Guinea Pig Kids--Excerpt from "Almost Cancelled"

A film that details unethical experiments done on "HIV" positive orphans in NY

With confirmation hearings coming up for Rober F Kennedy Jr to potentially become the secretary of Health and Human Services in the next administration, we have been hearing more about some of the shady practices of governmental organizations intended to promote “health”; in particular, the case of the “AIDS orphans” at the Incarnation Children’s Center in NYC; the story was broken by Liam Scheff and Celia Farber covered it extensively, as well. Consider the following recent post by Liz Churchill on X:

ARREST Dr. Fauci. “Celia went to New York to the Gates of Heaven Cemetery…where Fauci was disposing the corpses of children who died in his illegal experiments. She opened the astroturf and she saw 100’s and 100’s of tiny coffins stacked…” -RFK Jr.

I’ll embed the film; directly below will be the excerpt from my 2023 e-book, Almost Cancelled, discussing the film and the attempts to censor it.

Guinea Pig Kids

In 2004, the late investigative reporter Liam Scheff broke the story of the atrocities of the HIV-positive orphans in New York City at the Incarnation Children’s Center, including stories of children held down and force fed medication if they were “noncompliant.”

The Center, which is a former convent, was home to hundreds of orphans from underserved communities; they were often orphans of drug-addicted mothers who had died. Scheff published a long article called “The House That AIDS Built” on his website in 2004 [1]. Readers have probably heard about the nurse at ICC who fostered two children only to have them removed from her—their--home indefinitely when it was discovered she had discontinued the anti-HIV drug regimen that was harming her foster daughters. After Liam Scheff broke the story, it was turned into a BBC documentary called Guinea Pig Kids, and the ICC atrocities have been discussed at length as well by Celia Farber in her book Serious Adverse Events [2], as well as by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his book The Real Anthony Fauci [3].

What readers may not be aware of is that there was intense backlash to this story and to the way that it was told. Critical articles were written in newspapers such as The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Village Voice [4], [5], [6], in which Scheff was portrayed as a crazed zealot with a vendetta, and the medical professionals were completely innocent and the victim of Scheff’s delusions. The Center for HIV Law and Policy sent a letter to the BBC listing many complaints regarding the script. The BBC formally apologized. [7]

If it seems strange that the people that are subjecting children to medical experimentation are the heroes of this story, whereas those trying to protect these children from medical experimentation are clearly delusional, abusive bigots, I would suggest you take a moment and consider where we are now.

Scheff’s story was later picked up by an independent British journalist, Jamie Doran, and was made into a documentary called “Guinea Pig Kids,” that aired on the BBC that year, on November 30, 2004. One particularly interesting story involved a nurse named Jacklyn Hoerger, who had worked at the Center for many years and had plentiful experience as a nurse for pediatric AIDS patients. She fostered two children; sisters aged four and six. When she brought them home, she observed that their health continued to decline as they continued on their medication regime. It got so bad that she eventually consulted with a physician that encouraged her to give the girls a “drug holiday.”

Immediately upon ceasing the drug regimen, the girls improved. They regained their appetites and energy; their clinical health was excellent. However, unbeknownst to Ms. Hoerger, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) somehow found out that she had stopped the childrens’ drug regimen, and raided her home and removed the children. Ms. Hoerger, at the time of publication, did not know what had happened to her foster daughters.

The atrocities that occurred at the ICC are unbelievable, and have been discussed at length elsewhere. My purpose here is not to revisit those horrific events, but rather, to discuss the reaction in the mainstream media to the documentary that was produced by the BBC.

In 2005, an article appeared in the New York Times, “Belated Charge Ignites Furor Over AIDS Drug Trial” [5]:

It was seen as one of the great successes of AIDS treatment. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, hundreds of children in New York City were dying of AIDS. The only approved drugs were for adults, and many of the patients were foster children. So doctors obtained permission to include foster children in what they regarded as promising drug trials. [. . . ] But now, just as the trials are receding into history, they are coming under intense scrutiny. A federal agency is investigating whether guidelines for including foster children in trials were violated. [. . . ] All this is happening despite the fact that there is little evidence that the trials were anything but a medical success. Most of the questions have arisen from a single count of abuse allegations — given by a single writer about people not identified by real names, backed up with no official documentation as supporting proof, and put out on the Internet in early 2004 after the author was unable to get the story published anywhere else. [Isn’t a single account enough? – Ed.] [. . . ] Whatever the outcome, the controversy has already demonstrated the power of one 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 HIV and that AIDS drugs do not necessarily help, and the belief of some Black people that the medical establishment does not always have their best interests at heart.”

Perhaps the Black community is wise to the fact that history is replete with incidences of their being unethically experimented on by medical professionals. At the same time, The New York Post published several articles about Incarnation under headlines like “AIDS Tots Used as Guinea Pigs.” Soon, an independent film director enlisted Mr. Scheff and Ms. Sharav [Vera Sharav, of the Alliance for Human Research Protection] to help with a documentary, paid for and shown by the BBC, entitled ‘The New York Experiment—Guinea Pig Kids.’

The film caught the attention of Jeanne Bergman and Nathan Geffen of the Center for HIV Law and Policy. They strenuously objected to what they considered to be the film’s lack of accuracy and impartiality. They penned a “letter of concern” to the BBC and received a reply on July 31, 2007 [7]. The letter from the Center for HIV Law and Policy expressed significant concern about the statements made by the chemist Dr. David Rasnick, in particular what he had to say about AZT. The letter makes a number of complaints, some, but not all, of which the BBC upheld. One of the complaints that was not upheld was that “The programme was misleading in that it presented a photograph of a child with a terrible skin condition as an ICC resident. The programme also implied that ICC clinical trials participants had developed the rash when there is no evidence for this,” and that “The programme was misleading in that it presented a photograph of a child receiving medication through a tube as a photograph of an ICC resident and suggested that such systems for delivering medication are inhumane and unethical”[7].

It seems that we are living in a world in which the people trying to stop unethical medical experimentation involving drugs with known toxicities on children who are too young to understand what is happening to them, let alone consent as some kind of bigot. If we don’t want children to have to participate in medical experimentation, we’re the bad guys. Imagine that—who would allow such a thing to continue?

Regardless, the story attracted negative attention from not only the Times and Bergman/Geffen, but also from The Guardian [4] and The Village Voice [6]. In 2009, an article by Elizabeth Dwoskin appeared in the Voice, “The AIDS-Babies-as-Guinea- Pigs Story is Finally Over. Right?”

That writer was Liam Scheff, a man who lives in Boston, comes from a family of doctors, is “nearing 40,” and who, in 2003, knew that he was onto a remarkable news story about the way foster children in Washington Heights were being used in medical experiments.

There’s little doubt that Scheff uncovered a troubling and fascinating part of the city’s history. But the problem wasn’t that he was an “independent” journalist who tended to get stories published only on the Internet.

No, the problem was that Liam Scheff was on a crusade, one that made it especially unfortunate that he was the one who stumbled onto what was happening at an old convent converted into a sickhouse for foster children. Over time, the most heated rhetoric subsided as the agenda of Maggiore and Scheff became better known. The Times, in its 2005 story, quoted physicians who were adamant that they had done everything possible to follow ethical guidelines and care for the children, beginning in a desperate time when HIV was a death sentence and there were no approved medicines for children. (AZT, the first AIDS medicine, was approved for children in 1990.) The BBC, after being shown evidence that the facts had been distorted, retracted much of what was in its documentary.

Yes, thanks to the heroic attempts on the parts of “AIDS activists” to censor and cover up the horrific drug trials that were being conducted at the ICC. The Voice article, which is hardly favorable toward Scheff, his article, or the subsequent film, even admits:

Except that it’s not that simple. Even disregarding the unscientific fevered dreams of Scheff, much of what the children experienced at the IncarnationChildren’s Center was horrific, and there’s little doubt that much of the testing work and record-keeping in the various sites around the city that conducted clinical trials were questionable.

Nevertheless, the BBC caved to the relentless pressure from the AIDS activists and issued a public apology for the film. A public apology for producing a film that exposes actual child abuse? What kind of upside down world are we living in?

Bibliography:

[1] Liam Scheff. The house that AIDS built. https://www.altheal.org/toxicity/house.htm,

[2] C. Farber. Serious Adverse Events: An uncensored history of AIDS. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023.

[3] R. Kennedy Jr. The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the GlobalWar on Democracy and Public Health. SkyHorse Publishing, 2021.

[4] ‘Serious Concern’ at BBC over flawed HIV film. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/oct/23/2, 2007.

[5] Janny Scott and Leslie Kaufman. Belated charge ignite furor over AIDS drug trial. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/nyregion/belated-charge-ignites-furor-over-aids-drug-trial.html, 2005.

[6] Elizabeth Dwoskin. The AIDS babies as guinea pigs story is finally over. right? https://www.villagevoice.com/the-aids-babies-as-guinea-pigs-story-is-finally-over-right/

[7] Fraser Steel. Letter to center for HIV law and policy. https://www.hivlawandpolicy.org/sites/default/files/BBC July31 2007 letter.pdf, 2007.