Wednesday, April 08, 2020

Volunteers

One mark of a lawless regime is its willingness to carry out medical experiments on unwilling or uninformed subjects (see Mengele, Josef).  It hardly matters if the purpose of these experiments is give the subjects a better chance of survival or to find out how long they can live in freezing temperatures.  All civilized countries have protocols which are supposed to safeguard the helpless.

The United States has a long, dark history of damaging its citizens in the name of medical research or national security, from feeding LSD to the unwitting to the infamous Tuskeegee program.  Every time one of these abominations comes to light, we are assured that lessons have been learned, laws enacted, and there will be no more forced sterilization of the "feeble-minded" or giving hepatitis to mental patients or feeding people a sub-standard diet to determine the cause of pellagra.  The bulk of these atrocities have been committed against prisoners who may consent without knowing all the risks or because they are offered an incentive like early parole, or who just believe they have no choice.  The rule of law Americans like to cite as distinguishing us from other places rarely extends to those convicted of breaking our laws.

So why are Texas nursing homes administering hydroxychloroquine to residents suffering from COVID-19, whose only offense was being too old or too ill to care for themselves?  The governor, a devout Trumper, has admitted that the unproven drug is being given without informing the patients or their families (who cannot visit them because of the quarantine) on the recommendation of Dr. Trump himself.  This "miracle drug" is the straw he clutches in hope of restoring a boom economy before the election, and if a few old people have to die, they probably would have died anyway.  It's the least they can do for "our great Country."  Ask Senator Ron Johnson.

Even before this pandemic hit, Texas nursing homes (which are apparently regulated as carefully as Texas chemical plants) had a staggering number of citations for infectious disease and poor staff hygiene.  I would venture to guess the pay does not attract many trained healthcare professionals.  As the Texas Tribune reports, the families of residents are struggling to get information about each facility.  People who work in these places are sick, too, but they don't have Alzheimer's or similar disabilities -- they can refuse to be guinea pigs for Trump and Abbott and the almighty Dow Jones.

Some people with COVID who get hydroxychloroquine recover.  There is no way to be sure they would not recover anyway, as most people do.  This is called "anecdotal evidence."  Nobody knows.  People who experiment on the old and those with pre-existing health problems -- just about everyone in a care facility -- should be tried in The Hague.  Especially the ones who wasted precious time on wishing the pandemic away, calling it a hoax, and now blame their inertia on the World Health Organization or the Chinese government or their self-created political problems.  Trump and his criminal associates have surpassed themselves.

1 Comments:

Blogger MarkS said...

THIS..

4:40 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home