From Khartoum to Kansas, vaccine conspiracy theorists have one thing in common: they have lost their faith in government, says the Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik
  • @pononimous@lemmy.ml
    0•3 years ago

    Blaming the victim of rushed and botched science and medicines approved by the FDA without completing extensive and full testing for safety and efficacy is incredibly lazy! Seeing as you haven’t bothered to do at least a little research on this, allow me to fill you in on a little medical and political history; since it’s very beginnings, the Food and Drug Administration has always been under the influence of very powerful drug lobbies in Washington. This has resulted in some tremendous medical disasters, the most horrendous of those being the Thalidomide disaster of the early 1960s.

    If you’ve never heard of Thalidomide or don’t know what it is, you can read about it here (providing you’re not too lazy to click a link:)

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21507989/

    The German pharmacological firm, Gruenenthal, discovered the chemical composition of Thalidomide in the mid 1950s and, after some testing, discovered that it appeared to be an effective treatment for nausea in pregnant women. They quickly went into production and international distribution of the drug but they hit a wall; the United States would not allow the drug to be used within its borders without substantial and effective testing. Investigating their options, Gruenenthal quickly discovered that their best option was to establish a very powerful pharmacological lobby in the US Congress, which they did. Thanks to pressure from that lobby Gruenenthal was able to get FDA approval for US Distribution and sales of Thalidomide by 1958.

    US Doctors were then pressured to prescribe Thalidomide to their pregnant female patients as much as possible to maximize Gruenenthal sales. This is what led to the Thalidomide Baby Disaster.

    By 1961 mothers began giving birth to horribly deformed babies in epidemic numbers and an investigation was launched November of that year. The investigation wasn’t completed until August of 1963 and, after substantial congressional debates, Thalidomide was banned in the United states in April of 1964 and Gruenenthal was fined 1.5 million dollars for failing to do proper research on their own drugs. The FDA was not fined.

    This should give you all insight into how easily the FDA is manipulated and even controlled by lobbies in Congress and the corrupt congressmen and women who allow such lobbies to control an agency that has our very lives in its hands.

    There are other things I could mention here, too; such as the Berkeley Labs Polio Vaccine Disaster which resulted in over 2.5 million new polio cases and 100,000 polio deaths or the or the Methadone Disaster (a drug for the treatment of heroine addiction, which was distributed in the 1970s) which has, to this date, ended up killing almost 99 percent of all of those who took it, usually by brain hemorrhages and strokes.

    So, next time you think of posting something which lazily and nastily accuses the victims of greedy and corrupt lobbyists consider that there are a whole lot of people in this world who know a whole lot more than you do.