In the corona pandemic, it has often been claimed that the vaccine tests were carried out too quickly. This is all the more annoying as there have always been ethically problematic experiments in medicine – for example a hair-raising syphilis study in the USA.
A doctor draws blood from a participant in the Tuskegee study (photo from 1953). The inhuman study was only stopped in 1972.
Since the corona pandemic said goodbye to the summer holidays early, my life has been beautiful again. Far away are the daily discussions about the number of cases and hospitalizations and the corona measures that are perceived as too extensive or too little extensive, depending on one’s position. But the hateful disputes have left their mark. And I’m a little disillusioned.
Before the pandemic, I could never have imagined that so many people in Switzerland, a wealthy nation of knowledge, would be receptive to fake news and the worst conspiracy theories. And that many prefer to get information from the Internet and social media than from established media. I was really distressed by the widespread skepticism about the corona vaccination. Because in my eyes it is the most important achievement in the fight against the new virus. I was really annoyed when it was claimed at the beginning of the vaccination campaign that speed was more important than the safety of the population when evaluating and approving the vaccines. The accusation insinuated unethical behavior by those responsible.
That’s what struck me as I recently read some articles about a blatantly unethical human experiment in the United States: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Tuskegee is a city in Alabama. A clinical investigation started there in 1932, which was stopped in 1972, ie 50 years ago. A well-known authority of the American Department of Health was responsible for the study.
With their work, the researchers wanted to investigate the consequences of syphilis infection, a venereal disease that used to be common and fatal. For this purpose, 399 African American farm workers infected with the syphilis pathogen and 200 uninfected control persons were recruited. The scientists left the subjects in the dark about what the study was about. Instead of educating them about syphilis, they spoke of “bad blood” and promised free treatment. But this was exactly what they were denied. Because the researchers wanted to study the natural course of syphilis. Thus, none of the infected men received penicillin, even though the drug had been available since 1947 and was the standard treatment for syphilis.
The fact that the inhuman study was stopped in 1972 is thanks to a single scientist with an ethical conscience. After being rebuffed by the relevant authorities – he was apparently told that the experiment would continue until the last patient died – he ended up in the media. Under pressure from the public, the authorities canceled the experiment. In 1997, President Bill Clinton apologized to the study’s victims.
The scandalous Tuskegee study is rightly regarded as a scientific failure. Because the researchers had clearly violated ethical standards. These were already written down after the Second World War, after seven doctors had been sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials of the main war criminals. They had committed crimes in the name of science.
In 1964, the Nuremberg Code for the Protection of Participants in Medical Experiments became the Helsinki Declaration of the World Medical Association. It sets the ethical guidelines for research. The most important requirement: Medical experiments require the – informed – consent of the subjects.
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