By Seema Yasmin – Jun 27, 2016 – for the Dallas Morning News

Yes. 

My cmnt: Democrat doctors in communist Russia, Nazi Germany and America (i.e., Dr. Anthony Fauci) have no qualms with experimenting on people, animals or whole populations in their quests for medical knowledge. This long history of medical abuse by authorities was repeated in 2020 with the overblown democrat response to Covid-19. Possibly 100,000s of people died in the U.S. alone because Fauci and friends pooh-poohed the use of readily available and inexpensive drugs like HCQ while lying about the effectiveness of masks and the vaccines.

Some children were infected through injections into the spine. Some men were infected through sex with prostitutes who themselves had been infected with syphilis and gonorrhea by American doctors. Some men had skin scraped off their penises so that doctors could rub syphilis into the cuts. One woman, a patient in a psychiatric hospital, had pus from a gonorrhea patient injected into her eyes.

Between 1945 and 1956, 1,308 orphans, soldiers, mental health patients, prisoners and sex workers in Guatemala were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea by American doctors. Some were given antibiotics. Many were not. At least 80 people died.

The doctors said they wanted to learn more about sexually transmitted diseases and to see if penicillin could treat syphilis. But they changed their minds about the study objectives over and over again.

The experiments were funded by the National Institutes of Health and approved by the surgeon general. The study wasn’t made public,  but in 2005, Susan Reverby,  a professor at Wellesley College, discovered study documents in the University of Pittsburgh library.

“I was floored,” she said. Reverby was researching another set of gruesome medical experiments carried out by American doctors (more on that later), when she found the papers about the Guatemala studies.

In 2010, President Barack Obama called Guatemala’s President Alvaro Colom to apologize. An official statement was released by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

The Guatemala study wasn’t the only set of experiments the U.S. government had to apologize for. In 1997, President Bill Clinton said sorry to survivors of unethical medical research funded and carried out by American doctors.

From 1932 to 1972, nearly 400 African American men were deliberately left untreated with syphilis in a study called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. The men were mostly poor sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. (I wrote about the Tuskegee and Guatemala studies in an earlier column.)

Even when penicillin was known to cure syphilis in 1947, the men were left untreated and U.S. Public Health Service doctors experimented on them as they grew sicker. By the end of that study, 128 men had died from syphilis. At least 40 of their wives were infected and 19 of their children were born with the disease.

The effects of these unethical experiments are felt to this day. Some public health experts blame an outbreak of tuberculosis in Marion, Alabama, earlier this year on the U.S. governments history of unethical medical research. (In February, the rate of tuberculosis in Marion was higher than the rates in India and Kenya.)

Marion is a two hour drive from Tuskegee. A deep mistrust of doctors and the medical establishment means some people sick with tuberculosis in Marion have been reluctant to seek help. That may have helped the disease spread, experts say.

If you want to learn more about the Tuskegee medical trial, the film Miss Evers’ Boys, tells the story of a nurse in Macon County who was recruited to take part in the study.

Debunked is your go to site for demystifying science and medicine. Send your questions and conspiracy theories to syasmin@dallasnews.com or tweet me @DoctorYasmin. I’m a staff writer at the Dallas Morning News and a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. I worked as a medical doctor and disease detective before training to be a journalist. And I’m obsessed with conspiracy theories.

Seema Yasmin. Dr. Seema Yasmin, a medical doctor and former disease detective at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a staff writer at the Dallas Morning News and a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.