6 ms·

So American doctors knowingly gave radioactive cocktails to hundreds of pregnant women while telling them the lie that they were actually vitamin drinks. Those

by p-e-w 4y ago

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.

lynx23 4y ago
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.
trasz4 4y ago
It's not the "medical establishment" that sanctioned it - American society did.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  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?
kybernetyk 4y ago
>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.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Governments, NGOs, churches, we can't get the big things done alone, we have to work together for those. Bad big things included.
dale_glass 4y ago
> 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.
- jdthedisciple 4y ago
  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.
  - soco 4y ago
    To claim that nothing was fixed, you need to present us with some proof of further fuckup. Please proceed to do so.
    - pigeonhole123 4y ago
      What about the claim that it was fixed? Does that require no further evidence?
      - Dah00n 4y ago
        You can show evidence of that without being all knowing. We know it didn't get fixed, so there's no need.
    - 4y ago
soco 4y ago
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.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  It's a novel concept in history that it is wrong to knowingly poison people? I don't believe you.
  - darkwater 4y ago
    GP talked about ethical standards. Poisoning a few people for the "greater good" might be an acceptable thing depending on your standards.
    - serf 4y ago
      >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.
  - jounker 4y ago
    From looking around at the opposition to chemical industry regulations, it seems that knowingly poisoning people still isn’t considered wrong.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      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?
gizmo 4y ago
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.
- fabian2k 4y ago
  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.
mrtksn 4y ago
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.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  I agree with what you're saying but there are also plenty of well intentioned practitioners outside of the establishment.
- csomar 4y ago
  > 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.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    > 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.
jackmott 4y ago
[dead]
archagon 4y ago
Why are you treating “the medical establishment” as a unified bloc?

by p-e-w 4y ago

lynx23 4y ago

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.

trasz4 4y ago

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

mandmandam 4y ago
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?

kybernetyk 4y ago

>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.

galangalalgol 4y ago
Governments, NGOs, churches, we can't get the big things done alone, we have to work together for those. Bad big things included.

dale_glass 4y ago

> 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.

jdthedisciple 4y ago
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.
- soco 4y ago
  To claim that nothing was fixed, you need to present us with some proof of further fuckup. Please proceed to do so.
  - pigeonhole123 4y ago
    What about the claim that it was fixed? Does that require no further evidence?
    - Dah00n 4y ago
      You can show evidence of that without being all knowing. We know it didn't get fixed, so there's no need.
  - 4y ago

soco 4y ago

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.

p-e-w 4y ago
It's a novel concept in history that it is wrong to knowingly poison people? I don't believe you.
- darkwater 4y ago
  GP talked about ethical standards. Poisoning a few people for the "greater good" might be an acceptable thing depending on your standards.
  - serf 4y ago
    >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.
- jounker 4y ago
  From looking around at the opposition to chemical industry regulations, it seems that knowingly poisoning people still isn’t considered wrong.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    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?

gizmo 4y ago

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.

fabian2k 4y ago
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.

mrtksn 4y ago

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.

AlecSchueler 4y ago
I agree with what you're saying but there are also plenty of well intentioned practitioners outside of the establishment.
csomar 4y ago
> 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.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  > 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.

jackmott 4y ago

[dead]

archagon 4y ago

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