Predatory Clinical Trials

Dr. Josef Mengele – Wiki Image

It is the poor one who saves: Middle-class rich boy that I was, I never would have thought that it would be the poor who would be my salvation. Owing to the upbringing I had received at my mother’s hands, as well as the attitude of the church I had been attending up until that time, I had always thought that it was we rich and well-to-do who would be the ones to rescue the poor. The latter depended on us, it seemed, and our generosity was their salvation. Without us they would have been destined to death. What blindness was ours and mine! The truth was just the contrary…It was the poor who would be my salvation, and not I theirs. It was they who would put me back on my feet.
— Francis of Assisi

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
— John Berger

The essence of the statement of Francis of Assisi is very apt to the issue of “clinical trials and poor”, although he made it in a different context. John Berger’s statement provides the reason for using poor and vulnerable as “guinea pigs” for clinical trials.

Using poor and vulnerable for clinical trials is nothing new. This has been going on for a long time.

The US covert clinical trials on the poor and vulnerable in Guatemala came to light in 2010 after Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby stumbled upon archived documents outlining the experiment led by the US doctor John Cutler during 1946-1948. The Guatemalan study, which was never published, was interested in whether penicillin could be used not only as a cure of venereal diseases but also as a prophylaxis (to prevent the disease from spreading). Nearly 5500 people were subjected to diagnostic testing and more than 1300, including Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, commercial sex workers and mental patients, were exposed to syphilis by human contact or inoculations.

Initially the researchers infected female Guatemalan commercial sex workers with gonorrhea or syphilis, and then encouraged them to have unprotected sex with soldiers or prison inmates. Neither were subjects told what the purpose of the research was nor were they warned of its potentially fatal consequences. When the researchers couldn’t create enough infection through commercial sex workers, they started to do inoculations.

Some of the experiments were shocking. For example, seven women with epilepsy, who were in Home for the Insane, were injected with syphilis below the back of the skull. Another female syphilis patient was infected with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere, in order to see the impact of an additional infection. Six months later she died.

Within the group that was subjected to clinical trials there were 83 deaths, according to Stephen Hauser, a member of US presidential commission. “It was not an accident that this happened in Guatemala,” commission president Amy Gutmann said, “Some of the people involved (in the research) said we could not do this in our own country.” The US researchers “systematically failed to act in accordance with minimal respect for human rights and morality in conduct of research,” Gutmann said, citing “substantial evidence” of an attempted cover up.

The Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom has called these experiments conducted by the US National Institutes of Health “crimes against humanity”. The Guatemala Study nauseated ethicists on multiple levels. Beyond infecting subjects with terrible disease, it was clear that people in the study did not understand what was being done to them or were not able to give their consent. Scientists showed no interest in the rights of the subjects of research. Nuremberg Code says doing this kind of research on people who cannot give informed consent is immoral and a crime against humanity.

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