Mr.Anderson
Veteran
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2018
- Messages
- 992
While I was in pharmacy school we have been taught about two disasters in recent medicine story. First was the talidomide disaster and then the Tuskegee Experiment.
First I'll write some stuff and then connect them all later, right? So don't become confused.
The "science is always right" hysteria -
The common populace think it is a folly to be distrutful of vaccines, specially the new coronavac, and they keep repeating the motto "believe in science!" or "but it is backed up by science!" or similar.
Well, it might have been a valid point until the early 2000's where the science in general was still young, specially considering the exponential growth of new discoveries. This same exponential rate of new inventions gave birth to the somewhat famous "publish or perish" mentality that plagues the academic world nowadays. It was already a problem when I started college back in 2009, it is a worse problem by now.
Publish or Perish, Publication Bias, Replication Crisis, Negative Results and so many others are just some of the current problems that the scientific community faces right now. It has come to a point that even if a paper is published we can't be sure that it is true or not after all. Today's science has become a business and not a sincere try to understand nature.
The Tuskegee and Guatemala Experiments -
The Tuskegee University, somewhere in Alabama, realized an experiment that ran from 1932 to 1972 using the local black community. First they innoculated local black people with sifilis without their consent and then simply let the disease go untreated to see how it would develop. Meanwhile, the people envolved with the tuskegee experiment did the same in Guatemala, with the local government approval.
They lied to the locals, saying that they were receiving free health care when they were actually being used as lab rats.
The Talidomide Crisis -
Talidomide was an antiemetic drug that was widely used around the 60's. It came in two forms, the L-Talidomide and the D-Talidomide. Both were synthetised at the same time, and it was a pain in the ass to separate them. So they just put them two togheter in the pill and sold it. While one of the forms of the talidomide was deemed safe, the other one had no effect besides being teratogenic. Lots of babies were born with birth defects and this disaster led to the clinical experiments that we use today. But it took a real long time until the link between the drug and the birth defects was made.
What I mean by telling you all of this -
The point here is: we've seen the government experimenting with people before, more than once. We can't really trust scientific papers anymore, and they are rushing the coronavac and we can't be sure of the future damage they will bring. What makes me more worried is that there were at least three drugs that were controversial about their effectiveness (Ivermectine, Hydroxicloroquine and Nitazoxamide) but at least here in my city worked damm well fine. Any treatment besides Remdensivir and the Vaccine are bashed by scientific papers while the later are pushed and rushed to disregarding what history has taught us. It is almost like we are part of a worldwide tuskegee experiment.
And regarding the coronavac itself: a pregnant woman can't use the rubella vaccine because it might cause miscarriage. I had a cousin who had a miscarriage because she took a shot and didn't knew she was pregnant. Also it is well known that the dengue fever models we have right now might cause even worse problems later on, and the scientists still didn't figured how to solve them.
In a sense, the guys who say "trust the science" actually are missing important lessons that history and science itself has taught us.
And as final worlds: if any of you or people you know still believe this is nuts, what would you think if you lived in the 40's and someone told you that the USA was working a bomb that could level a whole city in a matter of seconds? And how did they hid project Manhattan for so long? Experiment Tuskegee dragged on for 40 years dammit.
First I'll write some stuff and then connect them all later, right? So don't become confused.
The "science is always right" hysteria -
The common populace think it is a folly to be distrutful of vaccines, specially the new coronavac, and they keep repeating the motto "believe in science!" or "but it is backed up by science!" or similar.
Well, it might have been a valid point until the early 2000's where the science in general was still young, specially considering the exponential growth of new discoveries. This same exponential rate of new inventions gave birth to the somewhat famous "publish or perish" mentality that plagues the academic world nowadays. It was already a problem when I started college back in 2009, it is a worse problem by now.
Publish or Perish, Publication Bias, Replication Crisis, Negative Results and so many others are just some of the current problems that the scientific community faces right now. It has come to a point that even if a paper is published we can't be sure that it is true or not after all. Today's science has become a business and not a sincere try to understand nature.
The Tuskegee and Guatemala Experiments -
The Tuskegee University, somewhere in Alabama, realized an experiment that ran from 1932 to 1972 using the local black community. First they innoculated local black people with sifilis without their consent and then simply let the disease go untreated to see how it would develop. Meanwhile, the people envolved with the tuskegee experiment did the same in Guatemala, with the local government approval.
They lied to the locals, saying that they were receiving free health care when they were actually being used as lab rats.
The Talidomide Crisis -
Talidomide was an antiemetic drug that was widely used around the 60's. It came in two forms, the L-Talidomide and the D-Talidomide. Both were synthetised at the same time, and it was a pain in the ass to separate them. So they just put them two togheter in the pill and sold it. While one of the forms of the talidomide was deemed safe, the other one had no effect besides being teratogenic. Lots of babies were born with birth defects and this disaster led to the clinical experiments that we use today. But it took a real long time until the link between the drug and the birth defects was made.
What I mean by telling you all of this -
The point here is: we've seen the government experimenting with people before, more than once. We can't really trust scientific papers anymore, and they are rushing the coronavac and we can't be sure of the future damage they will bring. What makes me more worried is that there were at least three drugs that were controversial about their effectiveness (Ivermectine, Hydroxicloroquine and Nitazoxamide) but at least here in my city worked damm well fine. Any treatment besides Remdensivir and the Vaccine are bashed by scientific papers while the later are pushed and rushed to disregarding what history has taught us. It is almost like we are part of a worldwide tuskegee experiment.
And regarding the coronavac itself: a pregnant woman can't use the rubella vaccine because it might cause miscarriage. I had a cousin who had a miscarriage because she took a shot and didn't knew she was pregnant. Also it is well known that the dengue fever models we have right now might cause even worse problems later on, and the scientists still didn't figured how to solve them.
In a sense, the guys who say "trust the science" actually are missing important lessons that history and science itself has taught us.
And as final worlds: if any of you or people you know still believe this is nuts, what would you think if you lived in the 40's and someone told you that the USA was working a bomb that could level a whole city in a matter of seconds? And how did they hid project Manhattan for so long? Experiment Tuskegee dragged on for 40 years dammit.