Infected blood scandal: Children were used as 'guinea pigs' in clinical trials
bbc.com
bbc.com
If it was known that those products had a high chance to be contaminated, no amount of consent would make any of this ethical. The only ethical way to use them would be if there was no alternative available and the potential infection with Hepatitis C or other viruses would be less dangerous than no treatment at all.
Consent is a necessary requirement for an ethical clinical trial. But it is not sufficient by far, the risks and benefit of the trial need to be proportionate for the patients.
From what I can tell, the issue is twofold: Informed consent, of which there was very little, but that's not exactly rare until recently, and running the trials on "marginal cases" - hemophilia comes in differing severity, and given the risks of using known contaminated factor VIII using it unless necessary probably wasn't the best idea.
If correct, these satanists might argue those were of good intention.
Informed consent was broken, so I guess it's a lower hanging fruit for bringing justice. That said, I don't know if informed consent had been established by 70-80s.
You really need to bone up on the acts of Christians, if you think only satanists would irreparably harm others, including children.
But, you know, that should have happened before they were approved as products.
I'm horrified and don't know what the hell to say. Humans have a long history of gruesome medical experimentation and I'm just not in a good space for addressing this well.
Don't blame the regulators (legal (state) and paralegal (ethics committees)), blame those who abused their power.
> Documents just released show the government in 1973 knew about the trials at Treloars and covered some costs.
There's no perfect system. When the regulator, or the regulator's boss, is in on it, or when the industry has captured the regulator (which invariably happens), all that paperwork, all those regulations, all that complication -- they do nothing to protect the victims.
Lots and lots of regulations are ok to exist only as long as they do something useful. If they are useless, piling more useless ones isn't better than the alternative.
On the real world, we tend to have plenty of the useless ones, and only a few of the very useful ones. When someone complain about the first set, people are quick to throw the second set at them like if it addressed the problem.
Please don't do that. I said nothing of the sort. Plus what you did, besides being the "have you stopped beating your wife yet" sort of disgusting attack, is also whataboutism.
The thing about workplace safety is that a) employers don't relish their employees getting hurt or dying on the job, b) employers don't benefit when their employees get hurt or die on the job, so even if there were no regulations employers would still not go back to 120 years ago states of workplace safety, c) regulations here can help force employers to make better calculations regarding costs and benefits of improving workplace safety as it's on the improvement side that the costs mostly lie. So you see, there is not much benefit to the industry in capturing the regulator for the purpose of undoing workplace safety regulations.
We can and should continually improve the system of regulation we have in place.
We must not throw out the system completely, as that will likely result in a regression to previous behaviors and outcomes (which we've already determined were wrong).
>This is why we can't have nice things.
When alternative approaches are suggested, they're met with a mindless regurgitation of emotionally charged rhetoric rather than careful thought and reason. Their narcissism allows them dismiss anyone that even slightly disagrees with their approach. Those broadcasting alternative points of view are demonized and viciously attacked with the same oppressive tactics employed by the Sturmabteilung. The only saving grace here is ignoring reality is very costly. Eventually the payments are going to come due and the Schadenfreude is going to be very satisfying.
Legal paperwork cannot prevent the government from choosing evil. In fact, it only serves to sanction it in most cases.
This is deeply mistaken attitude - paperwork allows your to prosecute the person in the government that signed off on this decision. Without paperwork, you wouldn’t be able to pin the decision on anyone
And it is entirely normal to have the next government prosecute corrupt officials from the previous one
Has this happened recently in the UK? Like, in the past 50 years, or in the past 100 years?
That person died and the all medical records (from that doctor) somehow went missing. fyi: This was during the 1980's in the UK.
Yes, as the saying goes, regulations and safety rules are often written in blood.
But that doesn't mean that all regulations are automatically good and proportionate. For example, many institutional review boards would have zero problem with researchers deliberately submitting security holes to the Linux kernel. Sure, you're experimenting on kernel maintainers without their consent, and sure, you might make hundreds of millions of people vulnerable. But it's not technically "human research", so the IRB may sign off.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-foundations-demands-...
Meanwhile, if you're a psychiatrist working in a hospital, and if you want to (say) compare the results of your standard screening questionare against the results of your standard patient intake interview, you might think this is easy. Patients will usually do both anyways, so how hard can it be to design an ethical process to compare the two? Well, it's harder than you might expect:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
I agree that we need to have rules and regulations about many things. But we should still discuss whether specific regulations accomplish the intended goal, and how big a cost those regulations impose on society.
It is perfectly possible for a large organization to design a software development process that makes it impossible to ever ship software. And similar pathologies often appear in any large organization, public or private. Designing good policies is hard but worth it.
This one is really interesting. I thought a lot about it after the revelations that Uber were targeting law enforcement based on user behaviour, and refusing to offer them rides in areas where they were breaking regulations.
Of course, one option is that the developers were fully aware of what they were doing, and were perhaps motivated by money or some sort of libertarian ideology.
The other option - more compelling in my mind - is that this functionality was carefully broken down into innocuous pieces and distributed on a need-to-know basis. One feature which groups users in configurable ways based on their history. Another feature that allows on-the-fly ride prioritisation based on user groups. Another feature that localises prioritisation to geographic areas. The upshot is that only some managers knew what the full potential of the functionality was.
That idea is so exciting to me, I'd volunteer to be part of that project, ESPECIALLY
> if there was no personal risk
And nothing that would harm a group I belong to or support.
I generally wouldn‘t find pleasure in working on things that make people I have nothing against more miserable.
It‘s a very broad question. Really depends on a case by case basis.
I think I just really don‘t care about ethics at all, just my personal feelings.
(In my opinion this article represents a pretty compelling counterargument to that philosophy...)
(I'm not a utilitarian, or even a consequentialist, I just want to be fair.)
A utilitarian may also consider things like, "likely impacts on public trust in medicine" and what effects that is likely to cause, when considering how an action might influence "total utility".
Admittedly, it took a few decades after the Nuremberg trials before the superficial realization that you can't do everything that pleases the researcher's heart took hold.
"The ancient Persian kings and the Egyptian pharaohs are said to have treated criminals as expendable experimental material, much as a modern laboratory researcher might order a supply of rats or rabbits. The practice was apparently still in vogue in eighteenth-century England, since Caroline, Princess of Wales, "begged the lives" of six condemned criminals for experimental smallpox vaccination before submitting her own children to the procedure. (She also procured, for further trial, "half a dozen of the charity children belonging to St. James' parish/')"
Louis Lasagna, Special Subjects in Human Experimentation, p.449, Daedalus Vol. 98, No. 2, Spring, 1969, Ethical Aspects of Experimentation with Human Subjects
As someone who previously trusted "people of science" and the scientific method, I've come to realize that my assumptions were misplaced. The shenanigans of the COVID period, government censorship etc.
I find it exceeding hard to trust anyone is competent in anything. The overpriced general contractor that take shortcuts and have to pay someone else to redo work, medical people that prescribe medication/procedures based on a script (e.g. prescriptions of Ozempic).
I tend to go down the path of treating people respectfully and then quite rapidly, it goes down to they just start saying stuff that doesn't make sense (logically) and just want me to accept it.
This sounds ridiculous but FFS. My tech/analytical, data-driven approach to solve problems seems to be a better model that anyone I deal with.
Hopefully it's not Occam's razor that AITA.
This is food for their argumentation, and with that kind of stuff, it's hard to explain that science should prevail.
This is sad.
It seems perfectly pro-science to me. It is just an abuse of science. The anti science take would be to deny parents pass on genes and as such eugenics / forced sterilization wouldn't stop bad genes.
> > Our governments have done awful things in the name of science, including eugenics and forcible sterilizations.
"...in the name of science" -- it hardly matters whether it's proper science or anti-/un-scientific nonsense when the result is deeply immoral. The fact is that both science and "science" have been and continue to be used to justify horrible acts. We have to stop that.
How can you simultaneously know that pharmaceutical corporations are corrupt and choose profits over health, but also think it is crazy to question the vaccines they produce. Those are two contradictory ideas, but the vast majority of people would agree that both are true. It seems like we have been manipulated.
Do you know of Maddie de Garay's story?
It is right to hold people accountable
1) there was no free-form writing field to mark down symptoms that weren't on an existing list of pre-approved or allowed-to-be-reported symptoms, and
2) the clinical research director for the ignored participants who attempted to contact them to report symptoms not reportable in the app.
Source: a teenager and her mother who were participants in the clinical trial, here in their ~10 minutes of testimony - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2GKPYzL_JQ
Are you kidding? Sure there's lots of garbage at YT, but so what, you can often tell if something is hot garbage or real.
Anyways, this is testimony taken by Senator Ron Johnson. It's trivial for you to verify that Senator Johnson is the one running that meeting, and that this is video of that meeting, and you can follow up with his office if you have any questions. You would know this if you merely loaded the video, even if you didn't watch more than 5 seconds of it. You asked for a source, and you got it, and it is a reputable source even if it is a YouTube video.