Informed Consent Archives - Marilyn Singleton, MD JD

America Out Loud PULSE: Informed Consent and Medical Coercion in the Age of Covid

February 1, 2023 No Comments

From my America Out Loud Pulse podcast with Greg Glaser, JD –https://www.americaoutloud.com/informed-consent-and-medical-coercion-in-the-era-of-covid/

Informed consent is the keystone of medical autonomy and participating in our own medical care. It is the physician’s ethical and legal duty to provide informed consent, and patients have the right to make decisions about their own health. Informed consent is generally something people only think about when they are about to undergo a surgical procedure. Thankfully, now “informed consent” is on the tips of the tongues of newly minted advocates of medical freedom.

Many patients and physicians had lost their curiosity about the effects of many medications, including vaccines. But we must not be lazy about exercising our rights. We need informed consent before subjecting our bodies to any outside intervention – even if it is “for our own good.” Assuming you have the mental capacity to make the decision, informed consent must include an understandable explanation of the intervention with the risks and benefits of the medical intervention and the probability that the risk or benefit will occur. Informed consent must voluntarily, without coercion or duress. The physician might not agree with your decision, but the decision is yours to make.

The Covid fiasco has brought to light the element of coercion with the vaccination mandates. The government authorities banned children from in-person schooling, people—including critically needed health care professionals—lost their jobs.

However, the government’s vaccine tyranny did not begin with Covid. We have laws on the books like the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act enacted in 2005. The PREP Act provides nearly blanket immunity from liability for manufacturers, distributors, and administrators of certain drugs meant to counteract an epidemic or pandemic. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) merely determines that something either is or may become a public health emergency. Then HHS can make a “declaration” that certain entities and “countermeasures” (including vaccines) are covered by the PREP Act.

The federal government has given itself a lot of power. Today we’ll discuss returning some of that power to the people with my guest, Greg Glaser, JD.

America Out Loud PULSE: Government Secrecy and Medical Radiation Experiments

February 1, 2023 No Comments

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.