'I'm a Healthy Person. Our Children Have Excellent Records of Health …'
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AIDS Defiant: IH V-positive Christine Maggiore appeared on the cover of Mothering magazine in 2001, pregnant with daughter Eliza Jane. By 2005, THE DENIALIST Eliza Jane had died of pneumonia resulting from untreated Aids. ‘I’m a healthy person. Our children have excellent records of health …’ Despite the death of her child and being HIV-positive, Christine Maggiore refused to believe she had Aids. by Diana Wichtel he image is confronting, as keep googling her and her organisation, when children with far less – impatient late like a motorway pile-up. Maggiore’s edifice. Maggiore survived for a long time been published in Harpers magazine. In it’s meant to be and, now, Alive and Well, to see what she was up to. distracted parents, a small apartment on book was called What If Everything You without drugs. “Mathilde Krim would this country, Joel Hayward’s thesis claim- unbelievably sad. A vibrant One such search revealed that, in 2005, a busy street, extended day care, Oscar Thought You Knew About Aids Turned out to describe me as a slow progressor,” said ing the Nazi gas chambers were “atrocity woman sits smiling into weeks after that radio show, Eliza Jane Mayer Lunchables – will happily stay?” be Wrong? There was a certain amount of Maggiore, of a doctor interviewed on propaganda” was awarded first class hon- the camera, flanked by her was dead. After being ill for a couple of The site was soon taken down. schadenfreude on websites where denial- 20/20, “as if to make ‘progress’ I need ours. Climate change deniers are regularly Thusband and small son. On her bare, weeks, during which time Maggiore had Earlier this year, in an idle moment, I ism is opposed. But no one would ever to become ill!” After EJ’s death, her son called upon to give “balance”. pregnant tummy is painted a “No AZT” her seen by three paediatricians sympa- tapped in “Maggiore”. She was dead, too, wish being this wrong on anyone. Charlie and her husband, Robin Scovill, Maggiore was certainly no slouch at symbol. The cover line on an issue of thetic to her views, the three-year-old was aged 52. Her death certificate, it’s alleged, It’s not difficult to see some reasons both tested negative. Scovill and Mag- getting heard. She attended the 13th Mothering magazine reads “HIV+ Moms rushed to hospital. There, Maggiore did cited disseminated herpes viral infection, why Maggiore took the track she did. In giore had never practised safe sex. “I just International Aids conference in Durban Say No to Aids Drugs”. not disclose her own HIV-positive status. bilateral bronchial pneumonia and oral 1992, Maggiore, a successful business- never really bought into the premise that in 2000, where she had the ear of Thabo I remember seeing that back in 2001. candidiasis, all Aids-defining conditions. woman, discovered she was HIV-positive. Mbeki. A 2008 Harvard study put an esti- Someone called Christine Maggiore was But by now I knew how things would go. A former boyfriend in Italy tested posi- mated 365,000 preventable premature the Californian HIV-positive mum in “Life as I had lived, Her supporters didn’t dispute these facts, tive also. “Life as I had lived, planned No one claims to know deaths in South Africa down to the influ- question and an Aids denialist. HIV was planned and hoped came to but have claimed she really died of an and hoped came to a grinding halt,” she everything about HIV/Aids. ence of denialists. harmless, she believed, and didn’t lead a grinding halt.” She talked unusually strong detox regime, of taking wrote on the Alive and Well website. She There are always shards of No amount of evidence, not the worst to Aids. She rejected Aids medication for of “shock and shame”, of antibiotics, or of the stress of defending talked of “shock and shame”, of feeling truth on which to erect the of personal tragedies, dented Maggiore‘s herself, refused to get her husband Robin herself after the death of EJ. In the wilds like a leper. She retested several times, get- certainty. “No cracks. No doubts,” noted Scovill, maker of the dissident film The feeling like a leper. of cyberspace, dark forces were hinted at. ting negative, positive and indeterminate whole, shaky edifice. an Elle magazine interview after EJ’s Other Side of Aids, or her son, Charlie, Maggiore always said she was only after results. A meeting with Peter Duesberg, a death. “This woman could lead armies.” tested. “I’m a healthy person,” she told “I wanted an unprejudiced evaluation of the truth. An autopsy might have settled professor of molecular biology who main- if you have sex with the wrong person, On Primetime Maggiore described the Connie Chung on ABC’s 20/20 in 2001. my daughter,” she told ABC’s Primetime. the matter. None, it seems, was done. tains that the HIV virus is harmless and you’re going to be infected and your life scene the night EJ died. “My husband “Charlie’s a healthy boy.” When her The coroner found Eliza Jane died Aids-denialist journalist and friend of doesn’t cause Aids, gave her what must as you knew it is over,” said Scovill on was on the phone with the paediatrician, daughter Eliza Jane was born, the baby of Aids-related pneumonia. Maggiore Maggiore Celia Farber posted online an have looked like the way out. 20/20. and I started screaming: ‘She stopped wasn’t tested either. As with Charlie, and commissioned her own report, from email from Maggiore about the state of her “Research since the early 80s has breathing!’ Then, she collapsed right in against best medical opinion, Maggiore Dr Mohammed Al-Bayati, a veterinary health. Maggiore talked about difficulty proven beyond all doubt that HIV causes s with denial of the Holocaust, front of my eyes. My baby! My baby!” As breastfed Eliza Jane. Maggiore regularly pathologist who is on the board of Alive eating, sleeping, breathing. “I was feel- Aids,” says the New Zealand Aids Foun- climate change or any other she became so ill herself, in precisely the put up her own good health, and her and Well. He claimed EJ died of an aller- ing winded after the most simple task like dation firmly. “Aids denialism has no vis- A inconvenient truth, this sort of ways medical science predicted, Maggiore children’s, as evidence that the HIV/Aids gic reaction to antibiotics. That’s the story making the bed.” She sought out a doctor ible support at all in New Zealand.” Yet “rethinking” is cast by believers as healthy must have known she’d got it wrong. You “paradigm” was wrong. “Our children Maggiore stuck to. More websites ensued, “not at all into the HIV paradigm”. She Maggiore was the poster girl for a small scepticism. The myth persists that “dissi- can’t help but be haunted by the choice have excellent records of health. They’ve though some postings on www.ejlove- died soon after. Farber somehow thought but surprisingly influential global ideol- dent” thinking is ruthlessly suppressed. she then faced. She might have saved never had respiratory problems, flus, tour.com proved unhelpful to Maggiore’s the email proved Maggiore didn’t die of ogy. This is a world where, as with cli- In fact, it infiltrates the mainstream sur- her own life, and more besides, but that intractable colds, ear infections, noth- cause. She implied that her daughter had Aids. That post also disappeared fast. mate change or Holocaust denial, dodgy prisingly often. Neville Hodgkinson, would mean backing down and accept- ing. So, our choices, however radical they somehow chosen to “go home”: “Why science and even dodgier logic abounds. former Sunday Times science correspond- ing the chance offered by Aids drugs. A may seem, are extremely well-founded,” our child – so appreciated, so held, so live and Well. By this time, the No one claims to know everything about ent, published articles in the 90s with chance she denied her own child. If she she said, in a radio interview. carefully nurtured … How come what we tragic ironies surrounding this HIV/Aids. There are always shards of titles like “Aids: The Plague That Never ever wavered, no one is saying. Her sup- It seemed mad. I couldn’t help but offered was not enough to keep her here A case were beginning to accumu- truth on which to erect the whole, shaky Was”. Celia Farber’s denialist work has porters still hail her as a hero. z 36 LISTENER MAY 30 2009 MAY 30 2009 LISTENER 37.