Now that Trump is drying up much the EPA swamp, is he going to permanently shut down the illegal medical experiments that harken right back to Josef Rudolf Mengele, the so-called angel of death out of Nazi Germany? The left is so quick to paint Trump as this right-wing nut case, but it was Obama’s EPA that would return to human medical experiments. It’s a good thing the U.S Public Health Service called off the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments in 1972. Had someone sued to stop the horror, a federal judge like Anthony Trenga might have stopped the suit — not the experiments.
A return to a post I did back in 2013:
A federal judge decided to shut down the lawsuit rather than the government’s human experimentation program.
To Judge Trenga, however, the important thing apparently was to nitpick to death the effort to stop the experiments with a narrow reading of the federal rules of civil procedure.
Judge Trenga determined that the EPA’s decision to endanger the lives of its study subjects, including inducing them to sign a fraudulent consent form, did not constitute a “final agency action” under the Administrative Procedures Act. Judge Trenga also determined, as the American Tradition Institute was not being harmed by the experiments, it didn’t have standing to pursue the case. Now the story:
The suit accuses the EPA of paying as many as 41 participants $12 an hour to breathe in concentrated diesel exhaust, for as long a two hours at a time. The exhaust was directly piped in from a truck parked outside the Chapel Hill facility. According to the lawsuit, the fine particulate matter, called “PM2.5,” was piped in at levels 21 times greater than what the EPA calls its “permissible limit.”
Milloy added some historic perspective to the mix. “In the context of rules established after scientific horrors of World War II and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the notion that EPA would pipe high levels of PM2.5 and diesel exhaust into the lungs of unhealthy people to see what would happen is simply appalling,” he said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.
“Unhealthy” is an accurate assessment. The 41 subjects who took part in the experiment included people who were elderly or suffering from asthma, hypertension or metabolic syndrome. One of them, an obese 58-year-old woman with a history of health problems and family history of heart disease, experienced an irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) and had to be hospitalized as a result. Another subject developed an elevated heart rate.
Then again, the study subjects really weren’t “asked” to risk their lives, since the EPA researchers failed — and, in fact, refused — to warn them that PM2.5 could kill them. At the very least, exposing study subjects to a dangerous and deadly toxin without their consent is also known as “assault and battery.”
Given that the EPA long ago determined that any exposure to PM2.5 could cause death (as well as a host of other serious health consequences) within hours or days of inhalation, the experiments are fundamentally illegal. Federal regulations and the Nuremberg Code strictly prohibit scientists from treating human subjects like expendable guinea pigs. In the experiment in question, the study subjects were asked to risk their very lives for $12 per hour.
The American Tradition Institute sued the EPA in October to stop an ongoing experiment in which the agency was exposing elderly study subjects (up to 75 years of age) to concentrated levels of a deadly (according to EPA) air pollutant known as PM2.5 (soot or dust much smaller than the width of a human hair).
The lawsuit claimed the experiments were illegal in that they blatantly violated virtually every major standard developed since World War II for the protection of human study subjects used in scientific experiments.
Given that the EPA long ago determined that any exposure to PM2.5 could cause death (as well as a host of other serious health consequences) within hours or days of inhalation, the experiments are fundamentally illegal. Federal regulations and the Nuremberg Code strictly prohibit scientists from treating human subjects like expendable guinea pigs. In the experiment in question, the study subjects were asked to risk their very lives for $12 per hour.
The EPA engaged in disturbing experimentation that deliberately exposed human beings to airborne particulate matter the agency itself considers lethal. The experiments were conducted at EPA’s Human Studies Facility at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “That EPA administrator Lisa Jackson permitted this heinous experimentation to occur under her watch shocks the conscience,” said Milloy.
Full story at Front Page Mag and Washington Times
From an earlier post: Lisa Jackson & EPA conducting illegal human medical experiments February 15, 2013
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