Puppies?! Fauci tortured orphan babies and children in his AIDS drug experiments

by Silviu "Silview" Costinescu on 22 Dec 20214 Aug 2022

“In 2003, 04, 05, I was investigating this story. Children in an NYC orphanage (and the foster care system) used in clinical trials. The Associated Press took it national and found it going on in seven or more states. “Some states declined to participate in medical experiments. Tennessee said its foster care rules generally prohibit enlisting children in such trials. California requires a judge’s order. And Wisconsin “has absolutely never allowed, nor would we even consider, any clinical experiments with the children in our foster care system,” spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said. Officials estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent of the 13,878 children enrolled in pediatric AIDS studies funded by NIH since the late 1980s were in foster care. More than two dozen Illinois foster children remain in studies today. ” No medical records were ever made available to official investigators. You make up your own mind.”
– Liam Scheff

A National Scandal: AIDS Drug Experiments on Foster Care Children – Associated Press

Wed, 04 May 2005

The article has been deleted from the AP website, but the archive survived here

On March 10, 2004, The Alliance for Human Research Protection filed a complaint with the FDA and the federal Office of Human Research Protection about a series of AIDS drug experiments conducted on New York City children in foster care. That complaint prompted two separate investigations by the FDA and OHRP which are still on-going.

Articles in The New York Post and a documentary by BBC raised the alarm among the African-American and Latino community in NY-some of who have been protesting weekly in front of Incarnation Children’s Center, the site of some of the drug experiments.

The Associated Press AP has just released its investigative report: the problem is a national scandal–the experiments were conducted in “at least seven states — Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas — and involved more than four dozen different studies.

AP’s investigation found that 13,878 children had been enrolled in pediatric AIDS studies funded by the government since the late 1980s. Of these, officials estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent were in foster care. Their age ranged from infants to late teens.

“More than two dozen Illinois foster children remain in studies today.”

Those who conducted the experiments in violation of federal regulations, are supported by taxpayers – thus they have a public responsibility which they violated. The children who were targeted to serve as human drug testing subjects – mostly poor children of color – were not afforded the protection of a personal advocate – as is mandated by federal regulations. (45 Code of Federal Regulations 46.409)

The institutional culture of arrogance is demonstrably in evidence at both medical research centers and government agencies: “Our position is that advocates weren’t needed,” said Marilyn Castaldi, spokeswoman for Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.

And officials of NYC Administration of Child Services “defend the decision to enlist foster children en masse, saying there was a crisis in the early 1990s and research provided the best treatment possibilities.”

The children are reported to have suffered painful side effects “such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.”

In one study testing the drug dapsone, “at least 10 children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning, and researchers said they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. They said the deaths didn’t appear to be “directly attributable” to dapsone but nonetheless were “disturbing.”

“overall mortality while receiving the study drug was significantly higher in the daily dapsone group. This finding remains unexplained,” the researchers concluded.

“Another study involving foster children in the 1990s treated children with different combinations of adult antiretroviral drugs. Among 52 children, there were 26 moderate to severe reactions — nearly all in infants. The side effects included rash, fever and a major drop in infection-fighting white blood cells.

At least three states declined to use children in foster care in medical experiments: Tennessee said its foster care rules generally prohibit enlisting children in such trials. California requires a judge’s order. And Wisconsin “has absolutely never allowed, nor would we even consider, any clinical experiments with the children in our foster care system,” spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said.

Not addressed in the AP report is the amount of money that these trials generated for the institutions involved in the experiments.

***The NYC Council, general welfare committee is holding a hearing about the unethical experiments conducted in NYC. The hearing will take place at City Hall at 11:15.

For information and to register to speak, call: Ms. Jackie Sherman at 212-788-7015

Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav
212-595-8974

Researchers Tested AIDS Drugs on Children – Associated Press

By JOHN SOLOMON
11:08 AM PDT, May 4, 2005

WASHINGTON – Government-funded researchers tested AIDS drugs on hundreds of foster children over the past two decades, often without providing them a basic protection afforded in federal law and required by some states, an Associated Press review has found.

The research funded by the National Institutes of Health spanned the country. It was most widespread in the 1990s as foster care agencies sought treatments for their HIV-infected children that weren’t yet available in the marketplace.

The practice ensured that foster children — mostly poor or minority — received care from world-class researchers at government expense, slowing their rate of death and extending their lives. But it also exposed a vulnerable population to the risks of medical research and drugs that were known to have serious side effects in adults and for which the safety for children was unknown.

The research was conducted in at least seven states — Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas — and involved more than four dozen different studies. The foster children ranged from infants to late teens, according to interviews and government records.

Several studies that enlisted foster children reported patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.

In one study, researchers reported a “disturbing” higher death rate among children who took higher doses of a drug. That study was unable to determine a safe and effective dosage.

The government provided special protections for child wards in 1983. They required researchers and their oversight boards to appoint independent advocates for any foster child enrolled in a narrow class of studies that involved greater than minimal risk and lacked the promise of direct benefit. Some foster agencies required the protection regardless of risks and benefits.

Advocates must be independent of the foster care and research agencies, have some understanding of medical issues and “act in the best interests of the child” for the entirety of the research, the law states.

However, researchers and foster agencies told AP that foster children in AIDS drug trials often weren’t given such advocates even though research institutions many times promised to do so to gain access to the children.

Illinois officials believe none of their nearly 200 foster children in AIDS studies got independent monitors even though researchers signed a document guaranteeing “the appointment of an advocate for each individual ward participating in the respective medical research.”

New York City could find records showing 142 — less than a third — of the 465 foster children in AIDS drug trials got such monitors even though city policy required them. The city has asked an outside firm to investigate.

Likewise, research facilities including Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said they concluded they didn’t provide advocates for foster kids.

Some states declined to participate in medical experiments. Tennessee said its foster care rules generally prohibit enlisting children in such trials. California requires a judge’s order. And Wisconsin “has absolutely never allowed, nor would we even consider, any clinical experiments with the children in our foster care system,” spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said.

Officials estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent of the 13,878 children enrolled in pediatric AIDS studies funded by NIH since the late 1980s were in foster care. More than two dozen Illinois foster children remain in studies today.

Some foster children died during studies, but state or city agencies said they could find no records that any deaths were directly caused by experimental treatments.

Researchers typically secured permission to enroll foster children through city or state agencies. And they frequently exempted themselves from appointing advocates by concluding the research carried minimal risk and the child would directly benefit because the drugs had already been tried in adults.

“Our position is that advocates weren’t needed,” said Marilyn Castaldi, spokeswoman for Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.

If they decline to appoint advocates under the federal law, researchers and their oversight boards must conclude that the experimental treatment affords the same or better risk-benefit possibilities than alternate treatments already in the marketplace. They also must abide by any additional protections required by state and local authorities.

Many of the studies that enrolled foster children occurred after 1990 when the government approved using the drug AZT — an effective AIDS treatment — for children.

Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said advocates should have been appointed for all foster children because researchers felt the pressure of a medical crisis and knew there was great uncertainty as to how children would react to AIDS medications that were often toxic for adults.

“It is exactly that set of circumstances that made it absolutely mandatory to get those kids those advocates,” Caplan said. “It is inexcusable that they wouldn’t have an advocate for each one of those children.

“When you have the most vulnerable subjects imaginable — kids without parents — you really do have to come in with someone independent, who doesn’t have a dog in this fight,” he said.

Those who made the decisions say the research gave foster kids access to drugs they otherwise couldn’t get. And they say they protected the children’s interest by carefully explaining risks and benefits to state guardians, foster parents and the children themselves.

“I understand the ethical dilemma surrounding the introduction of foster children into trials,” said Dr. Mark Kline, a pediatric AIDS expert at Baylor College of Medicine. He enrolled some Texas foster kids in his studies, and doesn’t recall appointing advocates for them.

“To say as a group that foster children should be excluded from clinical trials would have meant excluding these children from the best available therapies at the time,” he said. “From an ethical perspective, I never thought that was a stand I could take.”

Illinois officials directly credit the decision to enroll HIV-positive foster kids with bringing about a decline in deaths — from 40 between 1989 and 1995 to only 19 since.

NIH, the government health research agency that funded the studies, did not track researchers to determine if they appointed advocates. Instead, the decision was left to medical review boards made up of volunteers at each study site.

A recent Institute of Medicine study concluded those Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were often overwhelmed, dominated by scientists and not focused enough on patient protections. An ethicist who served 22 years on such boards said they lack the resources to ensure the safety of foster children.

“Over the last half century, IRBs have basically broken under the strain of some of the structural changes in research,” said Gregory E. Pence, a University of Alabama-Birmingham bioethicist.

The U.S. Office for Human Research Protections, created to protect research participants after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies on black men, is investigating the use of foster children in AIDS research. The office declined to discuss the probe.

NIH said it considers patient safety its top priority and awaits the outcome of the investigation. “If we find that patient protections need further strengthening, we will take action to do so,” spokesman John Burklow said.

AP’s review found that if children were old enough — usually between 5 and 10 — they also were educated about the risks and asked to consent. Sometimes, foster parents or biological parents were consulted; other times not.

“Our policy was to try and contact the (biological) parents because it was fairly common when we got done the foster kid would go back to the parents,” said Dr. Ross McKinney, a pediatrics AIDS expert at Duke University.

Research and foster agencies declined to make foster parents or children in the drug trials available for interviews, or to provide information about individual drug dosages, side effects or deaths, citing medical privacy laws.

Other families who participated in the same drug trials told AP their children mostly benefited but parents needed to carefully monitor potential side effects. Foster children, they said, need the added protection of an independent advocate.

“I don’t believe a foster care parent can do it,” said Vinnie DiPoalo, a New Jersey woman whose 10-year-old adopted son has participated in three AIDS drug trials. “There are informed consents that have to be signed. There are follow-up blood appointments.

“I think that’s the role the advocate should take, because a foster parent may only have this child for three months and then the child moves on and someone needs to be watching all the time,” she said.

Many studies that enlisted foster children involved early Phase I and Phase II research — the riskiest — to determine side effects and safe dosages so children could begin taking adult “cocktails,” the powerful drug combinations that suppress AIDS but can cause bad reactions like rashes and organ damage.

Some of those drugs were approved ultimately for children, such as stavudine and zidovudine. Other medicines were not.

Illinois officials confirmed two or three foster children were approved to participate in a mid-1990s study of dapsone. Researchers hoped the drug would prevent a pneumonia that afflicts AIDS patients.

Researchers reported some children had to be taken off the drug because of “serious toxicity,” others developed rashes, and the rates of death and blood toxicity were significantly higher in children who took the medicine daily, rather than weekly.

At least 10 children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning, and researchers said they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. They said the deaths didn’t appear to be “directly attributable” to dapsone but nonetheless were “disturbing.”

“An unexpected finding in our study was that overall mortality while receiving the study drug was significantly higher in the daily dapsone group. This finding remains unexplained,” the researchers concluded.

Another study involving foster children in the 1990s treated children with different combinations of adult antiretroviral drugs. Among 52 children, there were 26 moderate to severe reactions — nearly all in infants. The side effects included rash, fever and a major drop in infection-fighting white blood cells.

New York City officials defend the decision to enlist foster children en masse, saying there was a crisis in the early 1990s and research provided the best treatment possibilities. Nonetheless, they are changing their policy so they no longer give blanket permission to enroll children in preapproved studies.

“We learned some things from our experience,” said Elizabeth Roberts, assistant commissioner for child and family health at the Administration for Children’s Services. “It is a more individualized review we will be conducting.”

Researchers likewise defend their work, saying they often sat with foster families to explain the risks and benefits, and provided them literature and 24-hour phone numbers.

“We talk about it. Then they come the next time. There is no rush,” explained Dr. Ram Yogev, the chief pediatric AIDS researcher in Chicago whose patients include a large number of foster children.

Kline, the Texas researcher, added: “I never wanted a parent or guardian to ever say ‘yes’ simply because they thought that it was what I wanted them to do. I wanted it to be the right choice for them. I think there is not any single right answer for any family.”

* __

Researcher Rachel Landau in Washington and reporter Carla K. Johnson in Chicago contributed to this story. On the Net:

Documents associated with this story are available at:

http://wid.ap.org/inv/foster.html

Liam Scheff’S BOMBSHELL interview:

Includes nurses who participated in the experiments!

An excerpt below from Kennedy’s explosive book describing Fauci’s medical experiments on children:

Robert Kennedy sat for an interview this past month to journalist James Corbett where he laid out some key arguments from the book and specifically explained the facts on Fauci’s illegal testing on orphan children:

Fauci tested harsh chemotherapy drugs on orphan children in order to determine its use for AIDS treatments in the 1980s
Fauci got control of foster homes in 7 states
Children were tortured to death
Children were denied guardians and any kind of legal protector
Children who refused to take Fauci’s drugs had feeding tubes installed so drug companies could administer the drugs even when the kids fought back
Most of the children did not have HIV/AIDS, they were just used as guinea pigs to see if they could survive the harsh drug regimen
At least 85 kids died as part of these experiments

The graveyard where these children were thrown into a pit, filled with hundreds of coffins sometimes stuffed with multiple children, is buried under an astroturf pit in New York. These are the victims of Fauci’s crimes, says Kennedy.

The Gateway Pundit was able to locate this memorial to the orphan children killed by Dr. Fauci and the NIH in New York State.

The orphans are not forgotten. There are toys and flowers left at the memorial.

The names of the orphans are listed on the memorial wall.

And an angel holds a stuffed Teddy Bear.

These photos were taken from Google maps

RFK Jr.: Reporter Found Monument to Dead Orphans Tortured and Killed by Monster Fauci (VIDEO)

By Jim Hoft / Gateway Pundit

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. joined The High Wire recently to discuss his best-selling book on monster Dr. Tony Fauci.

During the discussion, RFK Jr. revealed that reporter Cecelia Farber went to the cemetery in New York state where the tortured orphan children were buried. These victims were Fauci’s experimental patients.

The Gateway Pundit reported earlier on this monument and cemetery in New York State.

Fauci has a long history of mass death, barbarism and lies.

In 2004 Dr. Fauci’s NIH was also caught funding experiments on AIDS orphans at a New York City hospital. The Gateway Pundit reported on this dark Fauci chapter in October.

The Fauci NIH approved experiments on hundreds of New York City orphans. Government agencies and pharmaceutical companies used the orphans in deadly AIDS drug trials.

In 2005, the city of New York hired the VERA Institute to form a final report on the drug trials. VERA was given no access to medical records for any of the children used in trials. Their report was published in 2008.
They reported that twenty-five children died during the drug studies, that an additional fifty-five children died following the studies (in foster care), and, according to Tim Ross, Director of the Child Welfare program at VERA (as of 2009), 29% of the remaining 417 children who were used in drug studies had died (out of a total 532 children that are admitted to have been used). [LINK]
The WIKIPEDIA writers cover up all details, as is expected.
No payment or compensation has been paid to any of the children used in the trials, or to their families.

A hospital nurse later spoke out to reporters about the testing. She reported that children would immediately get sick, break out or throw up during the testing.
They were orphans at the Incarnation Children’s Center in New York City.https://www.youtube.com/embed/cyJLYPh9pxY?start=1471

On Tuesday The Gateway Pundit reported on Dr. Fauci’s torture and medical murder of at least 85 orphan minority children in New York, children who were vulnerable, could not consent, and who would not be missed.

Ann Rosen at LifeSiteNews wrote a good recap of Fauci’s crimes against children earlier this month.

Advertisement – story continues below

These children were buried in mass graves at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, NY in Westchester County and otherwise forgotten.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that Anthony Fauci is America’s Joseph Mengele for what he did to poor orphan minority kids in the 1980’s.

These extreme claims are the subject of a new book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., called “The Real Anthony Fauci.” In Chapter 7, the Kennedy heir lays out “NIAID’s Barbaric and Illegal Experiments on Children”

Kennedy refers to Fauci as America’s ‘homegrown Mengele.’

LATER ADDITION

FAUCI GREW ABORTED BABY SCALPS ON RATS

To be continued?
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! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them

Disabled kids fed infected feces to advance the hepatitis vaccine research

by Silviu "Silview" Costinescu on 23 Jul 202123 Jul 2021

by Silviu “Silview” Costinescu

If you’re a typical millennial, schooled, not educated, and with no historical time perception, you may think this happened ages ago and it’s no longer relevant. But the victims would be younger than my mom today and the affair has been concluded just a few years before my birth. It is conceivable that some of the participants are still working and giving advice on Covid nowadays.

Pharmafia and its faucist lemmings have jumped on an imaginary flying white horse and are pointing fingers at all dissatisfied costumers and skeptics from some imaginary moral heights they fly in their empathy-deficient heads.
They call out racism, egoism and what not in everyone who’s not a Pharma-junkie yet, projecting their own faults all over the place like a garden sprinkler made by Goebbels Industries .
They need bitch-slapped back into reality with some historical facts.
Because if a person had Pharmafia’s criminal record, you’d ask for bodyguards and a restraining order, and the last thing you’d take from them would be health-advice.

THE HIDDEOUS THRUTHS OF TESTING VACCINES ON HUMANS

By Leah Rosenbaum, Forbes, June 12, 2020

Sixty years ago, a monstrous hepatitis experiment was performed on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School that raises serious ethical questions about vaccine challenge trials for Covid-19.

Nina Galen was ten years old when she became part of one of the most controversial human experiments in American history. Her mother, Diana McCourt, was looking for an institution that could care for her severely autistic daughter. “I was just desperate,” McCourt says now, more than 50 years later. “I think I was having a breakdown because I was just trying to take care of everything.”

McCourt finally settled on Willowbrook State School, a home for severely developmentally challenged children and adults on Staten Island, New York. In order to get Nina a spot at the overcrowded facility, however, she had to make a Faustian bargain—consenting to allow her daughter to be part of a quest to find a vaccine for hepatitis. “I had no choice,” McCourt says, “I had tried so many different places and so many arrangements, and they didn’t work out, so I went along with it.”

Nina became one of more than 50 mentally disabled children, ages 5 to 10, under the care of Dr. Saul Krugman, a respected pediatrician from New York who wanted to determine if there were multiple strains of hepatitis, and whether a vaccine could be created to protect against the disease. Krugman and his partner, Dr. Joan Giles, used the Willowbrook residents to test a preliminary vaccine for this disease that had killed millions worldwide. From 1955 to 1970, the children were injected with the virus itself or made to drink chocolate milk mixed with feces from other infected children in order to study their immunity.

For much of human history, hepatitis caused some of the deadliest outbreaks in the world. The symptoms, including fever, liver damage and yellow skin, were written about by Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C.E. While we now know that there are multiple viruses (most famously, hepatitis A, B and C), in the first half of the 20th century researchers only knew of one form of the disease, which was then called epidemic jaundice.

Finding a vaccine became particularly important for the United States during World War II, when hepatitis outbreaks affected more than 50,000 American troops. To fight this disease and others, the Surgeon General’s office established the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board.

Willowbrook-building — School for Scandal: In addition to conducting hepatitis experiments, Willowbrook’s staff physically abused residents.

In the early 1950s, Dr. Krugman, a former flight surgeon for the U.S. Army Air Corps, went to the Epidemiological Board with a proposition: he wanted to create a vaccine for hepatitis, and knew the perfect place where he could do his research. Willowbrook was overcrowded, already rampant with disease, and at the time it wasn’t uncommon to test vaccines on children.

The idea goes back to the grandfather of vaccines himself, Edward Jenner, who used an 8-year-old boy as the first test subject of his groundbreaking smallpox vaccine in the late 18th century. The Willowbrook hepatitis experiments would be vaccine challenge experiments, so-called because the body is intentionally “challenged” with a direct exposure to the virus to see if a particular treatment prevents someone from getting the disease.

“He believed he was helping the children at this school deal with the epidemic,” says Dr. Krugman’s son Richard, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital Colorado and former head of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect. “He certainly thought he was making a contribution to infectious disease research.”

Although there’s little doubt that Dr. Krugman accelerated the discovery of a hepatitis vaccine, the ethics of his experiment have resurfaced as vaccine challenge trials are being debated for Covid-19. Many politicians, medical ethicists and scientists have come out in favor of the idea, which would include giving healthy volunteers a dose of an unproven vaccine, and then deliberately exposing them to Covid-19 to see if it offers protection against the virus.

While the vaccine challenge trials would be done with healthy adult volunteers, the Covid-19 vaccine challenge trial and the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments beg the same question: Is it really necessary—or right—to risk the health of a few for the benefit of many?

Saul Krugman arrived at the bucolic Willowbrook campus in 1955. Nestled on almost 400 acres on Staten Island, the large, U-shaped brick buildings were surrounded by a lush green forest. A painted yellow and blue carousel sat at the entrance to the grounds, and first-time visitors described it as enchanting, like a summer camp. Inside, however, Willowbrook was a nightmare.

Do No Harm: RFK described Willowbrook's conditions as ″less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.″ — Do No Harm: RFK described Willowbrook’s conditions as “less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.”
But since the kids were mostly white and many of the “caregivers” black, I doubt libtards will get triggered by this

The school opened in 1947 and was built to hold 4,000 residents, but for years that number was over 6,000. Disease and neglect were everywhere, and multiple residents died from untreated illness and abuse. In 1965, Robert F. Kennedy, then a New York Senator, made an unannounced visit to Willowbrook and left appalled. “There are no civil liberties for those put in the cells of Willowbrook,” he later testified before Congress, calling the institution a “snake pit.”

When Dr. Krugman and Dr. Giles began the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments, they used the conditions of Willowbrook to their advantage for recruiting new families. Despite its well-documented horrors, Willowbrook was still one of the only options for children with severe disabilities, and there was a long waitlist. Dr. Krugman offered several parents, including Nina Galen’s, the ability to jump the line and have their children put in the newer, cleaner research wards with more staff—if they joined the experiments. “I did feel coerced,” McCourt says, “I felt like I was denied help unless I took this [opportunity].”

Krugman also told parents that since hepatitis was already prevalent at Willowbrook, their children may as well have the chance for a vaccine. McCourt remembers being told her daughter could get an “antidote” to hepatitis if she joined the experiment. When she asked why the hepatitis studies couldn’t be done on primates, she was told that using animals would be “too expensive.”

Despite understanding the optics of infecting mentally disabled children with a potentially deadly disease, Dr. Krugman felt the risk was worth the reward. “The decision to feed hepatitis virus to patients at Willowbrook was not undertaken lightly,” he wrote in a 1958 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine. He noted that the strain of hepatitis in Willowbrook wasn’t very severe, that many of the children would get infected anyway, and that any knowledge gained from the experiment would in fact help other Willowbrook residents. He also emphasized that the study was sanctioned by the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, and the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board of the Surgeon General’s Office.

“I don’t think you’re ever justified to inoculate a child with an infectious virus that might kill them,” says pediatrician Paul Offit.

Some of Dr. Krugman’s trials built on previous research that giving children antibodies from patients who had recovered from hepatitis could prevent new infections. (A similar concept, using convalescent plasma of recovered Covid-19 patients to treat sick patients, is being explored today.)

The experiments also involved infecting healthy children with the virus through the chocolate milk concoction. The doctors eventually learned how much it took for the children to show symptoms of hepatitis, allowed them to recover, and then gave them the virus all over again. These experiments were done to test if someone who had recovered from hepatitis would remain immune or if they could be reinfected again.

As each trial concluded, Dr. Krugman published the results in prominent medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. From the time of the first publication, the experiments were controversial within the medical community. In 1966, renowned medical ethicist Henry K. Beecher published an article titled, “Ethics and Clinical Research,” which listed Willowbrook as an example of an unethical clinical experiment and concluded that “there is no right to risk an injury to one person for the benefit of others.”

Five years later, the editorial board of the Lancet apologized for publishing Dr. Krugman’s studies without greater skepticism. “The Willowbrook experiments have always carried a hope that hepatitis might one day be prevented,” the editors wrote, “but that could not justify the giving of infected material to children who would not directly benefit.” A year later, Krugman had to ward off protesters at a medical conference in Atlantic City.

Consent-form_AK-redacted_1958 — Bad Form: Willowbrook often accepted children in exchange for parental permission to conduct hepatitis testing. THE COLLEGE OF STATEN ISLAND ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

“I think he got a lot of flak for it from people who didn’t understand the context or the reality of the institution,” Richard Krugman says. “It certainly got caught up in the politics of the day.”

But Dr. Krugman had as many fans as he did detractors. New York State Senator Seymour Thaler, originally a critic of the hepatitis experiments, later said that Krugman had “done a magnificent thing.” Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, also supported the research. “How much better to have a patient with hepatitis, accidentally or deliberately acquired, under the guidance of a Krugman than under the care of a zealot,” he wrote.

In addition to discovering the hepatitis A and B strains, Dr. Krugman “certainly did speed up the development of a hepatitis B vaccine,” says Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But, Offit adds, “I don’t think you’re ever justified to inoculate a child with an infectious virus that might kill them.”

As members of the medical community protested Krugman’s experiments, a greater force was mobilizing to close down Willowbrook for good.

In 1972, Geraldo Rivera, then a local television reporter in New York, snuck into the grounds of the school and broadcast the inhumane conditions of Willowbrook. He had been tipped off about the residents’ living conditions by Michael Wilkins, a doctor at the school who was not involved in the hepatitis trials.

“It’s almost 50 years and speaking about it still makes me cry,” says Rivera, now a roaming correspondent-at-large at Fox News. “The conditions were so horrible.” Rivera remembers seeing children naked, smeared in their own feces and hitting their heads against the wall. “I would imagine that the situation I had was similar to the GIs that freed the concentration camps.”

Geraldo-Rivera-by-Michael-Ochs-Getty-Images — The Last Great Disgrace: As a result of Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 investigation of Willowbrook, a federal law was passed to protect people in institutions. MICHAEL OCHS/ GETTYIMAGES

At roughly the same time, a whistleblower exposed the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in which researchers deliberately let hundreds of Black men go untreated and several died from the disease, even though there was a known cure. Willowbrook was one in a long line of human experimentations on children, prison inmates, people in mental health facilities, and minority communities, and Tuskegee was the tipping point.

Dr. Krugman, however, was rewarded for his work at Willowbrook. That year, he became president of the American Pediatric Society.

In 1974, the National Research Act was passed in an effort to create regulations that protected subjects in human research trials. One measure it implemented was the creation of an ethics task force, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. “The National Commission might never have come into being were it not for Willowbrook and Tuskegee and several other instances,” says Karen Lebacqz, one of the original members of the commission.

By 1979 the commission had published the Belmont Report, a comprehensive guideline of basic ethical principles that guide modern clinical trials. The National Research Act also established the practice of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), independent committees that must take time to review the ethical aspects of human clinical trials to this day.

Aside from potential ethical dilemmas, today’s coronavirus vaccine challenge trials have something else in common with the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments: they may not even be necessary. While Dr. Krugman is credited for speeding up the development of a hepatitis vaccine, other researchers were not far behind. In the late 1960s, Dr. Baruch Blumberg independently discovered the hepatitis B virus, and together with Dr. Irving Millman submitted the first patent for a hepatitis vaccine in 1969. Blumberg did all his research by taking blood samples and testing the liver functions on children and adults who were already infected, and his work earned Blumberg a Nobel Prize for Medicine.

“Whenever people are desperate,” ethics professor Karen Lebacqz says, “they always want to relax ethical standards.”

Similarly, even if a challenge trial for coronavirus gets approved, there’s no guarantee that it will lead to a faster vaccine development. The U.S. government’s initiative to develop a coronavirus vaccine may be called “Operation Warp Speed,” but Christine Grady, Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, says that a lot of time and thought have to be put into properly designing a trial.

“Whether or not doing a challenge trial would even speed up the trial is a question that is not exactly clear,” says Grady, who is married to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Paul Offit agrees. “You have to have the right dose. And to get the right dose, you have to have these mini-challenge trials,” he says. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Karen Lebacqz, one of the original Belmont Report authors, also has concerns about the accelerated Covid-19 vaccine protocols. “Whenever people are desperate,” she says, “they always want to relax ethical standards.”

Saul Krugman’s controversial experiments at Willowbrook were only the beginning of his illustrious career. He later became the head of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, authored a classic textbook of pediatric infectious diseases, received the prestigious Lasker Award, and helped to develop the first rubella and measles vaccines.

He defended the Willowbrook trials his whole life, writing in 1986, “I am as convinced today as I was at that time that our studies were ethical and justifiable.” Krugman passed away in 1995, and his obituary in the New York Times has only a small mention of his experiments at Willowbrook.

To this day, while many modern-day ethicists use the Willowbrook studies as an example of unjust human experimentation, there are always second opinions. “It’s complicated,” Grady says. To her knowledge, “Krugman’s first goal was to understand the disease…but I think there are some things about it that certainly don’t look good and would be hard to get approval today.”

Mike Wilkins, the Willowbrook doctor who helped organize parents to shut down the institution in 1987, also doesn’t think that the experiments are black-and-white. “I’m not wanting to crucify Krugman,” he says now, “hepatitis B, for God sakes, is an international disease that there’s now a vaccine for. But let’s never ever do that again.”