Official Stories: Counter-Arguments for a Culture in Need (2012)

By Liam Scheff - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

Between the early 1990s and mid-2000s, orphaned and adopted children at the Incarnation Children’s Center in Washington Heights were force-fed pharmaceuticals bearing the FDA’s black-box warning, the label reserved for drugs that had killed adults at ordinary doses. Children who refused the pills had them delivered through nasal tubes. Children who continued to refuse had holes surgically cut in their abdomens and PEG tubes installed so the drugs could be pumped directly into the stomach with infant formula. Three dozen trials appear in the government clinical trials database with the orphanage listed as a study site, sponsored by Glaxo, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Genentech, and Merck. When the reporter who broke the story pressed his sources onto the record, including a taped interview with the doctor who ordered the abdominal surgeries, the New York Times ran a front-page piece calling those sources “un-named,” his documentation “no official documentation,” and his research “access only to the Internet.” None of it was true. Three years later, the VERA Institute, paid three million dollars by New York City to produce the definitive review, acknowledged that 532 children had been used in trials citywide and that many had died, while insisting the deaths were “not a direct result of the medications.” That reporter was Liam Scheff, and he collected the case, alongside ten others, in Official Stories: Counter-Arguments for a Culture in Need (2012).

Scheff came at this work from inside the family that built it. His grandfather Robert C. Mellors was a medical student who set up a laboratory for Albert Sabin and spent his career on the search for what mainstream medicine called cancer viruses. His grandmother Jane Mellors worked in the same field. His uncle John Mellors became a senior figure in the AIDS research establishment, whose published work Scheff cites in the same book that indicts it. Scheff was raised on the private conversation at holiday tables about who held power at the NIH and which protocols had just quietly been abandoned as errors, and the family lesson that “facts change” in medical science on a six-month cycle. He worked as a freelance investigative journalist. Between 2003 and 2008 he embedded himself in the Incarnation Children’s Center story, publishing in magazines and newspapers, appearing on New York and national radio, and producing source material for the BBC documentary Guinea Pig Kids, directed by Milena Schwager. Official Stories was his only non-fiction book, self-published in 2012, and it draws on that reporting alongside a decade of parallel investigation into the other topics in the book.

By the time the book appeared, the orthodoxies it dissents from had hardened into consensus. AZT and its cocktail successors were the standard of care. HIV testing was expanding under state and federal mandate. Gardasil, rolled out in 2005 with the claim that HPV caused cervical cancer, was being pushed onto boys as well as girls. The official 9/11 Commission Report had been in print for eight years, and dissent about Building 7, the Pentagon strike, and the collapse mechanics had been organized into a documented technical challenge that the mainstream press refused to engage. Peter Duesberg’s HIV work had been marginalized for two decades. The Rockefeller and Carnegie arrangement of American medicine, sealed by the 1910 Flexner Report that reduced American medical schools from 162 to 66 and eliminated the ones teaching alternative paradigms, remained unquestioned in every accredited institution. Georges Lemaître’s cosmic egg was still the working model in university astronomy departments. Alfred Wegener’s continental drift had been absorbed and defanged as “plate tectonics,” and Sam Warren Carey’s expanding-Earth work had been quietly shelved. Scheff was writing against the settled consensus of the working priesthoods.

The summary that follows walks the book chapter by chapter. Jim West mapped American pesticide production year by year against the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and found them tracking. In 1956 the CDC redefined polio from a 24-hour illness with mild symptoms into a 60-day permanent paralysis, retiring the failure of the Salk vaccine overnight. Nancy Padian followed 175 heterosexual couples in which one partner tested positive and one negative for six years, and recorded zero transmissions, which the field buried. At a few minutes to five on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, the BBC anchor announced that Building 7 had collapsed while the reporter in New York stood in front of the intact building visibly rising behind her left shoulder. Building 7 fell twenty minutes later. Georges Lemaître, who invented the Big Bang, was a Roman Catholic priest. His peers recognized it in the 1920s as Genesis with a few decimal places thrown in for looks.

The book has sat on my shelf for the last few years. I noticed it recently and decided it was time to highlight Scheff again. Of the eleven chapters, the one that opened the widest door was the ninth, on the electric universe. That chapter is why I could later hear Thomas Levy on ascorbate and electron flow, and why Gerald Pollack's work on structured water made sense when it arrived. He also opened the door to the falsehoods of Darwinism. The list of reframes I owe directly to Liam is long. Each chapter of the book is its own awakening, and this is arguably the most perspective-shifting book I have ever read. His five-minute clip "Vaccination: The Best of All Possible Worlds," on vaccination as tribal ritual, is worth watching before or after. Toby Rogers read the book after I began writing about Scheff here, and his review is worth reading alongside this one. Liam was one of a kind. He is missed by those who knew him directly and by the rest of us who only came to him through the work. The book is here, and worth owning on principle.

The rest of this summary — the analogy, one-minute elevator explanation, 12-point summary, Q&As, and Golden Nugget — is for paid subscribers.

Your subscription also unlocks every other book summary in the library, the Deep Dive Audio Library, my original books (new ones added monthly), and three series for the moments when a real decision is in front of you: Questions for Your Doctor, Before You Consent, and Package Inserts.