Dr. Mengele, USA Style: Lessons from Human Rights Abuses in America [pdf] (2022)
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Think about that for a second.
Yet in just a few decades, the medical establishment has managed to convince the vast majority of people and public officials that distrusting them is equivalent to claiming the Earth is flat or that the world is ruled by a secret cabal of lizardmen.
That surely has to be the greatest PR coup in human history.
Like - was American society aware of this? This all seemed pretty secret to me.
Did it sign the papers authorizing this? Did we vote on all that and I somehow missed it?
Were the people crafting these horrors and delivering these cocktails Licensed Doctors, or random American society folk?
Don't need to. Once you realize that the biggest mass murderers in the 20th century were all governments you should know what to think of those organizations.
Or, we've noticed the above, thought that it was an outrage, and fixed it. In fact these days some argue we've swung to the opposite side, and the barriers to even harmless research have gotten onerous.
Trust isn't optional in a society. If you don't trust the "establishment", then somebody has to take its place, and they've got all the same problems, only in modern society they're all worse. People like Twitter celebrities and youtubers will gladly sell you all sorts of crap because a sponsor asked them to, and shield themselves behind "not financial advice", or a small "Sponsored by NordVPN" in the corner.
Some have their very non-neutral agenda, some have sponsors, some just get taken advantage of, some have a good presentation but reached the limits of their knowledge, and some are chasing audience numbers. Pretty much none of them have any real oversight on their content.
"Fine, you guys were right, the gov fucked up - but at least we learned, fixed it and moved on."
Narrator: Nothing was fixed, and they did not learn.
>From April 1945 to July 1947, 18 men, women, and children were injected with plutonium by doctors working with the Manhattan Project
And then...
>In 1952, Chester M. Southam, a Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher, injected live cancer cells, known as HeLa cells, into prisoners at the Ohio State Penitentiary and cancer patients. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy females were injected with live cancer cells without being told. The doctors stated that they knew at the time that it might cause cancer.
And then from 1953...
>Project MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.
And yet again....
>In 1963, 22 elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York City were injected with live cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison.
There are hundreds of examples that we know of. There's even more than one Wikipedia article full of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
Why here it's also not rare to see people complain about the onerous regulations on nuclear power, guess where those came from?
These doctors deliberately poisoned people for a sick experiment while lying about it.
If you really can't tell the difference, and if it isn't obvious to you that the latter can't be "fixed" simply with stricter regulation, I don't know what to tell you.
I don't see a fundamental difference. Harm was done, rules should be put in place to prevent it in the future. Whether it was negligence or intentional is just a detail.
I don't see what's different about intentional harm that's not preventable with regulation. You put more people in the loop. You ensure that whoever breaks the rules sees no benefit. You can't prevent everything of course, but you can cut down a lot on it.
The only solution I see is to fix the "establishment", because the alternative seems to be mostly a free-for-all where everyone tries to convince you that they have your best interests at heart, and I don't see how not being part of the government suddenly makes one trustworthy.
Definitely not blind. The trust has to be earned, and there has to be oversight.
> You can for example just not put blind trust in other people, and teach your children to understand other people's lack of aligned incentives. A free-for-all is called free speech and freedom of association, where people are responsible for their own choices. You are responsible in the end anyway, since none of these central authorities will be there for you when they fuck up.
I don't think this is viable long-term. I see it as a defect, in some measure.
You can't be an expert on computers, and engineering, and food safety, and economics, and health. Each of those subjects is completely gigantic in modern times, and we can't expect the population at large to figure out how to tell which restaurant will poison them.
Those are valuable skills, but IMO in society at large they're at best a contingency measure. We specialized for a reason, and that means that all of us will have huge holes in our knowledge somewhere.
Blatant strawman.
Where can I read about the Nuremberg-style trials where the perpetrators of that outrage were brought to justice?
Because if those trials didn't happen, we didn't "fix" anything.
When how interesting your research was were what made you innocent then it was a sham. Nuremberg was strictly a propaganda tool for the masses and had nothing to do with justice. If justice had a say most of the men that were imported to the US would all have been hanged.
I strongly disagree. Symbols matter, a lot. Such a mass trial (with potentially thousands of defendants – those doctors didn't cook up all of that by themselves, after all) would have sent a strong message that such behavior will not be tolerated under any circumstances, and that medical professionals and other authority figures who believe themselves to be above the law are gravely mistaken.
What happened instead is that everything was swept under the rug and when it all became public, people were told that the profession had moved on and those things wouldn't happen anymore. Which sends the exact opposite message.
The past is an indicator, not the only indicator.
Do you mean that, for an individual, they must replace the "establishment" with some other authority as a general tendency? Or do you mean that, for society, we must have some authoritative source of truth?
I disagree with both, but I assume you're talking more about the first. Although the first sentence quoted, I suspect, could be used to talk about 'low/high trust' societies, when such a concept (low- or high-trust societies) has very little to do with news media. In any case, even if I lean conservative, I tend to be very distrustful of 'conservative' e-celebs (e.g., Stephen Crowder). I'm distrustful of pretty much any second- or third-hand account unless it's court documents or police reports (and less so the latter if it concerns police brutality). I wish more people had a similar model regarding how much they trust what they hear on the news.
All that said, I'll still take sponsored by NordVPN over sponsored by Pfizer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2LQW1TY0lY, and yes, I know this is from "The Daily Caller", it's the first source I found that compiles these 'sponsored by' cuts, although only the first minute, then it goes into Tucker Carlson ranting).
Ah yes, the illusion of moral progress. Guess what--the early 20th century progressives who were doing this and stuff like eugenics also thought they had "fixed" their ancestor's shortcomings.
Generally, such memetic evolution arises from competing drives to be adversarial or cooperate with others. Over time, people have found that cooperation is better in a vast variety of environments and economic or technological conditions. We are very slowly solving the Prisoner's dilemma.
Even if the goal of maintaining hegemony doesn't change, the people being occasionally bombed with drones will still prefer that situation to being conquered by Gengis Khan. Maybe one day the hegemon will only need to brainwash them using propaganda instead of bombing them, and then maybe one day just have a reasonable discussion with them and still be able to achieve the goals. This in my view constitutes progress.
Neither am I claiming that this progress is monotonous, eternal or inevitable. It's an observation about human history.
I don't believe you.
that still constitutes an ethical standard, albeit a weak one.
But what was amazing to me, at the time, that journalists refused to ask basic questions like:
- If the vaccine is brand new, how can we possibly know how many years the protection will last?
- Coronaviruses mutate rapidly, and because of that people are unable to build long lasting natural immunity and because of that we've never been able to create a conventional vaccine for coronaviruses. If RNA vaccines trigger a natural immune response that doesn't provide lasting immunity, just like conventional vaccines, how can we be so sure these new vaccines will be durable in the face of mutations?
- How can we know that vaccinated people are no longer able to spread covid, when we haven't done trials that demonstrate that, because such trials are forbidden (because you can't do trials where you intentionally expose healthy people to a disease).
This is not an angry rant about vaccinations or about covid. I'm vaccinated, it was fine. This is about how journalism fails during a crisis, and how patriotism (i.e. encouraging people to get vaccinated, with truth, lies, whatever it takes) takes precedence over doing their actual job (i.e. informing the people). And government agencies will grab and hold on to power when they're no longer kept in check by real journalists. The annoying kind that asks tough questions.
You describe the "greatest PR coup in human history", but I think the simple explanation is that it's easy to have great PR when journalists do your PR work for free.
There were various studies about how the vaccines affected transmission of COVID-19. You don't need unethical studies for that, you can still get that data by observation. The data is a bit noisy as it's affected by all kinds of confounding factors. But we had that data at various points in time. One big problem was that the variants affected that enormously, so the data was out of date at some important points. This was also discussed a lot in the media.
There were various arguments around vaccine mandates that seemed to have missed the memo on the transmission studies for Omicron. This was still discussed in the media, though I found it very annoying that bad arguments were made here by people that should know better.
The journalists didn't refuse to ask basic questions, they only applied a metaheuristic.
There were already MILLIONS of people worldwide thinking the vaccines were a ONU/bill gates pedophile-satanic conspiracy, etc. A lot of people not only didn't want to understand the science, but was attacking ALL SCIENCE. Even democracy got at risk. The system had to reorganize somehow, or the bases of civilization would be at risk.
No passarán.
This kind of thinking is not healthy and not compatible with the kind of free society we should strive towards.
Either panic or (false) advertising an experimental vaccine. This does look like a false dichotomy. You might instead educate people about the potential risks and clarify the limits, so they may decide.
In the defence of vaccine producers I want to say that they at least did point out early on that they did not develop it with the goal of stopping transmission. Which maybe led some to believe "there is a chance", but it's the code for "it does not do it". This was known even before the fourth phase of the study (approval of the vaccine).
> There were already MILLIONS of people worldwide thinking the vaccines were a ONU/bill gates pedophile-satanic conspiracy, etc. A lot of people not only didn't want to understand the science, but was attacking ALL SCIENCE. Even democracy got at risk. The system had to reorganize somehow, or the bases of civilization would be at risk.
Either you believe in the vaccine or in an absurd (and very specific) conspiracy. These are both extreme view points and gov/media did themselves a disservice by sticking with one of them.
> Against the early variants the vaccines were pretty effective in reducing transmission.
Even if it was true, what does it matter?
I don't see how defending the basic building blocks of our society would be an "extreme" perspective - at all.
These things are quite rare in the "medical establishment". The moment you step outside of the "medical establishment" you start observing what actually happens when there is no establishment. Scams and all kind of dangerous products lurk in the grey area of unregulated. They promise to make you strong, thin person with erection made of stone and cure your cancer and mental illnesses. Prime spam consumers too.
I'm really not on board with this rhetoric of the evil big Pharma enslaved the population together with the government. Every now and then some conspiracy theory comes to be right but those nuts tell hundreds of BS, with no logical cohesion whatsoever. Even when they are right they are never right for the right reasons.
Those who seek to bring down the establishment need first to be on the cutting edge of the establishment, spraying claims is not the same as the understanding the status quo and disagree with it.
In other words, those who are about to expose the chemtrail program will need to have to have solid understanding of chemistry, avionics and government structure. If a study comes out saying that the exhaust of planes have psychedelic effect, I still won't be concluding that the conspiracy theorist were right.
Sorry mate but you have been duped. These regulations are made to limit the supply of doctors and keep the prices up. Most of doctors require little in terms of competency to conduct a general check up. Some specialties in medicine require extra, much extra. But if you are having a headache/fever, or a regular dermatitis, you'd be fine with minimal training.
I think you are confusing nurses with doctors. Sure, administering painkillers for a headache doesn't require much training. The training part is about being able to tell what's the reason of the medical issue, plan the treatment and take responsibility of for it.
I see this kind of reasoning in engineering too. There are many people claiming that technicians can do everything that an engineer can do and what they fail to understand is what's an engineer.
Sure, utilising engineers for jobs that should be done by technicians also help with the confusion.
The article talks about hundreds of thousands of victims. This was a government-organized criminal enterprise, not "a few bad apples".
Governments can run pretty evil programs, you can tell by all the equipment specialised for killing people they purchase.
It's why drug research and development is slow, and why doctors are hard to access (because why not also limit supply to boost your bottom line while you're at it?) but it also protects society from abuse.
But if you seriously doubt that the US medical establishment of today is capable of committing horrifying human rights abuses, I suggest you read up on the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center[1], which has been condemned for practicing torture by the United Nations as recently as 2013.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Rotenberg_Educational_Ce...
Quite dismissive to lump one person making a single complaint with all other complaints ever uttered.
That's ... uh, I guess medical ethical reviews were invented sometime in the late 50's then?
In the late 1970s, actually, and yet they weren’t put into standard practice across the board in every medical field until the 1990s in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_subject_research_legisla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report
> The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.
> It should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation.
See Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobsen.
I'm assuming it was much like Tuskegee in this respect?
This is likely true of the radiation experiments, but is not indicated in the article.
It's not, in fact, quite the opposite is true: the subjects were all white, by express design.
What if they were all poor and white, because the study creators didn’t care about poor people, but also were concerned about the clarity of the data for actually improving health for White people, viewing any possible variation introduced by a more representative study population as noise?
(Asking because that is, in fact, how the study was designed; at least, the targeting, the assumption about why it was targeted that way is an inference.)
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/pm0...
They were exclusively white by design (they enrolled all of the white patients from a particular clinic [0] who were at the targeted point in pregnancy), because the purpose of the experiment was actually to inprove health for other people [1], and to the extent that race might correlate with difference in iron absorption, keeping the study focussed on the population it was intended to help was a goal.
> I'm assuming it was much like Tuskegee in this respect?
Like Tuskegee in that it was all of inhumane, wildly racist, and that the subject population was socially vulnerable, but different in the details of how those factors combined.
[0] whose population served was poor
[1] dangerously radioactive iron was used because it made determining absorption of iron easier, not because the effects of radiation or behavior specific to radioactive iron was being studied.
If we are our histories, the US are, as a people, still moral and ethical infants.
The opposition to human rights abuses should be a universal one, not something that is cheapened by narrowing everything down to a comparison to a single event. Guess what, there are atrocities that have both happened to and were committed by other people and also in different parts of the world besides Europe.
It ignores the awfulness of what has happened and is happening to other people too and other people also matter, not just one group at one time frozen in place.
Much like the illiberal state socialism of the USSR and the illiberal state racism of Nazi Germany.