Recently, Bayer Pharmaceuticals has come under a lot of scrutiny, due to some of their recent problems with some of their products that were mass produced, and sold to millions of consumers. Products in question include but, are not limited to these examples would be, Yaz, Yasmin, Ocella, Minera etc.
With that being said this is not the first time that Bayer has been under such scrutiny. Bayer A/K/A IG Farben use experimental drugs were tested on Auschwitz & Mauthausen-Gusen prisoners. Auschwitz & Mauthausen-Gusen were two of many concentration camps throughout Germany. Bayer along with several other smaller chemical companies in Germany were the biggest single financier of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1944.
I.G. Farben attempted to shake
its abominable image through corporate restructuring and renaming the
company Bayer after World War II. Which proved to be pure genius,
because most people don’t know Bayer was/is responsible for some of the
worst atrocities in written history. The fact that Bayer is now under
fire for negligence due to not warning its consumers of all possible
side effects of drugs and products they have produced, shows that like
tigers Bayer has not changed it’s stripes.
The drugs Yaz, Yasmin,
& Ocella are all pretty much the same drug with different names as a
way to increase profits. When Yasmin and it’s counterparts were
released in 2001, Bayer did not tell the users of these product that it
could possibly cause, blood clots, gallbladder disease, deep vein
embolism, heart attack, pulmonary embolism or stroke. Which in essence
means that Bayer is still doing human experiments.
We can also use the drug
Thalidomide for example. Thalidomide was first released in the US in the
late 1950′s, as a drug prescribed to pregnant mothers to help aid them
with morning sickness. It was considered perfectly safe and had even
received FDA approval. As a result of taking Thalidomide while pregnant
several women gave birth to babies who were born without arms or legs.
It was later removed from the market in 1961. Thalidomide was a drug
developed by wartime Nazis from one of their many chemical weapons
experiments used on Jews. Would you believe that the FDA has once again
approved the use of Thalidomide?! It is a drug used to help treat
chemotherapy patients with cancer. It is also still considered safe.
While this article is mainly
about the history of Bayer, I would also like to discuss big
pharmaceuticals companies in the US as a whole. While Bayer has many
skeletons in its closet they are not alone in human experimenting in the
US. Below I have cited just a few of the experiments that the US has
done on its citizens over the years.
There was experimental drug
testing centers in the US. New York City children’s homes (during the
late 1980s and 1990s) & For the EPA’s proposed CHEERS study: Health
care centers in Duvall County, Fla.
Experimental drug test subjects
were mainly poor people — including children in poor families, orphans
and foster care children; immigrants; mentally ill and mentally
challenged individuals and prisoners.
For CHEERS: Children born to low-income, minority families
Potential test subjects were
given long forms written in language they may not understand (either
because they are immigrants or because it’s written in obscure technical
jargon) as “informed consent”
In the New York City children’s homes: Forced non-compliant children to take experimental AIDS drugs by feeding them medication through tubes placed in their stomachs
In 1986, New York pediatrician
Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls “an idiot with
chronic epilepsy” with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).
In 1906 Harvard
professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with
cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors
with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors
cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).
In 1911, Dr.
Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research
published data used from injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into
the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to
develop a skin test for syphilis.
In 1913, At St. Vincent’s House childrens’ home in Philadelphia 15 children were injected with tuberculin that caused permanent blindness in some of the children. This test was reported and recorded but none of the researchers were punished.
In 1915, Dr.
Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office,
produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central
nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the
disease. In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of
the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had
known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did
nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans.
In 1948, Based on the secret
studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project
F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association,
detailing fluoride’s health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC) quickly censors it for “national security” reasons
In 1985, A former
U.S. Army sergeant tries to sue the Army for using drugs on him in
without his consent or even his knowledge in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669.
Justice Antonin Scalia writes the decision, clearing the U.S. military
from any liability in past, present or future medical experiments
without informed consent
In 1987, Philadelphia resident Doris Jackson discovers that researchers have removed her son’s brain post-mortem for medical study. She later learns that the state of Pennsylvania has a doctrine of “implied consent,” meaning that unless a patient signs a document stating otherwise, consent for organ removal is automatically implied
In 1990, The
United States sends 1.7 million members of the armed forces, 22 percent
of whom are African-American, to the Persian Gulf for the Gulf War
(“Desert Storm”). More than 400,000 of these soldiers were ordered to
take an experimental nerve agent medication called pyridostigmine, which
is later believed to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome — symptoms
ranging from skin disorders, neurological disorders, incontinence,
uncontrollable drooling and vision problems — affecting Gulf War
veterans (Goliszek; Merritte, et al.).
Also, in 1990, The CDC and Kaiser
Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black
and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an “experimental” measles
vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States.
Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an
adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in
impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits
that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into
their children was experimental (Goliszek).
The FDA allows the U.S.
Department of Defense to waive the Nuremberg Code and use unapproved
drugs and vaccines in Operation Desert Shield
In 1992, Columbia University’s New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine give 100 males — mostly African-American and Hispanic, all between the ages of six and 10 and all the younger brothers of juvenile delinquents — 10 milligrams of fenfluramine (fen-fen) per kilogram of body weight in order to test the theory that low serotonin levels are linked to violent or aggressive behavior. Parents of the participants received $125 each, including a $25 Toys ‘R’ Us gift certificate
In 1993,
Researchers at the West Haven VA in Connecticut give 27 schizophrenics —
12 inpatients and 15 functioning volunteers — a chemical called MCPP
that significantly increases their psychotic symptoms and, as
researchers note, negatively affects the test subjects on a long-term
basis
The Department of Defense admits that Gulf War soldiers were exposed to chemical agents; however, 33 percent of all military personnel afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome never left the United States during the war, discrediting the popular mainstream belief that these symptoms are a result of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons
In 2002, The U.S. Air Force and rocket maker Lockheed Martin sponsor a Loma Linda University study that pays 100 Californians $1,000 to eat a dose of perchlorate — a toxic component of rocket fuel that causes cancer, damages the thyroid gland and hinders normal development in children and fetuses — every day for six months. The dose eaten by the test subjects is 83 times the safe dose of perchlorate set by the State of California, which has perchlorate in some of its drinking water
In 2002, President George W. Bush signs the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA), offering pharmaceutical companies six-month exclusivity in exchange for running clinical drug trials on children. This will of course increase the number of children used as human test subjects.
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