BBC documentary that exposes how the city of New York has been forcing HIV-Positive children under its supervision to be used as human guinea pigs in tests for experimental AIDS drug trials.
Transcript for the BBC documentary Guinea Pig Kids
This is a slightly edited version of the complete documentary broadcast on Tuesday, 30 November, 2004, at 1930 GMT on BBC Two in the UK.
Liam Scheff has provided a few comments in brackets. The rest is from the BBC transcript of the film.
The Narrator throughout is Amanda St John.
Speaker: We have freedom in this country and that’s a wonderful thing isn’t it? We have freedom of religion and freedom of speech and that’s one of the cool things about being an American.
Narrator: Battery Park, in the heart of downtown New York. And a hymn to America in the last of the summer sunshine. New York is the richest city, in the richest country in the world. But just a few miles uptown live some of the poorest communities in America.
In the Bronx three grandchildren try to bring their grandmother up to date with the latest fashions. But two people are missing from this picture. Veronica Momodu recently died of AIDS.
[ed – This is the one piece of the film I think is not as accurate as it could be. She didn’t die of ‘Aids’, as in a long, debilating death. She was an African immigrant. Her son had been taken from her by the state, because she did not want him in an AIDS drug trial. I was working with her to appear in the film and tell her story. She was depressed and anxious, and terribly distraught over not seeing her child.
A few weeks before filming, she passed out in her home, again, after months of stress from not being able to see her child, and not knowing where in the city he was. She was brought into the hospital passed out, after having, I was told, a seizure. I believe she was drugged heavily, and with the standard Aids drugs, because she had tested ‘HIV positive’. In any case, three weeks after entering the hospital and starting the drugs, she was dead.]
Narrator: It was left to her mother, Regina, to bring up three granddaughters and a grandson, Garfield, who’s HIV Positive. Veronica and Regina had wanted to have a say in the treatment Garfield received.
But instead the New York authorities insisted Garfield stay on drugs and medicines, which even the other children could see were making him ill.
