|
*WARNING: CONTAINS
GRAPHIC IMAGES
[FTW can't cover
everything. But when we get wind of an especially egregious bit of
journalistic villainy, we like to smack the bully in his smug face.
Here, a brave investigative reporter named Liam Scheff went
undercover in a clinic that houses orphans; he discovered extensive
medical abuse and an embittering disregard for the wellbeing of the
kids - including force-feeding of drugs whose toxic side effects
were already acknowledged by the manufacturers. Anybody who knows
the stories of authoritarian medicine from Tuskegee to Auschwitz
will recognize the smell of moral death here. What you're smelling
is the perilous mixture of bureaucracy, technology, and racism that marks the nadir of
human activity - it is the worst we can do.
If that sounds harsh, read Scheff's
original report, "The
House That AIDS Built."
But the Paper of Record prefers to
swat the gadfly:
Whatever the outcome, the
controversy has already demonstrated the power of a single person
armed only with access to the Internet and an incendiary story to
put major institutions on the defensive. The story taps a
combustible mix of fears: the suspicions of some activists that
AIDS is not necessarily caused by H.I.V. and that AIDS drugs do
not necessarily help, and the belief of some black people that the
medical establishment does not always have their interests at
heart.
That will not do. AIDS activists do
not merely "suspect," and Black people do not merely "believe," that
there is something wrong with the "major institutions" of corporate
pharmacology in the United States. Bona fide researchers and
investigators like Christine Maggiore can be heard
explaining this all the time. But these two NYT writers can't hear
it - maybe the roar of the gravy train is too loud. -
FTW]
Another Attack on Authentic
Investigative Journalism
An Open Letter to the New York
Times in Defense of Liam Scheff
by
Michael Kane, Jamey Hecht, and
Michael C. Ruppert
janscott@nytimes.com, leslie@nytimes.com, letters@nytimes.com
In the July 17, 2005, piece titled "Belated Charges Ignite Furor Over AIDS Drug
Trial," by Janny Scott and Leslie Kaufman, the New York
Times seemingly accuses journalist Liam Scheff of having
fabricated the findings of his report regarding the forced drugging
of Black and Latino children at the Incarnation Children's Center
(ICC). Despite their multiple known and admitted toxicities, these
drugs were administered through tubes surgically inserted in the
children's stomachs.
Your claim that there is no "official
evidence" presented in Mr. Scheff's reports is simply false.
First, Mr. Scheff shows that the drugs
being given to these children have extremely toxic side effects,
which are listed by the manufacturer on the packaging. For example,
Nevirapine (Viramune), manufactured by Boeringer-Ingelheim, lists
the following warnings:
"Patients should be informed of:
the possibility of severe liver disease or skin reactions
associated with Viramune that may result in
death."
"Severe, life-threatening and in
some cases fatal hepatotoxicity [liver damage], including hepatic
necrosis [liver death] and hepatic failure, has been reported in
patients treated with Viramune."
"Severe,
life-threatening skin reactions, including fatal
cases…have included cases of Stevens-Johnson syndrome,
toxic epidermal necrolysis [skin death]…"
Nevirapine is a drug given to pregnant African women who test HIV positive. And
here's what toxic epidermal necrolysis actually looks like:
A baby with Steven-Johnsons Syndrome. SJS can be
caused by Nevirapine.
Steven-Johnsons Syndrome or Toxic
Epidermal Necrolysis related to Nevirapine.
Two related European studies on
Nevirapine toxicity:
http://www.altheal.org/pdf/nevirapine1.pdf
http://www.altheal.org/pdf/nevirapine2.pdf
In fact, all of the drugs given
at ICC have known toxicities which the manufacturers themselves
admit. This is most certainly true for AZT, whose side effects are
amply documented in the medical literature: they include liver
swelling, severe anemia, muscle wasting, fat degeneration, and blood
toxicity, all of which appear on the manufacturer's label.
Mr. Scheff interviewed ICC's medical
director, Dr. Katherine Painter, where she stated that inserting a
surgical tube into a child's abdomen to force them to take drugs is
done "when other interventions to help a child take a medicine by
mouth have failed."
So when the children don't want to take
drugs with known toxicities, a surgical tube forces them to ingest
them against their will.
The Times states that Mr.
Scheff "claims" children are being "force-fed" drugs. This is not a
mere claim by Mr. Scheff; it is confirmed by the medical director of
ICC. Tube-feeding drugs directly into the stomach is certainly a
form of "force feeding," especially if there is no parental consent.
In some cases, children were forced to
stay at ICC if their guardian refused to administer the drugs. Such
a guardian is deemed a "negligent parent." This is the case with
Mona Newberg who is no longer the legal guardian of her niece's
daughter Dana. At the time Mr. Scheff wrote the article, 16 year old
Dana was removed from her aunt's home into ICC. Her brother Sean had
been remanded to ICC for refusing to take medications. Sean was
interviewed in the BBC film "Guinea Pig Kids" in which he talked
about his desire to quit the medication regimen:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_world/4035345.stm
Mr. Scheff also interviewed Nurse
Jacklyn Herger, who had worked at ICC throughout the 90's. She
adopted two HIV positive children from ICC and confirmed to Mr.
Scheff that it wasn't until she took the two children off the
drugs that their health started to improve. Herger concluded
that the drugs "not only weren't helping the girls, they were making
them ill."
She also confirmed that ICC had been
conducting clinical trials since the early 1990's. ICC is always
conducting multiple clinical trials, as was confirmed by Dr.
Katherine Painter in an interview with Mr. Scheff.
Thanks to Mr. Scheff's report, the Department of
Health and Human Services Office of Human Research Protections
investigating the clinical trials on Black and Hispanic orphans at
ICC has found that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital acted unethically.
In the Times article, you
write:
All this is happening despite the fact that
there is little evidence that the trials were anything but a
medical success.
Oh really?
Where is the evidence that the trials
were a success? The Times states:
By 2000, the number of children
under 20 who died of AIDS in the city that year dropped to 13 from
more than 100 per year less than a decade
before.
However, the following is also admitted
in your article:
In March, the child welfare agency
handed its critics new ammunition. It revised its count of the
number of children in the trials, to 465 from 89, saying it had
discovered an additional box of documents in the
basement.
If there were nearly 400 children at ICC
who were 'unknown' because their documentation was "in the
basement," can it honestly be said that we know how many of them
died in 2000 when the overwhelming majority didn't even have an
accessible file? Many of these children were orphans. If they died,
few people outside of ICC would be likely to learn of it.
Would it be in ICC's interest to cover
up such deaths?
Still, you feel very safe in stating
that, "many (at ICC) said they remembered no fatal reactions." But a
source told Mr. Scheff that two children at ICC did in fact die
while Scheff was investigating the Center. He shared that source's
name with you so that the Times could follow up with due
diligence, but that does not seem to have happened. Why no mention
of this? To repeat: you were given the contact information for the
source of Mr. Scheff's claim regarding the two deaths. Did you
attempt to contact that source?
Perhaps the Department of Health and
Human Services Office of Human Research Protections will be able to
conduct a proper investigation and determine once and for all who is
telling the truth here and who has a hidden agenda.
It seems the position of the
Times is that Black and Latino children were indeed forced
to take drugs with known toxicities against their will, but that
this was done for their own good.
In closing, one of the biggest
bombshells put forth by Mr. Scheff comes from ICC's own published
history:
"Early in the [AIDS]
epidemic, HIV disease of childhood was considered to be a downhill
course leading to death. But in the late 1980's, before AZT was
available, many very ill children admitted to ICC got dramatically
better with proper nurturing and high quality medical and nursing
care."
If ICC has documented this, then why in
God's name are they now forcing toxic drugs into the stomachs of
Black and Latino children in Washington Heights, NY? Cui
Bono?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Michael Kane
Jamey Hecht
Michael
C. Ruppert
From The
Wilderness Publications
***
Liam Scheff's
series on ICC can be accessed here:
http://www.altheal.org/toxicity/toxicity.htm
The Times report can be read
here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/nyregion/17trials.html?ei=5094
&en=b1d5d7b52f5aab43&hp=&ex=1121572800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print.com
Here is Liam's response to the
Times report:
NY Times To The Rescue!
16 Jul 2005
Liam Scheff
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C.
Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those
who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes.
Just when you thought that those poor
folks at the NIH and Columbia University could find no one to stick
up for them for using orphans in clinical trials….Here Comes The
New York Times!
So, Are Columbia University and the NIH
the good cops for offering AZT to orphans through
no-chewing-required tubes?
Or, am I the bad cop for blowing the
whistle on forced-surgery on orphans as part of AZT and Nevirapine
Trials?
Read on and see….
Once you've figured it out, feel free to
write me at liamscheff@yahoo.com and/or
write the New York Times, for making us all feel better
about not worrying about it:
letters@nytimes.com
In response to NY Times article on ICC:
Dear Editor,
Thanks for covering the Incarnation
Children's Center story.
You might have showed a little bias in
your reporting, however.
If I didn't know better, I'd say from
reading what you wrote that I, Liam Scheff, independent journalist,
somehow managed to get everyone who covered the story - the Alliance
for Human Resource Protection, the New York Post, the UK
Observer, and the BBC - all to dispense with their
fact-checking and research departments and take my 'word' for what I
discovered at ICC.
That's quite a remarkable story.
I'm sure you'll stick to it, but it's
far from true.
Your piece claimed that I presented no
'official evidence' in my reporting on Incarnation Children's
Center. In fact, I've presented piles of official evidence - NIH
clinical trial documents, drug manufacturer's package inserts and
warning labels, multiple citations from the Physician's Desk
Reference, NIH and FDA policy papers on the use of wards of the
state - to name a few.
You wrote that I made claims in
my article about the death of two children at ICC. I was reporting
from sources, one of whom I made available to the New York
Times reporters after they interviewed me. I stand by that
claim, and those sources.
You generously quoted Dr. Stephen
Nicholas on the helpful nature of AZT in preventing mother-to-child
transmission of AZT. You didn't, however, bother to quote the
medical literature.
There are several studies on AZT and
transmission. The NIH study Nicholas quoted (ACTG 076) is the only
one with a significantly favorable outcome. Other mainstream studies
on AZT rate it similar to or worse than placebo or no treatment
regarding maternal HIV transmission (for a list of citations on AZT
see http://www.aras.ab.ca/azt.html ).
You also omitted reporting on the
consistent downgrading of AZT (also called Zidovudine) in the
medical literature - from "life-saving AIDS drug" to a drug which
actually increases the rate of disease progression and death in
children born to mothers who were given AZT.
There are so many contradictions in the
medical literature regarding AZT and other AIDS drugs, you have to
work hard to ignore them (find a few below).
Finally, you did not mention that I
interviewed the medical director of ICC Dr. Catherine Painter,
who told me, in no uncertain terms, how the medication regimen would
be enforced if a child was unable to swallow pills which tend to
cause abdominal distress (vomiting and diarrhea). The method, I was
told, is a surgery to implant a gastric tube into the abdomen of
these children, for the purpose of strict adherence to the drug
regimen.
It's one thing to say that AZT is a
life-saving drug and that these orphans have been treated with the
highest standard of care. It's another to print it as fact in the
pages of the New York Times, without reporting the significant
evidence to the contrary. Instead of digging to the roots of this
story, you have instead successfully colored it against further
investigation in your pages. And that's a shame for people who think
you really are the paper of record.
Sincerely,
Liam Scheff
Independent
Journalist
Seattle, Washington
Here are some examples of AZT in the med
lit:
"The probability of developing
severe disease at 3 years of life was significantly higher in
children born to ZDV+ [Zidovudine, AZT treated] mothers than in
those born to ZDV- [no AZT] mothers…The same pattern was observed
for severe immune suppression…
Finally, survival probability
was lower in children born to ZDV+ [AZT treated] mothers compared
with children born to ZDV- [no AZT] mothers. "
Rapid
disease progression in HIV-1 perinatally infected children born to
mothers receiving zidovudine monotherapy during pregnancy. AIDS.
13(8):927-933, May 28, 1999.
"Children of study women who were
prescribed ZDV [Zidovudine, AZT] had increased adjusted odds of any
anomaly…[T]he lack of data on potential adverse effects of this
therapy is still a concern….
Babies whose mothers had ZDV [AZT]
exposure during pregnancy had a greater incidence of major
malformations than those whose mothers did not.
"
Newschaffer CJ et al. Prenatal Zidovudine Use and
Congenital Anomalies in a Medicaid Population. J Acquir Immune Defic
Syndr. 2000 Jul 1; 24(3): 249-256.
"The study cohort included 92
HIV-1-infected and 439 uninfected children…Antiretroviral therapy
(nonprotease inhibitor) was independently associated with FTT
[Failure to Thrive] in our cohort…
ZDV [Zidovudine, AZT],
in particular, alters mitochondrial metabolism and may have direct
nutritional effects "
Miller TL et al. Maternal and infant
factors associated with failure to thrive in children with
vertically transmitted Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 infection: the
prospective, P2C2 Human Immunodeficiency Virus Multicenter study.
Pediatrics. 2001 Dec; 108(6): 1287-96.
| 
