Christine and Eliza Jane

Zenger’s Newsmagazine editorial, November 2005 (sent to press October 11, 2005):
Christine and Eliza Jane
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor
Christine Maggiore, alternative AIDS activist, founder of Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives in Los Angeles and author of the book What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?, has suffered the indignity of losing her four-year-old daughter Eliza Jane Scovill twice. The first time was on May 15, when Eliza Jane actually died after a three-week ear infection that baffled all three of Maggiore’s pediatricians — one of whom was actually on the phone with Maggiore the moment her daughter passed on. The second time happened on September 15, when the Los Angeles County Coroner officially declared Eliza Jane’s death to have resulted from “AIDS-related pneumonia” and the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story nine days later whose headline — “A Mother’s Denial, a Daughter’s Death” — openly endorsed the idea that Maggiore’s refusal to believe that HIV causes AIDS and to expose her daughter to highly toxic drug regimens both in the womb and after the girl’s birth led to her tragic death.
The irony is that, by their own standards, Times reporters Charles Ornstein and Daniel Costello were trying their best to be fair and objective. But to them, “objectivity” clearly means accepting the pronouncements of medical and scientific officials as gospel. Celia Farber, New York Press contributor with a 15-year history of writing articles challenging the conventional wisdom about HIV and AIDS, summed up this attitude in an interview with me in which she said that, more than any other reporters, science writers allow themselves to be controlled by their sources. The Los Angeles Times science staff has already shown this tendency on issues that have nothing to do with AIDS — for example, in an article that acknowledged a study that questioned the use of statin drugs to control cholesterol but nonetheless urged their readers to continue taking them. What made that one particularly amazing was that one of their own colleagues at the Times, David Willman, had earlier published an exposé that said the only reason anybody ever believed statins could control cholesterol was one study by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) researcher who was receiving six-figure subsidies from the companies that make them.
There’s an obvious reason for this journalistic deference. Scientists, especially in the medical field, have surrounded themselves with such an aura of complexity that most people who aren’t themselves scientists believe they’ll never be able to understand what scientists do or why they believe what they believe about the world. Ironically, in an age in which science is under assault from advocates for pseudo-scientific ideas like “intelligent design” based on religious dogmas, instead of the evidence and experiment that are supposed to govern science, scientists all too often approach the public and say, “You’ll never be able to understand what we do. Here’s the truth” — thereby making the same demand on us as religious leaders: to put our logical faculties on hold and just “believe.”
The Ornstein-Costello article on Maggiore and her daughter opened by noting that she’d been touting the health of her children as evidence that her unorthodox views on AIDS were correct, and almost gleefully suggested that Eliza Jane’s death confirmed the establishment view that HIV exposure inevitably leads to AIDS and premature death. It went on to hail the routine use of AZT, a toxic cell-killing drug originally designed as cancer chemotherapy (facts you would never have known from Ornstein and Costello), in “HIV-positive” pregnant women as one of medicine’s “few victories” against AIDS. The fact that there’s no evidence that babies born to “HIV-positive” pregnant mothers live longer or thrive better if they’ve been force-fed AZT than if they haven’t didn’t enter into Ornstein’s or Costello’s consciousness — any more than did the fact that, according to Maggiore and others I interviewed for a Zenger’s cover story on “HIV-positive” women in 1999, babies given AZT in the womb and after birth show higher rates of birth defects, slower development and learning disabilities than babies who remain AZT-free.
Maggiore is showing the coroner’s report to her own doctors to see if the actual evidence supports the report’s conclusions. She’s also released a letter she wrote to the Times protesting the story and challenging the report. “Medical records show my daughter did not exhibit symptoms consistent with the coroner’s determination of pneumonia, AIDS-related or otherwise,” Maggiore wrote. “The three pediatricians who examined Eliza Jane in the days before her death all noted clear lungs. At a doctor visit on May 14, the day before she died, no cough or respiratory congestion was evident. When my daughter collapsed at home the next evening following her fourth dose of antibiotic, she did not have the blue lips or fingertips suggestive of life-threatening pneumonia.”
In Maggiore’s letter, she asked if her daughter got “a diagnosis by association” after the coroner’s office learned that she is the founder of an alternative AIDS group and author of a book that challenges not only the belief that HIV causes AIDS but also the accuracy and reliability of the standard antibody tests used to identify people as “HIV-positive.” According to Maggiore, in late May a friend of hers phoned the coroner’s office and asked if they routinely administered posthumous HIV antibody tests to people who’d died of unexplained causes. He was told that “the symptoms of AIDS are so obvious” it wasn’t necessary to run such tests in all cases. On June 28 one of her pediatricians “received a call from the coroner’s office demanding to know if he was aware of my book and [Maggiore’s ‘positive’] HIV status” — and the coroner’s official threatened to subpoena the doctor.
No one can say with certainty why Eliza Jane Scovill died so tragically and so long before she should have. We do know that Christine Maggiore is a concerned, conscientious parent who took care of her daughter in the best way she know how. We also know that AIDS is generally a chronic syndrome that develops over a long period of time, and therefore it’s highly unlikely that a person — even a four-year-old child — who was in perfect health just three weeks before she expired died of an “AIDS-related” cause. On that basis alone, it’s hard to see the L.A. County Coroner’s ruling as anything but an attack on the alternative AIDS movement, an attempt to silence one of its principal activists and threaten her with criminal prosecution and the loss of her surviving child when she was already in shock and terror from her natural human reaction to the death of her little girl.