Mengele Medicine, USA

I posted a brief link to this story as part of the Sunday 5th December news briefs at Newshog. Since then, I have been trying to find more information and not-so-quietly fizzing with rage.

It would appear that major drug companies, the Catholic Church and the City of New York have been complicit in programmes which involved forcing toxic cocktails of experimental AIDS drugs onto children in care - with sometimes lethal results!

The story originally broke way back in March after being researched during the summer of 2003. The original article The House that AIDS Built, by Liam Scheff, already had all the elements of the BBC expose, and named the major drug companies involved such as Smith Glaxo-Kline, Pfizer, Bristol Mayer Squibb, Genentech, Chiron/Biocine and others. It named the Catholic Church's children's home at the centre of the row - Incarnation Children's Centre, it identified the NY City and federal agencies involved: the Administration for Children's Services in New York, the NIAID (National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, a division of the NIH) and the NICHD (the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development).

The only thing that has really changed since 2003 is the extent of the atrocious abuse of children by Mengele-style medical experimentation. The original article and a March 2004 report by Fox News mention only 50 cases originally which was later revised to 100. That is 100 children, some as young as 3 months, and all had either been infected with HIV or born to HIV-positive mothers. Their parents were dead, untraceable or deemed unfit to look after them. This enabled NY City ACS to become their only effective guardians, and removed the obligation to inform or get permission from other parents or guardians for the experiments.

Now, over a year later, the Guardian in the UK reports that:

The city health department has launched an investigation into claims that more than 100 children at Incarnation were used in 36 experiments - at least four co-sponsored by Glaxo. Some of these trials were designed to test the 'toxicity' of Aids medications. One involved giving children as young as four a high-dosage cocktail of seven drugs at one time. Another looked at the reaction in six-month-old babies to a double dose of measles vaccine.

If the children refused to take the drugs, they were force fed. If they still refused, then a tube was inserted surgically into their stomach and the drugs were given to them that way. The surgeries were performed at Columbia University Medical Centre.

Some in the medical establishment have defended the trials, but there is clearly a difference between treatment and experimentation. The Guardian continues:

Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, said the children had been treated like 'laboratory animals'.
'These are some of the most vulnerable individuals in the country and there appears to be a policy of giving drug firms access to them,' she said. 'Throughout the history of medical research we have seen prisoners abused, the mentally ill abused and now poor kids in a care home.'
Sharav has urged the US Food and Drug Administration to investigate and has demanded full disclosure of all adverse effects suffered by the children, including deaths. Brooklyn Democrat councillor Bill de Blasio is also demanding that New York's Administration for Children's Services, which approved the trials, reveal who gave consent and on what grounds.

Because of the many various agencies involved, so far everyone has managed to sidestep culpability by saying it is someone else's responsibility. Glaxo have effectively blamed the US authorities:

"The PACTG (Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group) designs and implements the studies. Companies like GSK will choose to provide medicine, funding, or not participate, based on a review of the trial design -- but ultimate approval, control and execution of the study are the responsibility of the PACTG," the company said in a statement.
"This is appropriate, as long as such trials are conducted under the most stringent standards, and in compliance with the various state and federal laws and regulations regarding legal authority in the case of minors."

It is time to call for a full and public inquiry by the U.S. Senate and the U.K. Government. The public deserve to know (and those kids certainly deserve to know) who knew about or was complicit in this abuse. In New York, the ACS would not have had the powers it did without Mayor Guilliani. The Incarnation Childrens Centre is a Catholic body and as such is answerable to the Diocese of New York. Columbia University also has those it must answer to. The various federal agencies are responsible to the Secretaries of the relevant Departments and ultimately the President. The drug companies are responsible to their shareholders, but also to the governments of the nations in which they operate and are headquartered. The abuse is not confined to children from the Incarnation Centre and tests still continue on New York's children.

There has been much made in the U.S, media about the torture of prisoners. Now, let us make as much or more noise about the torture of innocent children in the "Land of the Free".