After the war, those “experiments” were condemned, with guardrails put in place, including the principle of informed consent and strict adherence to the Hippocratic oath.
In 1947, the Nuremberg Code banned all coercive maltreatment in research, making informed consent mandatory across the board. But the code had no enforcement factor and, therefore, no teeth. It was summarily ignored.
Now, decades later, the World Medical Association (WMA), an international body representing 115 national medical associations and more than 10 million physicians, has just approved ethical guidelines regarding research on human subjects that reopen the gates of abuse.
Specifically, according to the WMA, informed consent protections do not extend to those with so-called mental illness.
“Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society—people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks.”
According to the WMA’s new guidelines, experiments now require “free and informed consent” from participants—all participants, that is, except those “mentally incapable” of consenting.
This group of humans will, instead, have a “legally authorized representative” who can do their thinking and deciding for them—deciding for them, that is, if they’d like to risk torturing side effects and possibly death, or if they’d rather be left alone as they are.
It will, in effect, be the same “forced treatment” without consent endured by Holocaust victims, except instead of being done at the point of a machine gun, the experiments will be done at the point of a pen of a signed “legally authorized representative.”
“Because of the numerous dangerous side effects of psychiatric treatments, the WHO/Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights opposes forced treatment, defining it as a potential form of torture,” says mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). CCHR is referring to the October 2023 joint World Health Organization and Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights guidance on mental health, human rights and legislation, which states: “Legislation should prohibit medical and scientific research, including all research studies and scientific experiments in the field of mental health (e.g., drug trials and clinical trials), without informed consent.”
The Nuremberg Code—the very first sentence of which reads, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential”—was deemed required “for barbarians, but unnecessary (or superfluous) for ordinary physicians,” according to Yale law professor Jay Katz.
If, however, “ordinary physicians” didn’t need it, then “extraordinary” physicians certainly did—physicians like those in Connecticut in the 1940s, who calculatingly infected mental patients with hepatitis. Or those who did the same to mentally “retarded” children in 1960s Staten Island.
“Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society—people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks,” according to a CBS 8 article about those experiments of the 40s and 60s. “It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.”
As history clearly shows us, there must be some codified system with sufficient teeth that forces itchy-fingered psychiatrists and others to keep their bloody claws off those who can’t say nay: our mentally impaired or otherwise incapacitated brothers and sisters.
Other specialized groups, however, are protected. In 2006, in tandem with the Swiss Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology, the Swiss Federal Committee on Animal Experiments determined that experimentation on chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas is ethically unacceptable and cannot be justified. Why? Because, said the two committees, they are closer to humans.
In its latest “ethical” guidelines, however, the WMA refuses mental patients the same rights now enjoyed by chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas.
For shame, WMA.
