| New York Times, July 17, 2005
Grim Allegations
In January 2004, he [Liam Scheff] posted an article, ''The House That AIDS Built,'' on
indymedia.org, a Web site that describes itself as an outlet for ''radical,
accurate and passionate tellings of truth.'' He chose that approach after trying
unsuccessfully to get the article published. ''I couldn't get anybody to touch
it,'' he said.
The article made a series of gruesome claims: Among other things, Mr. Scheff
wrote that Incarnation had been holding children against their parents' will, in
some cases force-feeding them drugs ''known to cause genetic mutation, organ
failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations.'' He wrote that two children
had recently died.
The article came to the attention of Vera Hassner Sharav of the Alliance for
Human Research Protection, a group she said she had founded to monitor ''the
underbelly of research'' after her schizophrenic son died of a reaction to an
approved drug. After his death, she said recently, she realized people must '
'stop thinking you can trust the men in the white coats.''
She added, ''It's a business now.''
Ms. Sharav forwarded Mr. Scheff's article to the 3,500 people she said
receive her e-mail ''infomails'' daily. She then looked into Incarnation on the
Internet. She came to suspect that children had died there, and that this was
what ended the trials and led to the license change and Dr. Nicholas's
departure. In March 2004, Ms. Sharav filed a complaint with the federal Office
for Human Research Protections and with the Food and Drug Administration.
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 to help with a
documentary, paid for and shown by the BBC, entitled ''The New York Experiment
-- Guinea Pig Kids.''
The reports alarmed African-American activists and politicians in the city.
The accusations resonated in particular with Omowale Clay, a leader of the
December 12th Movement, a Brooklyn-based group that campaigns for reparations
for slavery, and acts as a watchdog group for civil rights violations against
blacks.
Mr. Clay said he had conducted his own research and concluded that trials
were done on black infants who did not even have H.I.V. He offered no evidence
of his claims.
''What we know already,'' he said, ''is that 98 percent of the children
experimented on were black and Latino and that the fundamental basis of why they
chose those kids was racism. They have the arrogance to say it was for their own
good, but we know it was racism.'' |
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"There was no safeguard for the right to refuse drugs administered to
my child. I have no idea if any information was derived from the forced
drugging of FDA unapproved medications."
-Patricia Sabato read from a letter to Congress on May 18, 2005
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