a press conference on April 24, Dr Robert Gallo, at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) announces he has "isolated the probable cause of AIDS" and that it has been named HTLV-III. Dr. Gallo immediately files for a patent on a test for antibodies to the virus he claims to have found. The next day, the New York Times calls it the "AIDS Virus", and the case on causation is rather immediately closed.

(Dr. Gallo made his press conference announcement before any scientific articles were published, bypassing the peer review process. Quite disturbing is the reality that Gallo only found this "virus" in about 36% of the patients he decided had AIDS. He only found what he decided were antibodies to this virus in about 70% of the patients he decided had AIDS. These scientific reports, which appeared in the journal Science in 1984, are what convinced the scientific community and the uncritical media that HIV was the "AIDS Virus.")

The United States Health and Human Services Secretary, Margaret Heckler, confidently predicts a brief epidemic and says, "There will be a vaccine in a very few years and a cure for AIDS before 1990".

Dr. Joe Sonnabend writes in the New York Native that the question of whether HIV causes AIDS must remain an "open one."

In August, the New York Native interviews Dr. Gallo. During the interview, Dr. Gallo is challenged on the issue of AIDS causation. Regarding HIV, he states, "Why does anyone resist this data?…Nobody at high levels of science is arguing about this data."

By the end of 1984, 7,000 Americans were said to have died of AIDS.