From my America Out Loud Pulse podcast – https://www.americaoutloud.com/government-secrecy-and-medical-experiments-radiation/
Lately, we are hearing a lot of talk about transparency of prices of pharmaceuticals and medical services. Where was the call for transparency when our government was conducting experiments on unsuspecting Americans? Secret experiments on human guinea pigs are a sickening part of our history. We are supposed to be a country founded on moral principles.
Several weeks ago, I discussed a variety of government experiments perpetrated on unwitting Americans. This episode discusses experiments with radiation on similarly unconsenting victims ranging from prisoners, disabled children, cancer patients, and perfectly healthy individuals.
If it were not for good investigative journalists, many government misdeeds might be buried forever. In November 1993 Department of Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary officially revealed the government’s radiological experiments. Her hand was forced when journalist Eileen Welsome’s articles were published in the Albuquerque Tribune. Following a six-year investigation, Welsome uncovered details of five experiments in which plutonium was injected into 18 people without their informed consent. (She won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting.)
On January 15, 1994, President Clinton appointed the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experimentsto investigate reports of possibly unethical experiments funded by the government. At the same time, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was readying its Report on Cold War Era Programs Involving Human Experimentation that was released in September 1994. Read them and weep.
After the fact, some of the project “doctors” justified the secretive, amoral behavior because the experiments yielded “valuable information.” When these projects began, the Nuremburg Code regarding informed consent for human experimentation had not been written. However, the Hippocratic Oath and basic respect for human beings should have been enough to make the professionals involved – as we said in the 60s — question authority.
It is a stark reality that world tensions dictate that some government projects remain out of the public view. But science and national security cannot be advanced on the backs of unsuspecting individuals. The government assumed(s) individuals cannot be trusted to maintain secrecy and that they never would have consented had they known the risks. The continued misinformation about Covid, the suppression of early treatments, and the relative silence about vaccine side effects indicate that the government has not learned its lesson.
