Research Hospitals Sponsoring International HIV Adoptions - What Could go Wrong?

Although the end of the Helms amendment was celebrated, it opened the door to import and cultivate orphans for AIDS drug research

A visit to the webpage of Oregon Health and Sciences University’s (OHSU) Pediatric HIV clinic reveals the university works with the Cascade AIDS Project under a program called “Kids Connection” to sponsor international adoptions of HIV positive infants and children to bring them to the clinic - who are prioritized over Oregonians and who will always be seen within two weeks of their arrival in Oregon:

Kids Connection turns out to be a summer camp attached to the Cascade AIDS Project. Both I and mainstream media have reported on the conflicts of interest between Gilead Sciences, Oregon Government, and Cascade AIDS. I should note, however, that a summer camp is not an adoption agency.

A look at Anthony Fauci’s national Pediatric AIDS Drug Trials network called “IMPAACT” reveals that OHSU’s Pediatric AIDS Clinic physicians are all researchers funded by Fauci:

One of IMPAACT’s studies is very disturbing: P1115, aka NCT 02140255. It is almost an exact copy of the failed 2010 Mississippi Baby Protocol - in fact, the lead author on several P1115 reports, Deborah Persaud is the lead author on the 2014 NEJM publication of the failed Mississippi baby protocol.

Steve Nagel has done an excellent job sleuthing Fauci’s secret research about a functional cure using early neonatal HAART that never materialized. Nagel’s story about Baby Rico is heartbreaking, but it is only in his recent substack posts that the experimental research aspect of the case has materialized.

Going back to the 90’s, Fauci had at least 10 orphanages available to test experimental AIDS drugs on children and neonates. In 2004, this came crashing down with the absolutely stellar investigation by Liam Scheff. NIH Whistleblower Jonathan Fishbein explained in 2020 that it was very difficult to get infants and children enrolled in Phase 1 toxicity trials, so vulnerable ‘AIDS orphans’ were denied a federally-mandated patient advocate, who is supposed to weigh the potential benefit of participating in research with the best interest of the child. Given the documented toxicity of drugs like Nevirapine or AZT, no real patient advocate or informed parent would ever consent to such research. Fishbein recalls that NIH Director Elias Zerhouni apologized and put into place stronger pediatric research protections, but for some reason all records of that seem scrubbed from the internet.

Still the damage was done - and as Nagel has uncovered, the research into nevirapine (it was a triple dose “accidentally” administered to Baby Rico that likely killed Nagel’s grandson) went underground, off the record, and was decentralized. The holy grail: obtain a “functional cure” like the Mississippi baby for perinatal transmission. The existence of the Mississippi Baby provided the justification to go off-label - if one child was “cured” (i.e. had a bogus PCR test) then others could be. HOWEVER - in 2014, the secret couldn’t hold: the Mississippi baby was a fraud, and Fauci’s dream of recruiting 60 babies for a protocol involving aggressive HAART soon after birth and “cessation” to achieve a “functional cure” (akin to a “sustained virological response”) became too widely known to be kept secret.

So, in 2014, the Mississippi Baby’s PI, Deborah Persaud made it official: a “Phase I Phase II Proof of Concept Study” with a whopping 50 trial centers repeating the Mississippi Baby experiment on a goal of 960 recruited infants - still recruiting in 2023. At first the study only had American trial centers, but eventually it would add sites in South America and Africa. The protocol involves the same drugs given to the Mississippi Baby at very high doses who then after a specified time of viral load suppression cease treatment and then are followed for five or more years.

At the center of the protocol is once again Nevirapine. It is a drug banned since January 5, 2001 for post-exposure prophylaxis. In August 1993, Nature had to publish a retraction of its in vitro efficacy. In 1996, it received an FDA approval on the basis of surrogate markers that later fell apart. Its licensing had been rejected by Canadian and German regulators. Its use had killed Joyce Ann Hafford, a Tennessee mother enrolled in a clinical trial where critical informed consent was withheld. Yet nevirapine keeps coming back whack-a-mole fashion.

So, why all those foreign study centers that started getting added in 2018 or so? Well, given the difficulty of recruiting domestically, it appears the PI’s had to go abroad - and then to perform the proper follow-up we now have: International pediatric adoptions of HIV positive children sponsored by the very researchers involved in pediatric drug research - especially ones with alarming package inserts.

A 2013 investigation by Reuters found international adoptions frequently fail and that it is easy for American adoptive parents to hand off the children without any state scrutiny. Given the lack of concern of Child Protective Services for these babies who are essentially given away, the heightened concern for Baby Rico seems even more nauseating.

I was shocked to learn how many research hospitals sponsor international adoption services: Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota, and University of Chicago, Medicine just to name a few. State laws do have site visits that can investigate a potential adoptive home taking many weeks or months, but one really wonders if the process could be fast tracked with a few back-room phone calls between NIH and State Dept and the State Adoption agencies: “we need to get this infant into potentially lifesaving research!”

It’s a system prone to abuse. I plan to dig deeper.

Postscript: April 2023

Evidently, OHSU’s Pediatric HIV researcher Dr. Guzman-Cottrell is the individual who created the CDC’s MMWR report that was used to slander Dr. Paul Thomas. He is the vaccine-skeptical Portland Pediatrician who had his medical license revoked on a series of false accusations, including Dr. Cottrell’s.

Looking into IMPAACT P1115, it is deeply disturbing. Documents show it is explicitly intended to reproduce the Mississippi Baby experiment and to determine “Maximum Nevirapine tolerance.” The head of the snake appears to be Dr. Theodore Ruel of UCSF, a colleague of Dr. [Mengele] Deeks. Supposedly, Nevirapine tolerance should have been determined way back in the 90’s, and P1115 has 50 study centers - very similar to the notorious ACTG 076 for AZT. Initially, P1115 had only US Study Centers, but starting in 2018, they went international - probably for difficulty of recruitment.