http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3887&IssueNum=157

A Daughter's Death,
A Mother's Survival
~ By CELIA FARBER ~

The L.A. Coroner insists little Eliza Jane Scovill died of AIDS, and treatment activists have
crucified her mother, turning the death of a child into a battleground over the theory that HIV
causes AIDS

Photo by Max S. Gerber
" I want to know the truth about what killed EJ," says Christine Maggiore, right, with her husband
Robin Scovill and son, Charlie

t was in the early spring of 2005 when Christine Maggiore and her two children, Eliza Jane, 3, and
Charlie, 8, scored a tiny victory against loss.

A bee got caught on the windshield of their car as they drove Charlie to school. "EJ misheard
something I said about nectar and thought the bee's name was Hector," Maggiore recalls.

Christine slowed the car down and drove the rest of the ride at 20 miles per hour, while the three
of them, as she recalls it, "all shouted at Hector to hang on."

"Charlie's task was to report changes in stoplights to me so I could concentrate on Hector, while EJ
was in charge of keeping up Hector's spirits."

They were late for school, but the bee named Hector was still alive when they got there 40 minutes
later. The children watched attentively as Christine delivered him safely onto a lavender plant.

No such shielding spirits, providence, or mercy came their way on the terrible night of May 15, when
EJ suddenly stopped breathing during the third week of what seemed like a stubborn cold. She had
developed a runny nose and cough two weeks earlier, which eventually developed into an ear
infection. Christine, by all accounts a very protective mother, took EJ to a total of three doctors,
all of whom said she had nothing serious, that her lungs sounded clear, and that Christine and her
husband Robin Scovill should put her on an antibiotic if the ear infection worsened. The third
doctor, a personal friend of the family - was concerned about redness in EJ's ears and prescribed an
antibiotic called amoxicillin, at 400 milligrams twice a day. After the second dose, on May 15, EJ
vomited several times. After the third dose, day two, she became agitated, pale, and cold to the
touch. Robin called the doctor who had prescribed the antibiotic and while he was on the phone with
him, Christine started screaming from the other room: "She stopped breathing!!"

Robin ran to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, while Christine, sobbing, called 911. Paramedics
arrived and found EJ pulseless; they rushed her by ambulance to Valley Presbyterian Hospital, where
she was pronounced dead after several hours of attempts to revive her. The EMT report stated that
she had died of cardiac arrest. The attending physician filled out a cause of death form stating
that, in his opinion, "this death was caused by sepsis."

When word started to trickle out that Christine Maggiore's daughter had died, it carried a very
loaded cargo even beyond the universal sadness no parent wants to fathom. For years she had been a
public and well-known campaigner for the most agonized polemic in all of contemporary medicine - the
fight about whether HIV "causes" AIDS. In recent years, the 49-year-old Maggiore - HIV positive and
healthy for 14 years - had relaxed her identity as a global warrior who fought the psychic death
sentence attached to HIV. For years, hers had been a fairly benign message of positivism that her
many detractors would spitefully call "AIDS denialism." But at the time of EJ's death she was
enjoying being a stay-at-home mother who doted on her kids, raising them in a gentle,
countercultural zone shared by a community that favored organic diets, limited antibiotics, and no
vaccinations. Having firsthand experience with the vagaries of HIV testing, she quite naturally
never had them tested for HIV. Nor did Eliza Jane's pediatricians ever request of the parents that
they have EJ tested.

The question of what killed little Eliza Jane has pitted those who question HIV's role in AIDS
against those who are certain it is uniformly deadly, and turned the "debate" into an all-out war.
The evidence at the heart of the war is a Rorschach blot for everything that remains dizzyingly
unresolved about what AIDS is and is not.

Four months after Eliza Jane died, after an initial autopsy finding no apparent cause of death, the
couple got a call from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Dan Costello, who said he was running a
story on the coroner's new assesment that EJ had died of AIDS - specifically, a kind of pneumonia
called PCP. The Times had somehow been tipped off to this new result before the report was even
completed. When Christine returned Costello's call, and asked that they hold the story until there
was time for them to even receive and digest the autopsy report, he told her he was under
"tremendous pressure" to run with the story two days later.

"From whom?" she asked.

"I can't say," Costello answered.

"Is it the coroner's office?" Maggiore asked.

"No," he answered.

(Costello did not respond to an interview request. His cowriter Charles Ornstein said that their
story would have to "stand on its own.")

On September 12, 2005, the Times ran a cover story by Costello and Ornstein accusing Maggiore, in so
many words, of murder. Titled, "A Mother's Denial, A Daughter's Death," it was a slam-dunk
indictment that assumed the revised coroner's report was accurate, and that EJ had died of
AIDS-related pneumonia - which could have been prevented if her mother had had her tested, and
medicated with AIDS drugs.

The L.A. Times refused to publish even a letter from Maggiore in which she spelled out the
controversial decisions in the coroner's report. It was around this time that I began to speak to
Christine Maggiore on the phone and take notes on her story, which often left me speechless. I had
been reporting on ´´ AIDS for 20 years, and we were both familiar with the impossibly censorious and
even brutal treatment one can expect if one is branded an "AIDS denialist." We talked about our own
capacity for seeing, hearing, knowing reality. "I want to know what killed EJ," she would say, and I
felt she really meant that.

More and more, as time passed, I started to see the story as one that was less and less medical,
more and more psycho-social - a story of an almost crushing kind of mob rule, where the victims have
no rights. Few could resist the delicious temptation to condemn a "denialist" mother, or to
appropriate EJ as their own tragic little girl. It was all done in the pitch-perfect tones of the
AIDS morality play some of us know so well.

So, they have had their play. The lights have gone up, the mother is, in some minds, swinging from
the gallows, and the pious are triumphant in their lament. Bloggers have made their names dissecting
and re-dissecting EJ's autopsy reports with tongue-clucking certainty. ABC Primetime showed footage
of Christine and Robin watching film of EJ's brain tissue, which was said to be ravaged by an HIV
protein called p24. They then posted her autopsy report on their website, which the anti-Maggiore
bloggers went at like sharks after chum. Anonymous hate groups sprouted from Bethesda to L.A.,
distributing increasingly deranged flyers, erecting an anti-Maggiore website, and even starting a
new activist group called the "Christine Maggiore Action Committee" (CMAC, pronounced "smack"),
devoted to forcing her to publicly recant her HIV positions, and "apologize for her involvement in
the AIDS denialism movement." One of these groups printed a flyer that was originally a picture of
EJ in a hat, taken from a website that friends of Maggiore and Scovill put up, but the photo was
defaced. Black X marks were over her eyes, her lips were morphed and turned down over ghoulish
teeth, and the text read: "I died of neglect and AIDS and then my Mommy paid people big bucks to lie
and say it was bad medicine! See you in HELL Mommy!"

These and other similarly grisly flyers were distributed all over L.A.. She received profane,
abusive e-mails from e-mail addresses with her late daughter's name in the address, as well as
heavy-breathing anonymous phone calls that were traced to the Gay and Lesbian Transgender Community
Center (LGBT) in L.A. who also distributed 1,500 copies of a leaflet asking people to get involved
in the campaign to " . Help STOP Christine Maggiore."

All this courtesy of the people who for years have instructed the world about "compassion." They
were once called "AIDS activists"; now they are called "Treatment Activists." EJ Scovill's death has
become, in the past year, the very crucible of the HIV Causation War.

I have more of these profane and cruel flyers and e-mails at hand, but let's stop there. The point
is made. AIDS has become synonymous with rage and hatred of those who think differently from the
orthodoxy. About that there is no question. The question is: In such a climate, what are the chances
of anybody, on either side, being able to see clearly what the "facts" are about the sudden death of
Eliza Jane Scovill, one year ago? Especially one fact: the county coroner has produced no HIV test
on EJ Scovill.

AIDS IS SO OBVIOUS

Christine Maggiore originally tested positive on an HIV test during a routine physical in 1990, and
became a poster girl for heterosexual, middle-class AIDS, speaking to groups and telling them: "If I
can get it, anybody can." She became an HIV "skeptic" when she repeated the HIV test and tested
inconclusive twice, positive three times, and negative once. This caused her to start researching
the scientific underpinnings of the HIV test, the hypothesis itself, the assumptions about illness
and death attached to it, and the wisdom of the drug regimens. She founded what would become the
largest "dissident" AIDS charity in the country, Alive and Well, rooted in the heretical idea that
people who tested positive for HIV antibodies could live long, healthy lives and not die from HIV
"infection," per se. Though she never gave medical advice, she authored a self-published book, What
if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?, and became a kind of motivational
figurehead for the HIV positives of the world, speaking, holding meetings, and working behind the
scenes to help mothers and fathers who were under siege by draconian HIV mandates.

Being hyper-aware of the high incidence of false positives, of the stigmas attached to the test and
a positive result, and above all, of the crushing power of the state to enforce toxic medications,
ban breast-feeding, and even seize children at gunpoint if HIV positive mothers disobeyed, Maggiore
says to this day that she does not regret not testing her children. Since EJ died, she had Charlie
tested, and he has tested negative on all tests, as has her husband Robin, with whom she has had
unprotected sex for 11 years. Robin Scovill is an award-winning filmmaker who shares his wife's
convictions about the need to question HIV dogma. He won the Special Jury Prize at the AFI Los
Angeles International Film festival for his documentary The Other Side of AIDS. (Scovill has been
all but erased from media portrayals of the story, which focus instead on the archetypal Bad
Mother.)

On May 16, 2005, Eliza Jane's body was referred to the L.A. County Coroner to determine a cause of
death, which was then listed as "unknown." AIDS had not been considered initially. Maggiore and
Scovill did not volunteer the news that Christine had tested positive, as well as negative and
indeterminate, so the examiners initially did not see the girl's body through the lens of HIV or
AIDS. A friend of theirs, Keith Relkin, identifying himself as a student of public policy, called
the coroner's office on May 21, and asked if routine HIV tests were administered in cases of
unexplained death. Relkin spoke to a male employee who told him the coroner does not consider
routine HIV testing necessary because "AIDS is so obvious." Coroner's know, or knew before this
case, that a PCP death caused massive destruction to the lungs.

Nor did the coroner consider, apparently, the possibility of an antibiotic-related death. The reason
for all this obfuscation is clear to me: The mother is an "AIDS denialist," and therefore stands
accused of not seeing AIDS. What the medical examiners saw, before they knew whose daughter they
were looking at, was nothing.

On May 18, L.A. County medical examiner Dr. Changsri [first name????] called and spoke to Scovill,
telling him that she had found "nothing apparent" as a cause of death, and would need to see what
might grow in cultures. Meanwhile, she would release Eliza Jane to a mortuary.

On May 26, an investigator from the coroner's office called Dr. Paul Fleiss, one of Eliza Jane's
pediatricians, and asked if he knew about "the parents," and "what happens when you Google the
mother's name."

When Fleiss replied he didn't think Google searches would illuminate what killed Eliza Jane, the
woman snapped that she thought Maggiore's book had "everything to do" with the case. Under threat of
subpoena, she demanded that Fleiss immediately fax Eliza Jane's medical records to the coroner's
office.

In early August, Maggiore started calling the coroner's office for any possible information about
Eliza Jane's second autopsy. She was told by the coroner's office that the case had been placed on
"security hold," and no information was available. A Detective Castillo from the LAPD had ordered
the hold; Maggiore was told she could get no additional information. A few days later, Maggiore
called again and asked under what circumstances the hold might be lifted. The woman who answered the
phone shouted: "Hold is hold. Do you understand the meaning of the word 'hold'?" When Maggiore
replied that she understood it to be a matter of waiting, the woman yelled: "It's a police matter.
You need to take it up with the police. Do you understand that?"

On September 13, somebody from the coroner's office called and angrily told Scovill that they had
determined the cause of death to be "AIDS pneumonia," and that the family had caused them difficulty
by "withholding information."

But did EJ "have" HIV? Was she tested? Or was it her mother's HIV positive status that caused the
diagnosis - the Googling of her name and history? Did her lungs show evidence of fatal pneumonia?
Did her blood show signs of a crashed immune system, as measured by lymphocyte counts, viral load,
HIV antibodies, anything?

The couple were told that the new autopsy report would be ready by September 16. The couple provided
their address. In this same conversation, they were told that EJ's case had been so difficult
because the coroner's office "didn't know HIV was an issue."

On September 15, L.A. Times reporter Dan Costello left a voice-mail message asking for comment on a
story he had mostly written already, and which was scheduled to run on September 17. The Times did
not have a copy of the coroner's report, but had been told that the cause of death had been
re-classified as "AIDS." Chief Coroner Dr. James Ribe had been brought in to help "resolve" the case
and it was he who penned the word "AIDS." It is not known how the Times got this information, even
before Scovill and Maggiore had received their copy of the report in the mail, which was on
September 21. (The coroner's office at press time had not returned a call for comment.)

The L.A. Times article by Costello and Ornstein contained no mention of EJ's HIV status, or whether
she was tested. Her HIV status was not contained in the coroner's report, and for several weeks
Maggiore and Scovill were faced with the Kafkaesque situation of being denied their own daughter's
HIV serology records (HIV tests, unlike other viral tests, are run repeatedly, often have different
outcomes, and banding patterns that can be interpreted subjectively. It is not a clear Yes or No,
and is often decided based on the patient's identification with a risk group.)

"We have been trying since September of last year to gather information about and copies of any and
all HIV-related diagnostics that may have been performed on our daughter post-mortem," said
Maggiore. "The position of the coroner's office had been to refer us to the lab and the lab's
position is they're not giving us anything absent a subpoena."

Diagnostics aside, what about the corporeal evidence?

On what basis did the coroner determine, after four months, that EJ had died of PCP pneumonia? This
is a question that has been analyzed into powdered detail on blogs, radio shows, and network TV over
the past year. HIV believers see pneumonia clear as day, those who question the causes of AIDS do
not. Maggiore herself made the following arguments in her unpublished letters to the L.A. Times and
in countless skirmishes with journalists and bloggers: First, that during the last two weeks of her
daughter's life, three doctors listened to EJ's lungs and declared them "clear." Her lungs were
operating at full capacity a week before her death, when she was videotaped at a birthday party
blowing an unfurling paper tooter repeatedly. (This footage was given to ABC Primetime, which did
not air it.) She also noted that her daughter never turned blue in the extremities, but was "pink"
until the very end, and that she did not die of respiratory failure, but rather, cardiac arrest. She
said that although her daughter's lungs on autopsy were fluid-filled, there was no inflammation, and
that pneumonia is characterized by inflammation.

In the summer of 2005, an independent pathologist, Dr. Mohammed Al Bayati, a board-certified
toxicologist and pathologist, offered to review the L.A. Coroner's autopsy findings. His report
concluded that Eliza Jane had died of anaphylactic shock due to amoxicillin and not pneumonia.
Anaphylactic deaths due to so-called beta-lactam antibiotics result in up to 1,000 deaths per year.
According to Al Bayati, and others who have reviewed his assessment of the coroner's report, the
most striking thing about EJ's autopsy findings were the amount of displaced fluids in the body,
suggestive of a massive toxic reaction. Forty percent of her body fluids had been displaced and
"leaked out into the tissues," which is consistent with toxicity, causing the body's vasculature to
become permeable. All of her organs - lungs, heart, liver and kidneys, were way larger than normal,
engorged and fluid filled, which is what Al Bayati says caused multiple organ failure culminating in
cardiac arrest.

This claim - that EJ was killed by a reaction to the antibiotic - in turn caused a massive wave of
attacks on Al Bayati's credibility throughout the blogophere. It was noted that he is on the
advisory board of Alive and Well, and that he is on record having stated that he does not believe
HIV causes AIDS.

There are several kinds of antibiotic reactions that can be fatal: Some are immediate and others are
delayed, or "late," occurring up to 72 hours after ingesting the drug. Package inserts for
amoxicillin describe possible fatal reactions that include: "cardiovascular collapse," "nausea and
vomiting," and "hemolytic anemia." (EJ was found to be severely anemic.)

Credibility wars raged against Al Bayati on the one hand, and Coroner James Ribe on the other. The
primary concern about Ribe's credibility is that he is under investigation by the L.A. Appellate
Court for having submitted flawed and possibly fraudulent autopsy reports in several cases that led
to murder convictions of parents.

Ribe concluded that Eliza Jane died of AIDS as determined by PCP pneumonia and "brain
encephalopathy," after an HIV-associated protein called p24 was found in her brain tissue, which
Maggiore refers to as a "scavenger hunt" set into motion when no p24 was found in her daughter's
blood. Critics say that p24 is found in healthy controls and is not a specific marker for HIV, and
that EJ showed no signs of dementia or any brain abnormality while alive. Ribe stated adamantly on
ABC Primetime that EJ's lungs were ravaged by Pneumocystic organisms and her brain by "HIV," which
was not advertised as being found in the blood but only in the brain in the form of this one
protein, p24.

The program set off another round of blog warfare. One woman, Heather Knolls Morgan, to cite one of
countless examples of anti-Maggiore sociopathology on the Internet, wrote in to a thread at Reason's
Hit and Run blog: "Christine, your daughter is six feet under. Are you happy now?"

Last Sunday, writing on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, pharmaceutical-industry-funded AIDS
researcher Dr. John Moore, echoing recent calls by "treatment activists" to "wage war on AIDS
denialism," cited EJ's death as a catalyzing reason HIV dissent could no longer be tolerated, and
was indeed, "deadly quackery." He claimed in this angry sermon to have special knowledge that EJ was
"infected at birth" with HIV, and that she died of a treatable AIDS infection. This is what EJ's
death means to the punitive, sermonizing AIDS establishment and why they are fighting it so
breathlessly: They need it. EJ is propping up the very paradigm at this point.

THE INVESTIGATION

I called up University of Illinois cell biologist and toxicology expert Dr. Andrew Maniotis, who
will stand accused of "agreeing with Al Bayati," and therefore being insane, to ask him for a lay
person's tour through this thicket. In a paper he wrote (not yet published) reviewing all the
evidence, Maniotis wrote: "No one in their right mind would assume that the presence of the
organism, [P. Cariini] especially in the absence of pneumonia . in an immuneocompetent host . equals
a lethal case of PCP."

In a telephone interview with CityBeat, Maniotis said: "I wanted to come to my own conclusions
because I needed to make my own peace with Christine Maggiore's situation, which affected me deeply.
So I started at the beginning. The events leading up to the death looks pretty much like a drug
reaction. They should have focused on amoxicillin first and foremost because it was the last agent
taken. When she got to the hospital they gave her more antibiotics, intravenously, which is crazy.
She had a heart attack - she wasn't dying of an infection."

I asked him how one can cut through the din and fog of whether it could have been "AIDS," in the
absence of news of an HIV test, or CD4 cell counts or viral load, which are the "surrogate markers"
that bracket the entire clinical AIDS dialectic outside of this particular case, for which we are
asked to alter all parameters in the name of exorcising "denialism."

Maniotis said something that I have never heard noted before. "They did a lymphocyte count on Eliza
Jane when she was admitted to the hospital. Forget everything else. Her absolute lymphocyte count
was 10,800 cells per milliliter. She was not immune suppressed. That's all you've got to know. She
could not have died from PCP and had 10,800 lymphocytes in her bloodstream at the time of death. No
way. It just doesn't happen. Nor could she have encephalitis. End of story, it's that simple. 10,800
lymphocytes is very high, and the World Health Organization has said that it is a legitimate
standard way of gauging the immune system, in the absence of testing for CD4/CD8 ratios. An AIDS
patient has to have below 1,000 total lymphocyte counts. Normal is about 4,000 to 8,000. EJ's was
10,800. Even according to the most strident HIV dogmatists, AIDS is still a disease of too few
lymphocytes, not too many. All the pathologists I talk to find this logic hard to refute. She could
not have had PCP, nor died of it."

There is a coroner's report that has listed as the cause of death "AIDS" for Eliza Jane Scovill, and
despite all the arrows that point away from that conclusion, the witch hunt against Maggiore and
Scovill is in full swing and showing no signs of abating.

A criminal investigation of neglect leading to homicide has been under way for months, and hangs
like a sword over the family each day. Detectives have called all the parents from Charlie's school,
neighbors, friends, parents of playmates, and grilled them for details about EJ's condition in the
last weeks of her life. "They have been going around asking parents questions about Eliza Jane's
snot," says Maggiore incredulously. "Was it green? Yellow? One parent opened the door and said
sarcastically to the police officer: 'I guess you want to talk to me about the cold sore do you?
Come on in.' The officer jumped on it: 'What do you know about the cold sore?'"

When Shari Cliver got the call from a police officer, who said she was "calling about the death of
Eliza Jane Scovill," Cliver became enraged. "EJ was like any other kid," she says with desperation
in her voice. "I told the detective she was perfectly healthy and normal and you need to do your
homework and figure out who I am and then call me back. I was this family's nanny."

"If you're going to put Christine and Robin on trial you may as well put all of us parents in this
community on trial. We would have done no different than what they did - they are exceptional
parents," added Cliver. She says now, "I am so furious, and I told that detective what I thought of
her. I told her how disgusting this is, to all of us, how morally and ethically wrong. "

None of the parents in Maggiore's and Scovill's mid-Valley community have turned against the pair;
far from it, they support them all the way, and continually tell the investigators as much each time
they come knocking.

Christine Maggiore says, in a steady voice, choosing her words carefully: "To a certain extent, in
all the darkness there has been light. Blessings. My immediate world is a beautiful place. A family
I love, friends and neighbors. But it's a daily struggle. There is no immediate solace."

Celia Farber is the author of Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. Her most recent
article appeared on the March cover of Harper's.

06-08-06