`The CDC used to be a serious organization. Or, I should say, the CDC used to be considered a serious organization. I respected them enormously until recently.

No longer. It is a clown show filled with immoral, amoral, and morally vacuous souls who have contempt for the people whom they are there to serve.

Man, I wish I didn’t have to write that. Every single one of the government agencies for which I felt some respect have beclowned themselves in recent years, and I expect the trend to continue. The FBI, the CDC, Customs and Border Patrol. All awful.

The latest disgrace committed by the CDC in a long line of recent disgraces is CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Tuskegee Syphilus trials.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Tomorrow, I will be joined by colleagues & #PublicHealth leaders as we honor the 623 African American men, their suffering & sacrifice, and our commitment to ethical research and practice. https://t.co/cbR8Shy0Db

— Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) November 29, 2022

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Tuskegee syphilis study, it is one of the most horrific scientific studies performed in human history. It literally belongs in the same annals as the experiments performed by the Nazis. It was, instead, performed by US scientists on black Americans who were misled into believing they were being treated for a mysterious disease involving bad blood.

In 1932, the USPHS, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis. It was originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” (now referred to as the “USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee”). The study initially involved 600 Black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. Participants’ informed consent was not collected. Researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance.

The USPHS is the US Public Health Service, an agency of the government. Free burial insurance, because they sure needed that thanks to the government.

By 1943, penicillin was the treatment of choice for syphilis and becoming widely available, but the participants in the study were not offered treatment.

In 1972, an Associated Press story about the study was published. As a result, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs appointed an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to review the study. The advisory panel concluded that the study was “ethically unjustified”; that is, the “results [were] disproportionately meager compared with known risks to human subjects involved.” In October 1972, the panel advised stopping the study. A month later, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs announced the end of the study. In March 1973, the panel also advised the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) (now known as the Department of Health and Human Services) to instruct the USPHS to provide all necessary medical care for the survivors of the study.¹ The Tuskegee Health Benefit Program (THBP) was established to provide these services. In 1975, participants’ wives, widows and children were added to the program. In 1995, the program was expanded to include health, as well as medical, benefits. The last study participant died in January 2004. The last widow receiving THBP benefits died in January 2009. Participants’ children (10 at present) continue to receive medical and health benefits.

For 40 years the United States Public Health Service conducted a secret study in which they intentionally failed to treat men suffering from syphilis, observing their suffering and decline and carefully followed every jot and tittle. They only stopped when they were caught. Nobody thought to treat the men at any point, and it took an “Advisory Panel” to tell them that what they did was evil.

The “patients” were lied to, others were exposed to the disease, and it was all scientifically studied as if the human beings involved were lab rats. The government allowed the spread of deadly disease to study the effects.

That, my friends, is the government being here to help you.

Yesterday the CDC Director celebrated the anniversary of the experiment and honored the “suffering and sacrifice” of the men the government experimented upon. Honored them, instead of abasing herself and her team before their descendants and all Americans for their predecessors’ crimes against humanity.

Nobody was charged with crimes. “Compensation”of $10 million was provided to the few survivors and their families, but only 10 children remain. Because syphilis is like that.

The Twitter ratio has been epic.

On the one hand I am certain that Walensky doesn’t mean to exactly celebrate what was done to these men, but on the other she demonstrates a complete moral vacuity here. Clearly she believes that the scientific benefit of the study was significant enough that the men involved should be honored for their “sacrifice,” as if they volunteered to be experimented upon.

They did not. They were drafted into a death and suffering trial. They should not be “honored,” they should be vindicated and the perpetrators punished. We don’t “honor” victims of crime, not because overcoming their suffering is not honorable, but because the impulse of society should be a call for justice.

But the perpetrators of this crime were her colleagues in public health. Not contemporary colleagues, but the people who helped establish her profession at the federal level. They in a sense are her professional ancestors. By “honoring” the “pain and sacrifice” of the victims she is whitewashing history.

Given how the CDC and the federal health authorities are treating all Americans today as subjects in a medical experiment you would have expected her to more carefully choose her words. But obviously she agrees in principle, at some level, to using the judgment of scientists as higher morally than the informed consent of citizens.

We certainly know that the CDC opposes the latter, given its support of medical mandates.

The CDC is morally corrupt. I wish I could say it should be disbanded, but we need something like it. Clearly, at the very least, they need to clean house.