Cheryl:
Tom Bethell had his article about Lindsey ready. It would be in the May 10, 1993, National Review, on the stands end of April. We were excited, knowing thousands of people would read his article! It was a great story, and we really appreciated Tom's work and effort in getting it published. "The Cure That Failed" http://duesberg.com/media/tbcure-2.html started out, "Lindsey Nagel was born in Petrosian, Romania, in October 1990…Within a few weeks (her parents) were dismayed to find that she had tested positive for HIV. Although she showed no symptoms of disease, the Nagel's doctor put her on Retrovir syrup, otherwise known as AZT."
The article went on to describe how we noticed that after 22 months on the drug, Lindsey began suffering terrible leg cramps and failed to gain weight. Tom also pointed out that two of the most significant trials conducted on AZT had been sponsored by Burroughs/Wellcome, the company that manufactured it. To Tom, this seemed against scientific etiquette!
We had kept Lindsey's diagnosis a secret from most everyone, including office pals, friends from church, great aunts and uncles, our photographer, and friends from high school. There were lunches and baby showers. It was sometimes very difficult to put on a happy face and have people wanting to see the baby, knowing she was probably going to die in a short time from the deadly HIV virus. And what would they say when they found out they had held onto a baby with such a diagnosis?
Our family lost a good number of friends and relatives that we could have enjoyed being with. Some of our children became acquaintances, not friends. We all lost potential life-enriching experiences, and stability, things that family/friends provide. One person referred to Lindsey as having a "tiger running loose in the house."
Around Christmas time [1993], I wrote a letter to the parents in Lindsey’s nursery school class at a new church we had begun attending. The leader of the children’s ministry thought it would be a great idea and backed me up 100%, or I would not have done it. She herself had no problem having Lindsey, now 3, in her Sunday school and felt the other parents would also be accepting. I wrote that after studying HIV for nearly three years, I could assure them there was no way their child would contract HIV from Lindsey. Using CDC statistics, I explained that we were the ones taking the risk of having Lindsey in Sunday school with their children, as she was the one with a compromised immune system. I wrote, “HIV/AIDS is a controversial medical issue right now, and the purpose of this letter is to address the facts as we know them.” I noted the 4 ways the CDC notes that HIV is transmitted. Then I closed the letter by telling the parents and staff that if they had any questions or concerns, they should call me, and we could meet for coffee or whatever they felt comfortable with.
Things were going great at Sunday school. I did not think anyone was overly concerned and did not act differently toward Lindsey at all. That is, until February 7, 1994. John Forker had grave concerns. First, he called the toddler’s Sunday school class instructor. She referred him to the Sunday school director, whom he called at her home. He told her, “it’s imperative that I talk to Mrs. Nagel right away.” Reluctantly she gave him my number, and he called. (He must have misplaced the letter I gave to all the parents, which included my phone number.)
I was not prepared for such a vicious verbal attack! He told me I was in denial. He told me to give him some facts, but when I did, he talked right over me. I told him I did not expect anyone to believe the same way we did but begged him to at least believe what the United States Center for Disease Control now believes about HIV and how it is transmitted. He kept asking, “What about the 1%?” He was referring to a teeny-weeny percentage where HIV -might- be transmitted. He asked about biting behavior. I told him that saliva would only be a minuscule amount of HIV that could possibly be in the child’s mouth. He said he “didn’t trust doctors as far as he could throw them.” Several times I offered to mail him all the material we had gathered with facts about HIV and how it is transmitted. He would not hear of it.
The conversation abruptly changed when I asked him if he had attended last Sunday’s church service. The topic of Pastor Dave’s sermon was lepers (undesirables). The pastor told the congregation that in Bible times, if the guard at the city wall spotted a leper approaching, he would holler out, “Behold, a leper!” The pastor was saying that some people still act like this today. I told John that I knew exactly how those lepers felt and that John was the one hollering out, “Behold, a leper!” It was then that John told me I was getting off the subject. As soon as he said that, I said, “ Nice talking to you, John Gotta go fix my supper.” And I added, “My daughter and I will be coming to church every Sunday, so it is up to you what you want to do.” Then I hung up the phone! I was shaking but proud of myself!
We wrote letters, always including a copy of "The Cure That Failed," to the big 3 television broadcasters in the Twin Cities. (KSTP/ABC, WCCO/CBS, KARE/NBC) None responded.
We thought maybe they just might be interested in covering a story about a little Romanian girl who was HIV+. HIV/AIDS was the "Covid-19 story" of the early 90s. We thought they might want to inform viewers that AZT was not a magic bullet.
In early June, Steve called the FDA numerous times and usually talked to a man named "Ralph L." Steve was trying to understand if the FDA provided guidelines on when to initiate AZT in infants. Matt Zell, Ralph's assistant, answered the phone on one occasion. Steve told him Lindsey had been on AZT nearly 2 years. Matt's first question after hearing this was, "Then she had a low CD4 count?" NO, she did not. Matt was finding this hard to believe. He said he did not think a child should be given AZT until the CD4 count dropped below normal.
Steve:
In 1993, the FDA recommended that children with HIV should not receive AZT until their CD4 count dropped below normal levels. However, by 2012, the recommendation had changed for infants like Rico, and therapy with AZT, lamivudine, and nevirapine was advised to be initiated immediately. Dr. Huskins obtained this information from the National HIV/AIDS Consultation Center at the University of California, San Francisco. These guidelines, essentially laws for infants, were developed by the Health and Human Services Department and a working group of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council (OARAC).
The OARAC, the National HIV/AIDS Consultation Center, and the University of California at San Francisco all have connections to Dr. Steven Deeks and Paul Volberding at Ward 86, who were advocates of a "functional cure" and were involved in the famous Mississippi baby case. In 2010, Ward 86 became the first clinic to recommend universal antiretroviral treatment regardless of CD4 count. The clinic's policy states that all patients should be evaluated and offered or, in Rico's case, forced to receive antiretroviral therapy (specifically AZT) unless there is a reason to defer treatment.
Notably, 2010 was the same year the Mississippi baby was born, and Dr. Gay was conducting her "unpublished experience within the University of Mississippi pediatric HIV clinic." These experiences involved administering stronger and faster treatment than usual to the baby. Doctors like Deeks, Gay, and Fauci believed the Mississippi baby was cured because the treatment was so potent and was given swiftly after birth. By July 2012, just five months before Rico was born, Ward 86's policy of universal antiretroviral treatment, which was previously limited to the clinic, had become mandatory for all US-born newborns and was also adopted by the World Health Organization.
Dr. Fauci described the experimentation on the Mississippi baby as "gutsy," stating that "it makes perfect sense what happened" and that it opens up many doors to research. The faster and stronger treatment used on the Mississippi baby was so effective that it is likely to change how newborns of infected mothers are treated worldwide. The wizard's "next step is to find out if this…very early antiretroviral therapy…can actually replicate in other high-risk newborns."
Is this science or just more experiments?
The doctors/researchers involved in these experiments ultimately pave the way for further experimentation, which may include the forced administration of toxic drugs to infants through a tube inserted into the side of their stomachs and being separated from their families. As a board member at OARAC, Dr. Deeks may have felt ordained to make mandates for infants worldwide based on the idea of
a functional cure that never materialized. Ultimately, Deeks was brought back to earth, discovering that "this virus is trickier than we thought," and the treatment was ineffective. Despite this outcome, Rico was still subjected to both the treatment and the tube in his stomach and ultimately died.
Understanding the mindset of those making decisions regarding medical treatment is crucial, particularly in cases where such decisions involve separating an infant from their mother due to disagreement. To understand the experiences of Deeks and the University of California, which was Dr. Huskins's first contact with Rico's forced treatment, one needs to look at how Deeks treats his own patients.
In 1995 one of Deeks's patients, referred to as the "Baboon Man," underwent a controversial transplant in which he was given baboon bone marrow as a potential treatment for AIDS. The transplant required the patient to undergo a series of radiation and chemotherapy treatments to prepare for the infusion of baboon tissue into his bloodstream. Deeks based this experiment on observations that baboons generally do not contract AIDS, although the reasons for this are not yet fully understood.
Jonathan Allan, a virologist at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, criticized Dr. Deeks's Baboon Man experiment stating, "The [Baboon man] case is mostly about politics. It is certainly not about good science." "To suggest that baboon cells and human cells will communicate just because they are put into the same immune system is the stuff of science fiction." Allan was not just concerned for the wellbeing of Deeks's patient; he was also concerned about "Let's say there's a virus sitting smoldering in baboons…It takes only one transmission from one baboon to a human to start an epidemic. This is a serious mistake." The people involved in the experiment assured critics like Allan that the chosen baboon was very "clean," according to the Baboon Man himself.
It seems all you need to put the entire world at risk is a "clean" baboon or maybe a "clean" bat from a cave in China or maybe we could try eating some raw pangolin. I've seen no evidence that when it comes to medical research, the needs and perspectives of patients and their families are prioritized over researchers' desires for new experiences. And this is further exaggerated when it comes to children who may be considered to have no social value, as there seems to be a willingness to disregard their well-being for the sake of experimentation.
Side note: Rico and Baboon Man are both dead…Deeks and Huskins are still alive.
At the same time, the University of California at San Francisco is risking the world's population by injecting baboon bone marrow into someone from a "clean" baboon researchers are also infecting "baboons with a sub-type of the virus that caused AIDS" to "study new therapies and vaccines." To create an AIDS-like syndrome that is "especially quick and deadly," researchers reinject the animal with the virus recovered from animals with AIDS, resulting in the infected monkeys becoming sick, with half dying in 0.39 years (140 days).
Dr. Allan expressed his trained opinion on the dangers of transmitting the bone marrow of a baboon to a human and starting "an epidemic" why would researchers believe in therapies and vaccines studied on a "sub-type virus" that had been repeatedly reinjected into an animal until it became sick with an "AIDS-like syndrome." If this does, in fact, make sense to researchers, I suggest they use their relied science and "therapies" on themselves.
In 2010, while Deeks and the University of California were establishing guidelines for Rico's treatment, Deeks himself wrote a conflicting assessment of when to start antiretroviral therapy. He acknowledges that the timing of therapy has always been controversial, particularly in the current era, and that there is a lack of clarity regarding the optimal time to begin therapy. Despite this, Mayo Clinic and Mower County still saw fit to force-feed a black-label drug to a newborn.
Deeks himself admits that there is no definitive or timely study of when to start therapy and that the decision should be based on expert interpretation of observational cohort data. My own observational cohort data shows that Rico is dead, and that none of the children who were put on AZT in 1990 lived to be six years old. Even the statement of "six years old" is misleading, as most of these children died within the first six months to two years. These facts raise serious questions about the validity and ethics of the medical establishment's decisions regarding the treatment of HIV-infected infants.
In his 2010 article, Deeks himself acknowledges that AZT was a poorly tolerated drug with limited benefits, and that there was no evidence to support earlier use of the drug. While some may argue that this is only in reference to mono therapy and not the drug cocktail, the combination ART treatment is really just a diluted version of the previous 1993 recommendations. Even with the ART combination, Deeks himself admits that cohort studies are often inconsistent and non-definitive, raising further questions about the reliability of the treatment. Additionally, Deeks acknowledges that there is a "healthy lifestyle bias" that can influence mortality rates, which further complicates the issue. These admissions by Deeks cast serious doubt on the efficacy and safety of AZT and ART treatments, and raise questions about the motives and decision-making of the medical establishment.
Dr. Huskins' suggestion that Lindsey was a "long-term non-progressor" is flawed, given that Lindsey was the only infant taken off the AZT treatment. It seems unlikely that it was mere coincidence that Lindsey was the only long-term non-progressor, as well as being the only one taken off AZT. The doctors and researchers want us to believe that this is the case, but it raises serious questions about their motives and decision-making. In a 2010 paper, Deeks himself admits that "the benefits of early therapy are far less certain" in long-term non-progressors, yet it's unclear how he would know this in the case of infants, as they are exclusively force-fed the AZT regimen in the first 12 hours of life. It's also worth noting that Cheryl and I had the only test subject in this case, and that was Lindsey. She remained healthy until the age of 22, and then suddenly she was gone at 23. Doctors need to realize what happened to Rico starting in the first minute of his life and then continued until his death was not in his best interest or the interest of his mother and family.
The information that Huskins used to force AZT on Rico was by Deeks's admission "based primarily on observational studies." Deeks states "making clinical recommendations based on such types of studies is problematic." To my knowledge Rico did not die from HIV but rather a cardiovascular event. If that's the case, it's likely that the groundwork for that event was laid in the first minute of Rico's life. However its notable that Deeks himself has linked direct antiretroviral treatment toxicities to cardiovascular disease, non-AIDS-associated cancers, liver disease, and kidney disease, which raises serious questions about the long-term effects of these treatments.
The nucleoside analogue abacavir (Ziagen) has been shown to cause heart attacks, and in 2012, this was being suppressed because Glaxo still controlled the patent. In fact, the Danish researcher who found the connection was given death threats and had to be escorted around an AIDS conference in Mexico City with bodyguards. If Rico's ARV therapy included abacavir, that's the most likely culprit for a cardiovascular event.
can't believe what my nephew and my sister Lindsey are subjected to, God, I don't think it's fair and honest to do something like that, it's ugly to do a pure and simple experiment on the baby instead of giving him a chance at life, this doctor was not honest.
I