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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

So American doctors knowingly gave radioactive cocktails to hundreds of pregnant women while telling them the lie that they were actually vitamin drinks. Those cocktails caused cancer in both the women and their babies. This wasn't an experimental treatment or anything, they just wanted to know whether iron-59 was capable of crossing the placenta. There was never any possible benefit for the victims. And all of that was orchestrated and funded by the government.

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.

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All those regulations which make drug development so slow and expensive and makes training a doctor so slow and expensive are there exactly against that kind of stuff.

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.

I agree with what you're saying but there are also plenty of well intentioned practitioners outside of the establishment.

> All those regulations which make drug development so slow and expensive and makes training a doctor so slow and expensive are there exactly against that kind of stuff.

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.

> 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.

> These things are quite rare in the "medical establishment".

The article talks about hundreds of thousands of victims. This was a government-organized criminal enterprise, not "a few bad apples".

See, this is not about medical establishment doing something, this is about government doing something with cooperation of some medical professionals in an era of low regulations.

Governments can run pretty evil programs, you can tell by all the equipment specialised for killing people they purchase.

And the parent comment is talking about the current state of the establishment. One which saw its own horrors and took the reins and reformed itself to avoid the possibility of the government pressuring a physician or researcher into performing an experiment like this.

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.

If history is any indication, we will only find out about the full scale of abuses committed by the current establishment a few decades from now.

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...

reading this made me physically ill, especially being a father...

No. Not for a minute should you believe it would be beyond the pale for the establishment to push a narrative while not letting users/patients know all the facts. They may think they are doing these things for the right reasons and that history would prove them right (maybe, maybe not) but be assured you will receive bad information from that establishment and it will try to cover its tracks (mistakes) and be loath to admit they were wrong when the skeptics were right (of course it’s the nature of skeptics to be counter and will also be wrong, but they don’t have the force of the establishment behind them).

Do you understand that there are many unconnected for-profit and non-profit medical systems all over the world? Including areas of low to no enforcement due to lack proper government and they are not doing anything different?

> those nuts tell hundreds of BS

Quite dismissive to lump one person making a single complaint with all other complaints ever uttered.

> That surely has to be the greatest PR coup in human history.

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.

I see this kind of reply all the time.

"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.

To claim that nothing was fixed, you need to present us with some proof of further fuckup. Please proceed to do so.

What about the claim that it was fixed? Does that require no further evidence?

You can show evidence of that without being all knowing. We know it didn't get fixed, so there's no need.

Okay then.

>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.

That is true, my question was however about _actual_ cases, because 1950's USA is not 2020's USA (neither Germany, nor Iran, nor whatever country). Because I'm not arguing bad stuff never happened (or happens), I'm arguing that measures to make this less likely to happen have been and are taken continuously. Are those measures enough though? Without examples I cannot judge in good faith.

Or measures to hid these things have gotten better?

Who, exactly, "changed" things? Who are enforcing these "measures?" This wasn't an isolated instance of rogue doctors running amok. The same people supposedly setting the standards are the same people doing this stuff to begin with. Are we to assume that one day, they had a big epiphany that killing people is bad, or something?

Where's the Wikipedia article? It would be good to see some more recent examples, and by a more diverse set of perpetrators.

There's one here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

What do you mean nothing? Organizations like the FDA famously got a lot more powerful after incidents like with Thalidomide -- a big enough screwup seems to result in very considerable change.

Why here it's also not rare to see people complain about the onerous regulations on nuclear power, guess where those came from?

Thalidomide, Three Mile Island, etc. were accidents – caused by negligence and poor standards, sure, but accidents nonetheless.

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.

> 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.

It was always illegal to poison people. These doctors didn't care.

Incidents eventually resulted in the creation of Institutional Review Boards. All research on human subjects must now pass an IRB, and these are not rubber stamp organizations.

So you are comparing idiots that fall for "financial advice" on youtube to pregnant women who were given a radioactive cocktail without knowing about it? You seem to confirm that everyone has different sort of values...

I'm saying that if you don't trust the "establishment", then other people will very gladly take its place.

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.

Blind trust in a centralized authority is by no means necessary. 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.

> Blind trust in a centralized authority is by no means necessary.

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.

Sure, trust in centralized hierarchies as much as you like. IMO, the problem is more linked to missing accountability then trust in whatever system is called establishment. A single doctor is enough to do a lot of harm. If we, as a society, are not able to enforce heavy penalties even for those who seem priviledged, we are lost. Because a few bad apples can do whatever they want, without fearing repercussions. And people like you will come up and point "Hey, the establishment isn't at fault" and pretend nothing happened.

No, my point is that the establishment is at fault, but the only real solution isn't to reject it and seek non-establishment alternatives, but to fix it.

> I don't see how not being part of the government suddenly makes one trustworthy.

Blatant strawman.

> Or, we've noticed the above, thought that it was an outrage, and fixed it.

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.

It is ironic that you mention Nuremberg trials as a way of justice against human experimentation. The people that did Bad Things in WW2 on the German and Japanese side were not tried in a court at all if the research they did seemed interesting enough to get in US hands. Those that did Bad Things on the US side we likely haven't even heard of, and they definitely weren't put through a court.

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 agree with your first paragraph, but the statement that The Nuremberg Trials were only a propaganda tool is just false and an insult to those who brought many to justice. It certain was a propaganda tool as well but justice is not all-or-nothing. Certainly some justice was had.

Even with Nuremberg style trials that would still only have been a PR stunt. German police still has yearly reports about the issues they have with right wing nuts and racism in the force. You would have to replace both the entire chain of command and institute checks to keep things from repeating, one alone is not enough.

> that would still only have been a PR stunt

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 problem with generalizing across time and space is that you can never know where to draw the line. Taking your original comment as a starting point, who should not be trusted? American doctors? Americans? Doctors? Back then? Now? Forever?

The past is an indicator, not the only indicator.

> Trust isn't optional in a society. If you don't trust the "establishment", then somebody has to take its place...

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).

> 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.

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.

It used to be common knowledge that a great™ ruler is the one who conquers new lands and kills his enemies, and it used to be common practice to kill or enslave most civilians upon occupying a settlement. These things have changed, wouldn't you say?

How much of that is moral progress and how much is technological and economic change? Do you need to conquer land when you could use drone strikes and economic sanctions to maintain hegemony? And did we stop enslaving people because people found Jesus—which I’d like to think is true—or because mechanization rendered unskilled slave labor much less valuable?

I don't think separating these is that relevant here. People get told that certain things are good and right, which they then mostly do, these things have changed over time, I would claim to the better, and this is the claim I'm debating.

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.

As another commenter already pointed out, ethical standards are quite a novel concept in the history, newer than these cases (and by the way, there are way more such failures in medical history, Theranos being a very minor one). Anyway, pointing out malpraxis is by no definition equivalent to conspiracy theories and I refuse to accept this strawman of moral equivalence.

It's a novel concept in history that it is wrong to knowingly poison people?

I don't believe you.

GP talked about ethical standards. Poisoning a few people for the "greater good" might be an acceptable thing depending on your standards.

>Poisoning a few people for the "greater good" might be an acceptable thing depending on your standards.

that still constitutes an ethical standard, albeit a weak one.

From looking around at the opposition to chemical industry regulations, it seems that knowingly poisoning people still isn’t considered wrong.

Also look to the FDA "generally considered safe" statements for food additives. Some of them have loads of papers linking them to health problems of various sorts. But banning them would upset donors. I'm surprised trans fats were ever banned. I wonder if there is a deeper story there or if it just got too much publicity too fast to stop it. I wonder if erythritol will get cut too, that study needs some replication though I think?

>Think about that for a second.

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.

Governments, NGOs, churches, we can't get the big things done alone, we have to work together for those. Bad big things included.

I am not surprised. I was abused for a medical experiment at the age of 6, around 1985. This stuff still happens, but if you talk about it, people tend to not want to believe you, for their own peace of mind.

It's not the "medical establishment" that sanctioned it - American society did.

Can you explain your reasoning there?

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?

Why are you treating “the medical establishment” as a unified bloc?

What's most surprising to me is how willing journalists are to completely suspend their disbelief. During covid the authorities loudly proclaimed that vaccines were 99% effective, provided durable immunity (years!), and that vaccinated people would not spread covid themselves.

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.

It was certainly discussed that we can't know how long the protection from the vaccines will last. But it also didn't matter much as we needed the protection now, and even a waning protection later is much better than no protection at all.

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 alternative was panic and worse.

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.

Hint: providing an obviously false and/or one-sided narrative isn't a great way to dampen down conspiracy theories, rather quite the opposite.

I think your attitude exemplifies the difference in values that was brought to the surface during covid. When you embrace extremist claims that "the bases of civilization [were] at risk" you can justify anything. There is no moral line you would not cross if the alternative is the very collapse of civilization itself.

This kind of thinking is not healthy and not compatible with the kind of free society we should strive towards.

> The alternative was panic and worse.

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. Only against Omicron did this fundamentally change.

The alpha-variant was in decline and not the most common iirc, when the widespread vaccination started. Either it rains or it doesn't, but having a rainmaker tell you why his service is necessary is comforting.

> Against the early variants the vaccines were pretty effective in reducing transmission.

Even if it was true, what does it matter?

It was not only a matter of believing "the vaccine", but other vaccines aswell, and also basic science, medicine, hospitals, doctors, democracy, journalism, etc - which are all still under attack by the stupidity of right wing extremism.

I don't see how defending the basic building blocks of our society would be an "extreme" perspective - at all.

So, democracies had to put out a big fucking lie to save themselves? The lost trust will never be gained back.

What big fucking lie are you talking about, exactly? I'm not American. Where I live only lunatic people are attacking the media, and the only people saying there was any "big fucking lie" would be those lunatics that think the UN is some satanic conspiracy or something.

If you belief the meme that every critic is automatic a lunatic, talking to you about this issue is in vain. The media has definitely been used to transport a narrative, and did not work independently during the covid crisis. If you believe otherwise, I wish you all the best.

Journalists are oppotunists with a big ego. I dont trust a single story anymore, they lie whenever they open their mouths!

A crisis calls for radical solutions. I am much more bothered by the lack of spotlight on Fauci et al. that are suspected to be partially to blame for Covid, engaged in what looks very much like ass-covering using their positions of authority, yet were not only not immediately removed from them (for reasons of conflict of interest), but were even sent to China to "investigate" !

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