The Incarnation Children’s Center (Credit: public domain)
For many readers, the emotional heart of RFK Jr.’s new book, “The Real Anthony Fauci” is the deaths of mostly black and hispanic orphans through AIDS drug clinical trials at New York’s Incarnation Children’s Center. It was a big scandal that should have been on par with Tuskeegee, but the fact it got some press traction is in itself remarkable.
The real hero of the story is Christine Maggiore. In the 1990’s, Maggiore through Alive and Well assisted in building an underground railroad for HIV-positive mothers to give birth and escape public health authorities who wanted to kill their babies with AZT. The railroad is mentioned in the film “This Child of Mine,” and was briefly profiled in Mothering magazine. Maggiore was unique in her skill in public relations and nonprofit development, and her husband Robin Scoville had numerous friends in the Los Angeles entertainment industry — including the Foo Fighters who raised money for Alive and Well. In fact, Maggiore was even pre-interviewed for an appearance on Bill Maher’s show. Bob Leppo, a Bay Area Philanthropist who also funded Peter Duesberg’s cancer research and later the OMSJ, bankrolled Maggiore’s film, “The Other Side of AIDS,’ which was even shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
This Child of Mine from Immunity Resource Foundation on Vimeo.
Meanwhile, one day in Santa Monica in 2002, Journalist Liam Scheff had just returned from Europe and was speaking to a friend about how he had a fling in Europe and was worried about HIV and AIDS, and Scheff’s friend said, “oh, that — it’s a big fraud. Bob Gallo.” This made Scheff really mad, and Scheff set out to prove his friend wrong.
These were the early days of the internet when search results were more balanced in favor of AIDS rethinkers, and Scheff quickly learned about Maggiore’s work with Alive and Well. He immersed himself in the literature of the AIDS Debate, and in 2003 he was a contract journalist with a small Philadelphia alternative newspaper called “The Weekly Dig.” Amazingly, the Dig’s editor allowed Scheff to do a three part series called, “The AIDS Debate: the Most Controversial story you’ve Never Heard of.” In the story, Scheff interviews the prominent names in “The Other Side of AIDS,” but it was Christine Maggiore who had put Scheff in touch with Duesberg, Rodney Richards, Christian Fiala, etc.
Scheff’s series was real journalism — and he was one of the very few individuals who managed to cut through, even if it was in a relatively obscure alternative newspaper. Very much like Celia Farber wrote about AIDS in SPIN — a magazine about Rock/Pop music, John Rappoport got the occasional story published in LA CityBeat, or Rolling Stone published the works of Rian Milan and Michael Hastings (at least when still owned by Jan Wenner).
The Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) “began testing drugs on its orphan population in 1992.
About this time, “Mona” — the Harlem schoolteacher trying to protect her foster children from New York’s ACS and the hell of Incarnation — contacted Christine Maggiore. Like many in the Black Community, Mona was aware there was something wrong with AIDS, and Maggiore had developed a reputation for helping troubled mothers hurt by the AIDS establishment. Because Scheff had managed to get a story on AIDS in print, and because Scheff was close to New York, it was Maggiore who put Scheff into touch with Mona to expose the ICC scandal.
Scheff’s groundbreaking story, “The House that AIDS Built” was the product of this connection. It is first-rate journalism, and it changed Scheff’s life. What was not discussed, however, was that Scheff had a unique experience with child abuse. As a teen, he was sent to an abusive boarding school in northern California called CEDU. He also came from a family of cold medical researchers including his uncle John Mellors — a major force behind the HAART cocktail. This lead Scheff’s investigation to take on a passion that really touched some people’s nerves. He knew he had a blockbuster story and he was even in contact with a major magazine to publish it, but the editor was threatening to take out all the work Scheff had put in about the uncertainty of HIV testing or that a positive HIV test is not necessarily a death sentence. Also — babies were being killed.
So Scheff reached out to David Crowe, who published Scheff’s story to his own Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society and brokered a connection to AltHeal, where the story lives today. It was a basic early internet site — written in clean HTML — and such a story written to blog would not be taken up today. In 2004, it was still possible to cut through, and AltHeal was noticed. At the bottom of the story, Scheff listed organizations that were supposed to help children in New York — and these included Vera Sherav’s “Alliance for Human Research Protection.”
Sherav is a passionate Holocaust survivor who made the legacy of Nazi medical experiments and informed consent her crusade. She was/is especially involved in the anti-psychiatry movement and had lead annual protests outside the national American Psychiatry Association’s headquarters. In the 70’s, she was profoundly impacted by the horrors of Willowbrook — an unsanitary warehouse for developmentally disabled children in Staten Island that was the location of unethical hepatitis experiments in the 60’s and 70’s. Sherav immediately jumped on Scheff’s story and used the full force of AHRP to push it. Having deep roots to New York’s Jewish Community, Sherav was also able to get the New York Post to run a story on ICC. This is how the scandal “broke into the mainstream.”
Meanwhile, Scheff had struck up a professional relationship with editor Jeff Koyen, who had been hired in 2003 by the Alternative Weekly, New York Press. Koyen did not stay long — perhaps pushing boundaries too far and envisioning himself another Jan Wenner. In any case, he green-lit a revised version of Scheff’s ICC story, along with the follow ups in the relatively small alternative weekly.
These articles attracted the attention of Scottish Filmmaker Jamie Doran, who made the BBC Documentary “Guinea Pig Kids.” Doran originally contracted with Scheff for the research for the film, but Doran and Scheff had a falling out. The reason why was Scheff really wanted to have the film discuss the flaws with HIV testing, which became something of a passion for Scheff. In 2004, and 2005, Scheff wrote a landmark series of independent articles on the subject: “Knowing is Beautiful” and in 2005 (after he had moved to Seattle): “Sex Crimes” — about the criminalization of HIV exposure in a Washington State prosecution. In the 2009 film, House of Numbers, you can see Scheff’s articles discussing HIV testing being used as the basis of the testing featurette.
Therefore, Doran turned to Celia Farber, which proved to be more acceptable, as she was less “tainted” with AIDS dissidence than Scheff, who would be pilloried in the so-called “progressive” Village Voice in 2007. Farber is the daughter of Barry Farber, a noted radio host with probable CIA ties. Although she covered Duesberg for SPIN magazine, she was “acceptable” enough to even be interviewed on mainstream shows such as Charlie Rose. In the early 2000’s, she was highly-regarded because of her landmark piece for Esquire about OJ Simpson. For this reason, Farber became the research journalist behind Guinea Pig Kids …. and later for RFK Jr’s thrilling book.
Of course, the medical mafia and media elite and the intelligence agencies buried the ICC story — and Scheff’s discussion of being defamed on the front page of the New York Times is an important part of his memoir, “Official Stories.” I appreciate Scheff because he was willing to become a conspiracy realist — the lone HIV dissident to do so other than Nancy Turner Banks. All others tended for years to hedge against accepting that it was the intelligence agencies pushing and reinforcing the orthodox AIDS narrative — they knew, at some level, it was a conspiracy, but they wrote it off as a “medical blunder” or a “mistake” or just Bob Gallo committing a fraud. In later years Farber, especially, started discussing the intelligence agencies — you can see this on her appearances with the Progressive Radio Network. By the time Corona rolled around, Farber and others (including David Rasnick), could see the fake disease for the obvious intelligence operation it is.
Meanwhile ICC broke in tandem with the Naviripine scandal and whistleblower Jonathan Fishbein. For some reason, the AP’s John Solomon went with an investigation, which is totally out-of-character for the mockingbird-infested AP, and I can only hesitate a guess that Fishbein had some friends in high places, which is why that story cut through. Farber’s 2006 story in Harpers “Out of Control” is the twin of “The House that AIDS Built” — and how it got published is, well, a mystery. I speculate the best way to bury a story that had been legitimized by the AP was to associate it with a tarnished Journalist such as Farber — and after publication of the story, she was subject to a smear campaign that hurt her health.
In “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Farber takes her gloves off: no more hedging — we get more of the story of ICC and of Fishbein that we did in 2004 and 2006 when a courageous team of dissidence managed to break through the wall of silence of the corporate media. The ICC scandal was even worse than we thought.
Liam Scheff took his own life in 2017 — here are his parting thoughts.
Christine Maggiore died of pneumonia in 2009 — but it was a likely homicide. Here is a film about her made by Farber.
Christine Maggiore Documentary from Immunity Resource Foundation on Vimeo.