OT.....this is potentially lethal news about a charlatan ........The HIV Disbelievers
Christine
Maggiore is a
different kind of
AIDS
activist—one
who tells people
to forget safe sex
and stop taking
their lifesaving
drugs. Why?
Epidemic skeptic: HIV
positive Christine Maggiore,
holding her 8 year old son,
says HIV isn't caused by
infectious agents
By David France
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
August 19 — One sweltering California afternoon a
few weeks ago, Christine Maggiore was sitting in
her cramped office, still jet-lagged from the long
flight home from South Africa, where she’d
attended the International AIDS Conference.
QUIZ: Test your AIDS knowledge
SHE HADN’T YET found time to answer the “hundreds
and hundreds, perhaps literally thousands” of e-mail
messages she’d received from people she’d met there who
were looking for AIDS literature or doctor referrals, or
simply wanting to pat her on the back. “All your work and
dedication is appreciated!!!” a typical message declared.
She doesn’t know when she’ll find time to catch up—her
whole life is behind schedule because of her AIDS work.
“My fiancé and I have been trying to find time to get
married for years!” she says.
But Maggiore, who heads
Alive & Well AIDS
Alternatives in Burbank,
Calif., is not your typical
AIDS activist. In South
Africa, some scientists spit
nasty epithets at her.
Protesters marching outside
the meeting hall threatened to
plug her and her galvanized
followers with bullets. Why?
Because Maggiore takes the
strange contrarian stance that HIV, which has been blamed
in the deaths of 18.8 million people worldwide, doesn’t
cause AIDS at all. She exhorts people to stop taking their
medications and stop worrying about spreading their virus.
But Maggiore’s influence here and abroad is swelling.
The singer Nina Hagen wrote a song for her, and Esai
Morales, the actor, is a big funder. The platinum-selling
alternative rock band Foo Fighters promotes Maggiore’s
ideas on its Web site. And in South Africa, Maggiore met
privately with South African President Thabo Mbeki, who
endorses many of her beliefs. Mbeki’s call for more
research into whether HIV causes AIDS dominated
headlines from the important biennial meeting. In response,
5,000 flabbergasted scientists signed a declaration calling
the laboratory evidence “clear-cut, exhaustive, and
unambiguous.”
Such consensus doesn’t impress Maggiore, a bright
and compelling former garment executive with no scientific
training or college degree. Through emotional newspaper
columns, e-mail postings and lectures in such disparate
places as the University of Miami School of Medicine and
the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in
Harlem, she continues to try to pick apart the scientific
literature, a strategy that especially appeals to people with a
beef against the establishment. “We’re not saying that
anybody is 100 percent correct or incorrect on this issue,”
Foo Fighters bassist Nate Mendel told NEWSWEEK.
“Simply, there’s information out there that is being blocked
out.”
Maggiore is convinced that the HIV doesn’t cause
AIDS. No medical journal has ever proved to her it is
dangerous. She calls standard HIV antibody tests so
oversensitive that they can show positive “if you’ve had a flu
shot or if you’ve ever been pregnant” (the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention disagree), and she cobbles
together reams of footnotes, anecdotes and package inserts
to prove it.
Then how does she explain all the deaths that have
marked the pandemic? Here’s where her argument takes a
conspiratorial turn. In Africa, despite what health authorities
say, people are simply not dying more than before, she
asserts. And she thinks the 420,000 Americans who have
died of AIDS are victims of the prescription drugs they
hoped would save them. Or perhaps they died from
recreational drugs. Or maybe they succumbed to “a
profound fear of AIDS” itself. “We’re not saying people
haven’t died of what is called ‘AIDS’,” Maggiore explained
one afternoon in the sunny Burbank home she shares with
her fiancé, a 31-year-old video editor named Robin Scovill,
and her son. “We’re just asking what is at the core of this
incredible human tragedy. And by looking at other avenues,
might we better resolve this?”
“Christine is
putting lives in
jeopardy.”
— SANDRA
THURMAN
White House AIDS policy
director
There is no way to know how many patients she has
persuaded to abandon their medications or condoms, but
Maggiore’s detractors can barely contain their anger.
“Many people will die because they will go untreated,” says
Dr. Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of HIV. White
House AIDS policy director Sandra Thurman says bluntly,
“Christine is putting lives in jeopardy.”
Disbelievers—”flat earth” types who fervently doubt
the conclusions of science—have been around since the
Enlightenment. But they are staging a resurgence today,
partly in reaction to the unparalleled role science plays in
society. Disbelievers fear Big Science the way millennialists
feared Y2K. Fragments of contrarian evidence are enough
to shake their faith in everything from water fluoridation to
global-warming statistics, childhood vaccine programs to
the artificial sweetener aspartame, the Holocaust to
evolution. Huge parcels of the World Wide Web are
devoted to such exposes. “We’re at a moment for a lot of
things where skepticism becomes a dogma,” says Michael
Shermer, author of a book about the antiscience backlash,
“Why People Believe Weird Things.”
But what’s in it for them? “The basis of denial is a need
to escape something that is terribly uncomfortable,” says
Boston College psychology professor Joseph Tecce, who
has studied Holocaust deniers and AIDS dissenters. “If
something is horrific, I might want to pretend it doesn’t
exist.”
Christine Maggiore’s horrific event came on Feb. 24,
1992, when, she says, a routine blood test came back
positive for HIV. She was 36 years old, single and a partner
in a successful clothing wholesaler. A former boyfriend also
tested positive. “I was mortified,” she says. “According to
the conventional wisdom, I had just foolishly and
irrevocably ruined my entire life.”
Maggiore was not immediately a disbeliever. Initially,
the oldest child of a Los Angeles advertising executive
sought the advice of doctors and planned to start treatment.
But some scientific principles of the disease never added up
to her. For one thing, she felt fine—and still does. How
could she have a killer virus? “There was this empirical data
from my own body,” she says. “I was ridiculously healthy.”
Ultimately she discovered the work of Berkeley
virologist Peter Duesberg, whose belief that AIDS is caused
by lifestyle choices like promiscuity and drug use rather than
infectious agents have long been dismissed by his peers.
One spring evening in 1994, as she was sitting on a panel
discussing AIDS prevention, it finally struck Maggiore that
she no longer believed in the epidemic. “Being a practical
person, it didn’t seem to me after investigating this that there
were good reasons for me to live my life as if I were dying,”
she says.
Now, nothing can dissuade her. Take the 1999 CDC
report detailing the wild successes of protease inhibitors, the
new class of AIDS drugs introduced in 1996. The study
correlates a huge drop-off in classic AIDS-related infections
with data on how many of the new drugs were prescribed.
“Prescriptions don’t mean people are actually taking the
drugs,” she objected. “Do you know how many people
flush their drugs down the toilet?” (In fact, she says, the
wholesale return to health is a direct result of that protest, in
bathrooms across America.)
Today Maggiore is the most prominent foe of what she
calls “the HIV equals AIDS equals death paradigm,” having
sold or given away 28,500 copies of her self-published
booklet since 1995, in addition to the copies in French,
German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. She
founded Alive & Well, which has spun off chapters around
the globe and is affiliated with dozens of like-minded groups
representing perhaps tens of thousands of followers.
Their message has resonated among a number of gay
men who, exhausted by 20 years of medical vigilance and
daily toxic drug regimens, are increasingly receptive to
Maggiore’s exhortation to “live in wellness... without fear of
AIDS.” And they have reinvigorated long-simmering AIDS
conspiracy theories. According to a 1995 survey of 1,000
African-American churchgoers, one third believed HIV was
concocted by the government for racial genocide. When she
spoke before a crowded room in Harlem in 1998,
spellbound members of the audience likened her to the
abolitionists, interrupting her with cries of “John Brown
lives!”
“If you told me five years ago I would be promoting the
notion that HIV does not cause AIDS, I would have said
you were nuts. I believed adamantly that HIV was a killer
and these drugs were saving lives,” says Michael
Bellefountaine, 34, a friend of Maggiore’s who decided
against taking anti-HIV medication years ago. Now he
attributes his survival to being drug-free. Last month he
attended a protest in San Francisco and chanted, “HIV is a
lie! It’s toxic pills that made them die!”
AIDS educators already hold Maggiore and her
acolytes responsible for an upswing in new infections. San
Francisco authorities just announced that new HIV cases in
1999 were nearly twice as high as in 1997. “People are
focusing on the wrong thing. They’re focusing on
conspiracies rather than protecting themselves, rather than
getting tested and seeking out appropriate care and
treatment,” says Stephen Thomas, who directs the
University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Minority Health.
HIV renegades sometimes seem as if their main goal is
mayhem, not constructive discourse. For instance, the San
Francisco chapter of ACT UP, once a major force lobbying
for more money for AIDS research, is now run by
dissenters who stage protests against other AIDS
leaders—regularly bathing them in cat-box litter or spit. On
Aug. 9, police charged two ACT UP members with assault
and battery for allegedly striking city health department
director Mitchell H. Katz and covering him with Silly String
during a public meeting. Similar antics now prevail among a
half-dozen ACT UP branches. “They’re crazy,” says Larry
Kramer, who founded ACT UP in 1987. “They’re undoing
all we’ve fought for.”
Picking over a black-bean wrap at her kitchen counter
recently, Maggiore described herself simply as a person
who asks questions others are overlooking. The fact that
she provokes hostility only emboldens her. She sees only
intolerance and recalcitrance among her detractors—they
“smack of parental authority and religious authority,” she
said. Her brother Steven, 41, calls her a modern-day
Copernicus.
But she soon made it clear that her disregard for HIV is
not just an intellectual gambit when her talkative 3-year-old
son, Charlie, wandered into the kitchen after a midday nap.
She talked about how she conceived him naturally and gave
birth without drugs routinely given to prevent transmission.
She continues to breast-feed him today, according to the
family’s pediatrician. Her family supports her in this, even
though HIV can be transmitted through breast milk and
judges have charged mothers in similar cases with child
endangerment.
Maggiore and Scovill, Charlie’s father, say they’ve
never been curious to test the child for HIV (Scovill does
not know his own status). Their pediatrician is not as
sanguine. “I would not be opposed to testing his blood,”
admits Dr. Paul Fleiss, who says the boy has been very
healthy. “But she is.”
“He’s a perfectly healthy little boy,” says Scovill,
bending to offer his son a macaroon. Charlie was skeptical.
“They’re really good,” the father insisted patiently. “And for
some reason they decrease viral load!” With that, both
parents had a good laugh at the silly AIDS goblin. Such is
the power of belief.
© 2000 Newsweek, Inc. |
