By Bob Livingston
Any time I write that unConstitutional alphabet soup federal agencies should be eliminated — whether on Constitutional grounds or to reduce the size and cost of Federal government — there follows a deluge of comments to the effect of, “But then who will reign in those evil corporations, enforce regulations and keep them from harming citizens?” and “Who will keep us safe?”
Thanks to years of propaganda combined with 12 (or more) years of indoctrination at the hands of the public (non)education system, most Americans are under the false belief that the U.S. government is an agent of good in the world and its federal agencies want to protect citizens from harm. Americans by and large have become statists: They believe that every transaction, every contract, every aspect of human behavior must be regulated for “fairness” and that only the state is capable of regulating “fairly.”
They have abandoned republicanism in favor of the sweet sound of democracy. In doing so, they have embraced fascism and tyranny.
Of course, statist politicians (which is to say the overwhelming majority of them) always couch their liberty-stealing ideas and laws in altruism and code words in order to get the people to support policies against their own interests. You’ve heard the terms they use: “It’s for the children;” and “To keep everyone safe;” and “It’s good for the environment;” and “We must act now to prevent another tragedy.”
The truth is that government agencies and laws are only as good as the people staffing them and enforcing the laws and, unfortunately, government attracts parasites and psychopaths like honey attracts ants and bears. And they are just as annoying and more dangerous.
History is rife with examples of government action ostensibly to “help the people” resulting in privation, destruction, death and turmoil. Anyone who has truly studied the history of governments around the world has seen that the elected class — with very few exceptions — is populated by a psychopathic mix of destroyers and seekers of wealth and power. They pay little mind to the consequences of their actions. What is relevant to them is their glorification, gratification and security at the seat of power.
So I wasn’t surprised when I learned that the Environmental Protection Agency had conducted experiments on people — children included — to determine how they were affected by pollution. The EPA has been doing these experiments “for about 40 years” and it has authority to continue to do so under the Clean Air Act, which was passed by a “beneficent” Congress looking out for our welfare.
A government report shows that the EPA was exposing people to dangerously high levels of toxins and pollutants without informing them of their risk for cancer and death. Those exposed included the elderly; those with asthma, heart and other health problems; and children. The exposure was to levels of pollutants up to 50 times greater than levels the EPA has deemed safe for human exposure.
According to inspector general’s report, the EPA conducted experiments in 2010 and 2011 on the effects of particulate matter (PM) and diesel exhaust on humans but did not get consent forms from 81 people in five studies. It also did not provide information to study participants on the amount of PM they would be exposed to and the danger risk for those with health conditions.
The EPA has long said that PM is deadly. In a 2003 EPA document, the agency claimed even short-term exposure to PM can result in heart attacks and arrhythmias in people with heart disease. A 2006 EPA report links short-term PM exposure to “mortality and morbidity.
As The Daily Caller reported at the time, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Congress on Sept. 22, 2011: “Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should… If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country.”
In other words, as the website JunkScience.com notes, either the EPA operated with callous — as well as unethical immoral and illegal — disregard for the health of its test subjects (and deceived them about the level of danger they faced), or it is lying about the level of danger PM poses to Americans, which is a fraud on the American people.
The EPA violated its own policy and Federal regulations, The Common Rule as well as the Nuremburg Code and the Belmont Report in conducting these experiments.
The website JunkScience.com doggedly followed the EPA human studies scandal for years. It started a website on EPA human testing in 2012 to document the scandal.
This is certainly not the first time agents within or acting for the U.S. (or any) government have abandoned all sense of morals and ethics in the name of “science” or “safety.” Just some examples in the past 100-plus years include:
Tuskegee syphilis experiment: A clinical study conducted 1932-1972 in which black men were tricked into thinking they were receiving free health care from the government. While the 600 men — 399 of whom had contracted syphilis before the study began — did receive care, meals and free burial insurance, they did not receive treatment for syphilis. Nor did their wives who contracted the disease from them, nor their children born with congenital syphilis. And in fact, those who wanted to get treated through local programs were prevented from doing so. Revelations about the study led to the 1979 Belmont Report the EPA has been violating as well as the Office for Human Research Protections as part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Philippine prisoner study: U.S. Army doctors infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and exposed 29 others to beriberi in the early 1900s. Four of the test subjects died. In 1906, Harvard University Professor Richard Strong intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with cholera that had been contaminated with the plague. He did this without their consent and without informing them of the dangers. All the test subjects became ill and 13 died.
St. Vincent’s House orphanage: A 1908 experiment in which three researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin. Many of the children were permanently blinded and suffered from painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes.
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research syphilis experiment: In 1911, 146 American hospital patients — including children — were injected with syphilis.
Influenza experiments: In 1941 at the University of Michigan, virologists Thomas Francis, Jonas Salk and others deliberately infected mental patients with the influenza virus by spraying it into their nasal passages.
Stateville Penitentiary: In the 1940s, inmates at the Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, Ill., were exposed to malaria. The study, which lasted 29 years, was conducted by the University of Chicago Department of Medicine along with the U.S. Army and State Department. Related studies were conducted from 1944-1946 on mental patients at the Illinois State Hospital. The precedent of these malaria studies were used as part of the defense for Nazi doctors at the Nuremburg trials.
Guatemala study: U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in the late 1940s. Researchers later tried infecting people with “direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded… or in a few cases through spinal punctures.” About 700 people (including orphaned children) were infected. The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government. The research was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee experiments. The research did not come to light until 2010. A federal judge ruled in January 2019 that The Johns Hopkins University, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., and the Rockefeller Foundation must face a $1 billion lawsuit over their role in the experiments.
San Francisco: In 1950, the U.S. Navy used airplanes to spray large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens (considered harmless at the time) over San Francisco to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack. Dozens of residents contracted pneumonia-like illnesses and at least one man died. Tests with Serratia continued into the late 1960s.
Willowbrook State School: During the period 1950 to 1972, mentally disabled children at the school in Staten Island, N.Y., were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis. From 1963-1966, Saul Krugman of New York University promised parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled in Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form to have their children vaccinated. But the actual procedure involved deliberately infecting the children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of patients infected with the disease.
Ohio State Prison: In 1952, a researcher with Sloan-Kettering Institute injected live cancer cells into prisoners. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy women were injected with live cancer cells without being told.
CIA biological experiments: The CIA released whooping cough bacteria from boats outside Tampa Bay, Fla., in 1955. A whooping cough epidemic resulted which killed at least 12 people.
U.S. Army biological warfare experiments: Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of infected mosquitoes over Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., in 1956 and 1957 to test how yellow fever and dengue fever spreads. Hundreds contracted a wide variety of illnesses including fevers, respiratory illnesses, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid. Army researchers pretending to be public health workers photographed and conducted experiments on the victims. Several people died as a result of the experiments.
Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense: During the mid-1960s, the U.S. Army sprayed several U.S. ships transporting thousands of U.S. military personnel with various biological and chemical warfare agents. The personnel were not notified of the tests and were not given any protective gear. Among the chemicals and agents used were the nerve gasses VX and Sarin and toxic chemicals like zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide.
Human radiation experiments: While much of the information on these experiments was (and some still is) classified, researchers conducted thousands of radiation experiments on the poor, sick, mentally disabled and some “conscientious objectors.” Some of the information came to light in 1986 in a government report, American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Experiments on U.S. Citizens, that was issued by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Polio: One of the greatest medical myths that continues to persist is that the Jonas Salk polio vaccine ended the polio epidemic. The truth is polio’s rise in the United States coincided with an increased use of pesticides in the 1950s, many of which were byproducts of chemical weapons manufactured during World War II. These pesticides were found to increase susceptibility to viral infections, studies showed. Exposure to pesticides also came through milk, which was heavily contaminated with pesticides — including DDT — from crops being dusted with government-approved pesticides. Much of the milk had to be destroyed, according to a U.S. Senate report. Polio was transmitted through contaminated milk, as was tuberculosis, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, septic sore throat, diphtheria and infantile diarrhea. Patients undergoing tonsillectomy surgery had a greater chance of contracting the worst kind of polio: bulbar poliomyelitis. This is perhaps related to the milk contamination, as tonsillectomy surgery patients were given ice cream to eat. The pharmaceutical companies — which benefited financially from the polio outbreak — funded the writings on the history of polio and its treatment. As such, the pharmaceutical companies were presented in the best possible light. Americans were not told about the many people who developed paralysis after being vaccinated against polio. Nor were they told about David Bodian, M.D., Ph.D., from the Poliomyelitis Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Bodian told the International Poliomyelitis Conference in 1954 — the year before the polio vaccine was introduced — injections and other vaccines, such as the DTP vaccine, “may be causing polio.” In 1955, when the Salk polio vaccine was introduced, polio was considered the most serious post-war public health problem. In 1956, six New England States reported sharp increases in polio rates, from more than double in Vermont to 645 percent in Massachusetts, despite — or rather because of — the polio vaccine program. Idaho and Utah saw such an increase in polio cases and deaths they halted the vaccine program. In Congressional testimony in 1962, Bernard Greenberg, Ph.D., head of the Biostatistics Department at North Carolina University, said there were sharp increases in polio rates from 1957-1959 and that the Public Health Service had conducted a whitewash to suppress this knowledge. In 1977, even Salk admitted that mass inoculations caused most polio cases since 1971. Salk was, in fact, a medical criminal who used Federal funds to conduct medical experiments on helpless patients at a Michigan insane asylum, as noted above.
Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs kill many more people than guns, which the statists work continually to ban. There are more than 2 million adverse drug reactions annually and more than 1.68 million people die each year from adverse drug reactions, according to the FDA.
The medical-industrial complex is a killing machine for profit.
