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Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

I'm rather confused by the description of events here. The article focuses on the lack of consent, which of course is a very important topic. But the main issue to me here seems to be the use of blood products that were known to be often contaminated.

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.

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Yes, that's the part here - you die without factor VIII. Its why severe hemophiliacs almost always died before factor VIII because available, and why almost 100% of them had HIV and hepC in the window between those viruses entering the blood supply and 100% testing / heat treatment (which is darkly funny because one of the trials involved was about heat treatment, seems to work for HIV but not for hepC).

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.

One of the campaigners was saying they had a document from the 50's recommending that blood products be made from a small number of people in each batch, so that there was a decent chance that most batches were fine, and in the case of this trial each batch was made from vast numbers of people, so were bound to have something in.

So far, my understanding is that, in some of all these horrible inhumane activities, there were what THEY thought were potential cures.

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.

>If correct, these satanists might argue those were of good intention.

You really need to bone up on the acts of Christians, if you think only satanists would irreparably harm others, including children.

My impression is that they were trying to determine if the heat treated products were actually safe.

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.

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