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GNN June 2005

A federal investigation calls drug trials on orphans unethical. Now what?

ICC) has found that the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital acted unethically.

The Associated Press reported Thursday June 16th: “The government has concluded at least some AIDS drug experiments involving foster children violated federal rules designed to ensure vulnerable youths were protected from the risks of medical research.”

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GNN, January 2006

Mr. Fishbein Goes to Washington

Dr. Jonathan Fishbein’s fight for medical ethics in AIDS medicine

Editor’s note: In December 2005, GNN’s Liam Scheff spoke with NIH whistleblower Dr. Jonathan Fishbein. In an exclusive interview, Fishbein discusses the controversial African AIDS drug trials he exposed, his firing and reinstatement and how medical ethics and the public trust are violated when profit and politics rule the day. – A.L.

“Science has become so severely politicized that one has to be skeptical of nearly every research result that is reported.” Says Dr. Jonathan Fishbein, once and future NIH employee.

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Evidence in the New York Orphans in Government Drug Trial Investigation

The following is evidence in the long-running investigation into the use of toxic drugs on orphans in New York City in the Incarnation Children’s Center orphanage and in New York’s major hospitals, and then in Aids medicine in general.

Background on this story – here and here.

Below is the ICC webpage as it appeared when I first looked at it, in 2003. It was taken down in early 2004, after press attention focused on the practice of using orphans in government and pharma-sponsored drug trials. Read the rest of this entry »

April 2005. NY Press

azt pregnancy	bone marrow toxicity	drugs 1	exam 1	genentech vaccine
generally healthy	gtube	gtube 2	icc baby	healthy volunteers

Last July, New York Press published “Orphans on Trial,” the story of the HIV-positive children of Incarnation Children’s Center (a Washington Heights Catholic orphanage overseen by Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center). The piece detailed how these children are being used in National Institutes for Health- and pharmaceutical-industry-sponsored clinical trials.

The “orphans” at ICC aren’t always orphans; they often have a parent or family member who’d like to take care of them. The children are often removed from family custody because they fail or refuse to keep up their significant drug regimens. Once inside the walls of ICC, the drug regimen is enforced by a variety of means—cajoling, removal of privileges (like leaving the facility on weekends) and surgery.

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New York Press, July 27 – August 2

Mimi Pascual gave the children drugs every day and every night, on schedule, as the doctors ordered. She shook the children awake and popped the pills into their mouths, or squirted a syringe full of ground pill and water to the back of their throats.

She and the other child-care workers made the rounds: midnight, 3 a.m., 5 a.m. Some kids took the pills by mouth, some through nasal tubes, and some through tubes jutting out of their stomachs.

The children didn’t like the drugs. They’d wake up vomiting or with bad diarrhea. But Mimi and the workers at Incarnation Children’s Center had to follow the regimen, or they’d be fired. “The drugs had side effects, everybody knew that,” said Mimi. But the workers were told the drugs were saving the children’s lives.

After a young girl who had just gone on the drugs had a stroke and then quickly died, and another young boy who was put on thalidomide wasted away on a respirator, Mimi stopped believing that the drugs were just saving lives. She believed they were killing the children too. Read the rest of this entry »

The following transcript is taken from the 2005 radio interview on the Lizz Brown Show (lizzbrown.com), featuring Mimi Pascual, former ICC orphanage childcare worker and Liam Scheff, who broke and investigated the story. Mimi worked at ICC for 8 years over a ten year period. Her story is told in “Inside Incarnation” [1, 2]

Listen to the interview

Inside Incarnation

NYPress Orphans

30 to 50 percent

Pfizer Glaxo

Self med

3 days old

Lizz Brown: Welcome back to the Wakeup Call with Lizz Brown. Liam we have Mimi Pascual on the line. Talk to us about who Mimi is.

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In May 2003, I began my investigation of the Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC), an orphanage in New York City’s Washington Heights that was being used by government (N.I.H.) and pharmaceutical companies as a test center for the standard AIDS drugs – AZT and its analogs, Nevirapine, and the various protease inhibitors. ICC received funding from both government and corporate sponsors to enroll its wards, primarily abandoned children of drug (crack cocaine and heroin) abusers, in NIH clinical trials(1). What follows in this series are five excerpts of my October, 2003 interview with ICC’s medical director Dr. Katherine Painter. Read the rest of this entry »

February 2007
Liam Scheff.

Thalidomide, the once-banned sleep-aid that caused a wave of severe and deadly birth defects in the late 1950s and early 1960s, has been reintroduced into the AIDS market (1), and was specifically used on at least one ICC resident in 2003-2004.

I was told the story of a boy named Seon by child-care workers, nurses, former child residents and guardians of children in ICC. Seon was being dosed with many drugs at once through a gastric-tube into his stomach, because, I was told, he failed to adhere to his regimen.

I wrote about it in “Inside Incarnation”, New York Press, 2005 (2):
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Malaria Causes Aids, Nevirapine Doesn’t Help (even though it hurts), Viral Load Tests Don’t Really Work, Viral Load Tests Don’t Work For Sh*t.

Feel free to thread the needle with these, and tell me how they weave together…

One

The Associated Press reports that Malaria causes Aids: (Here)

That is, people in poorest, rural Africa who have malaria also have a strong response on the Viral Load test.

Note: ‘Viral Load’ (or PCR) is the test used to tell convince certain people (the brown, gay and poor), that they have a fatal sex disease (which they afix with the well-known moniker “Aids”), and must start taking strong drugs.

Aids, inc, interprets these results as showing that somehow Malaria causes Aids, instead of deducing that Malaria causes these, shall we say, ‘imperfect’ tests to give higher or stronger results. Therefore, they believe that Malaria patients need more life-saving (life-ending) drugs like Nevirapine.

Two

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that Nevirapine, that life-saving (life-ending) drug, is not actually life-saving. (Here)

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Hmmm.

“While crack cocaine seems to account for the rise in the murder rate of black youths in the 1980s, as well as more moderate increases in a wide range of adverse birth outcomes, the damaging social impact of crack fades a decade later.”

“Between 1984 and 1994, the homicide rate for black males aged 14 to 17 more than doubled, and the homicide rate for black males aged 18 to 24 increased nearly as much.”

“During this period, the black community also experienced an increase in fetal death rates, low birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.”

http://www.chicagogsb.edu/capideas/apr06/5.aspx

Imagine that. All of those babies!.dying because they’re born addicted to crack! in “Newark, Philadelphia, New York, Oakland!”

Crack Cocaine. Hmmm. Not a sexually-transmitted (but not so much)..uhm, vir!well, you test for something, with a test that doesn’t test for anything!but anyway!it’s not that?

But Crack?

Not an STD that will definitely kill them (unless we drug them mercilessly …after 15 or 23 or 52 years?

But CRACK?!?!

Woooaaahhh!hard to imagine!really, challenging my belief systems! but alright!

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Celia Farber has done something wonderful in posting this page:

http://www.joyceannhafford.com/

Joyce Ann Hafford died about five weeks into a government drug trial, with the drug Nevirapine. She was put on the drug because she is a black woman living in the South, and is thus, considered to be in the “high risk” category for the blanket-diagnosis we call “AIDS.”

While pregnant, she was given a quick, nonspecific antibody test (called an HIV test), and given her color and location, it was decided that the test meant something specific: namely that she was fair game to re-market a drug called Nevirapine, which had already made a mark on those who’d taken it. Namely liver failure and fatal skin loss.

Unaware of this, and uninformed by her doctors, Joyce Ann went on the ‘experimental treatment’. She became ill, with a rash and liver malfunction, and died of liver failure moments after the caesarian section that was needed to pull her child from her failing body.

The docs would’ve liked to blame that useful devil, AIDS, but they made the mistake of admitting that it was the drug.

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By Liam Scheff
Salvo Magazine - Summer 2006

Here are three ideas that you will never see debated by the major media:

• Was a bird-flu pandemic ever really likely?
• Is AIDS in fact a sexually transmitted disease?
• Does current evolutionary theory truly explain the diversity of life on earth?

Each of these widely-promoted beliefs is contradicted by more competing evidence than you can shake a stick at (from wide and varied sources), but you’ll never hear about it from the major outlets for science news - the New York Times, PBS, NPR, the BBC, or CNN - because the media simply doesn’t question the received scientific wisdom.

Because the major media doesn’t do science journalism the way it reports news.

When watch the news, we expect to hear crossfire and flak. We’re not flustered by divergent takes on policy. We feel that government business should be aired and battled over in the public sphere. We expect policy-makers and government officials to regularly submit to hard questions from the press, and to take the hot seat on the news shows.
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Jack goes on the record about sex, sex and sex in in this month’s Rolling Stone interview:

Interviewer Erik Hedegaard: ”[W]hen the AIDS crisis started, he [Nicholson] tried wearing condoms, but they prevented him from feeling the “full catasrophe” of the sex act, so he went to a doctor, who told him not to worry about getting AIDS, so he no longer wears condoms.”

The reporter fails to add, “And is just faaaan-tastic.” The journalist lets us know he feels the need to parse Nicholson, as though Nicholson couldn’t be saying what he’s saying.

But he’s saying it:

Nicholson: “I went to my doctor and got a very specific scientific analysis, which boiled down to, unless you’re a shooter or something else, you’re as likely to have this problem as to have a safe fall on your head. I mean, look at it logically. If you understand numbers at all, just by geometrical progression, if it were all true, everybody’s dead by now.”

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A few thoughts on African loss of life (and eugenics), for those for whom history began before 1979.

We’re told that Africa has an AIDS problem. I used to think this was so. But after copious reading research and discussion, I am more than fairly convinced that Africa has a number of severe problems that have been collected together and name-branded ‘AIDS’.

Last year I spoke with an epidemioligist, a specialist in water-safety, just returned from Uganda. She showed me her pictures of the tin-shack shanty towns, thrown up on the muddy banks of garbage heaps and drainage ditches, children playing in the refuse. I asked, where’s the clean water? That, she said, was a problem. I asked, how do you tell dysentery, cholera, TB, malaria and sepsis, and all the rest of what occurs, from AIDS?

That, she said, was the problem.

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In late May, 2006, I received a complaint about an article I had written for Cruxmagazine in Fall 2004, on the Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) investigation. ICC is an orphanage in New York City where orphans, often children of drug abusers, were being used in National Institutes of Health clinical drug trials, on the assumption that they had AIDS.

The drugs in use at ICC were and are extremely toxic drugs, so admitted by the manufacturers, and by years of trial results in adults. Physicians give the drugs on the remarkable assumption that the children’s death is a foregone conclusion, and that extraordinarily toxic drugs are the only thing to prolong their lives. This is the basic assumption of the AIDS diagnosis, which I find to be shocking in its arrogance and cruelty.

The belief that the drugs are absolutely necessary is so strong that the drug regimen is strictly enforced, without lenience. Children in ICC who do not want to take the drugs, which cause high rates of severe vomiting and diarrhea, have the drugs force-fed by mouth, or through nasal and surgically-inserted gastric tubes1.

The 2004 Cruxmagazine article was called “HIV Negative: Noble Doctors Try New Drugs on AIDS Orphans2.” In the article, I predicted that “Noble Doctors” would be the title or spin on the story, if it were reported in The New York Times, a paper which has long censored fair and ethical reporting about AIDS medicine.

In July, 2005, that is exactly what happened.

Read the Rest Here