Tag: human experimentation

The Plutonium Files: The US Government Injected Unsuspecting Citizens With Plutonium

In the mid-1940s the US was leading the world in atomic weapons development and the understanding of radioactive materials. Just ten years after plutonium had been discovered, the Manhattan Project was already close to creating a working atomic bomb. Such advances had not been made on the safe handling of such materials, however. This lack of understanding led to researchers on the project injecting people, unwittingly, with plutonium, to study the effects.

The Manhattan Project was the name of the major US research and development program that produced working atomic weapons. It began officially began in 1942, but similar, less intensive research had been ongoing since the late 1930s. The US took the idea of atomic weapons seriously in 1939 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the Einstein–Szilárd letter from Hungarian physicists. This letter warned the US about the potential German development of atomic weapons and was signed by Albert Einstein.

While it’s most famous for the development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project encompassed a number of different paths of research at different sites.

Much of this was related to the incredibly complex development and production of the weapons themselves, but a small priority was placed on studying the health effects of the materials involved in the project.

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THE CIA’S APPALLING HUMAN EXPERIMENTS WITH MIND CONTROL

ON APRIL 10, 1953, ALLEN DULLES, THE NEWLY APPOINTED DIRECTOR OF THE CIA, delivered a speech to a gathering of Princeton alumni. Though the event was mundane, global tensions were running high. The Korean War was coming to an end, and earlier that week, The New York Times had published a startling story asserting that American POWs returning from the country may have been “converted” by “Communist brain-washers.”

Some GI’s were confessing to war crimes, like carrying out germ warfare against the Communists–a charge the U.S. categorically denied. Others were reportedly so brainwashed that they had refused to return to the United States at all. As if that weren’t enough, the U.S. was weeks away from secretly sponsoring the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Iran.

Dulles had just become the first civilian director of an agency growing more powerful by the day, and the speech provided an early glimpse into his priorities for the CIA. “In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds–the war of ideologies,” he told the attendees. “I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” he continued. “We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’”

Dulles proceeded to describe the “Soviet brain perversion techniques” as effective, but “abhorrent” and “nefarious.” He gestured to the American POWs returning from Korea, shells of the men they once were, parroting the Communist propaganda they had heard cycled for weeks on end. He expressed fears and uncertainty–were they using chemical agents? Hypnosis? Something else entirely? “We in the West,” the CIA Director conceded, “are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare.” This sort of non-consensual experiment, even on one’s enemies, was antithetical to American values, Dulles insisted, as well as antithetical to what should be human values.

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Pfizer Is Now Developing A Twice-Per-Day COVID Pill That Must Be Taken Alongside Vaccines

Pharmaceutical megacorporation pfizer is now developing a COVID pill that is meant to be taken alongside the COVID vaccines that have already made the company a staggering amount of money. The new pill is expected to be released by the end of the year and will be required to be taken twice per day.

“Success against #COVID19 will likely require both vaccines & treatments,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Wednesday. “We’re pleased to share we’ve started a Phase 2/3 study of our oral antiviral candidate-specifically designed to combat SARS-CoV-2-in non-hospitalized, low-risk adults.”

Pfizer also put out a press release the same week that proclaimed, “If successful, [the drug] has the potential to address a significant unmet medical need, providing patients with a novel oral therapy that could be prescribed at the first sign of infection, without requiring hospitalization.” The company described the drug as an “investigational orally administered protease inhibitor antiviral therapy designed specifically to combat COVID–19 – in non–hospitalized, symptomatic adult participants who have a confirmed diagnosis of SARS–CoV–2 infection and are not at increased risk of progressing to severe illness, which may lead to hospitalization or death.”

Media corporations have already expressed excitement about the new pill, and Pfizer is so confident that the pill will be swiftly approved and mandated by governments that it has already started a production line before the end of clinical trials.

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Army Wants to Install Facial Recognition, Video Analytics at Child Development Centers

The Army wants to use facial recognition and advanced machine learning algorithms to monitor kids at base Children Development Centers and plans to launch a pilot program at Fort Jackson in the near future.

Army contracting officers posted a solicitation to SAM.gov for a vendor capable of developing a facial recognition and video analytics system and integrating that with the Fort Jackson CDC’s closed-circuit television system.

If successful, the system will be used for “monitoring the health and well-being of children in the CDC,” according to the performance work statement.

“The use of close-circuit television video-recording is common in CDCs for security purposes, however these feeds are not continually monitored during all hours of operation in live time,” the solicitation notes. “Instead, CDC staff log scheduled hours by watching the live video feeds periodically throughout the day for the mandated metrics.”

The center is hoping adding video analytics to the CCTV system will allow for continuous monitoring of students, “used as an addition to the human CCTV monitoring,” and capable of automatically alerting staff to situations as they arise.

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Moderna Wants to Transform the Body Into a Vaccine-Making Machine

Almost every antiviral vaccine ever sold works in a similar way: A dead or weakened virus, or a piece of one, is introduced into a healthy person. The weakened virus stimulates the immune system to generate antibodies, protecting the person when the real pathogen threatens to infect them.

Over the decades, this tried-and-true approach has vanquished polio, eradicated smallpox, and reined in chicken pox, measles, and mumps. But vaccine production has never been simple or fast. Many flu vaccines are still grown in chicken eggs. Newer approaches draw on genetic engineering to eliminate the need for whole viruses, but their viral proteins are still grown inside live cells.

The coronavirus vaccines from Moderna Inc., in Cambridge, Mass., and its German rival BioNTech SE propose to immunize people in a radically different way: by harnessing human cells to become miniature vaccine factories in their own right. Instead of virus proteins, the vaccines contain genetic instructions that prompt the body to produce them. Those instructions are carried via messenger RNA, or mRNA.

Moderna’s mRNA-1273 consists of a strand of mRNA that tells the body to produce the spike protein the coronavirus uses to latch onto human cells. The strand is like one side of a zipper; the “teeth” are a sequence of chemical letters that cells read to produce the 1,273 amino acids that make up the spike protein. If the vaccine works as intended, the body will start producing the proteins soon after injection, prompting the immune system to react and build up protective antibodies against them.

The great advantages of mRNA vaccines are speed and flexibility. No finicky live cells or hard-to-handle viruses are needed, and the basic chemistry is straightforward. Moderna’s vaccine reached Phase I human trials on March 16, only 63 days after the company began developing it. And at 6:43 a.m. on July 27, the first volunteer in Moderna’s 30,000-person, final-stage efficacy trial in the U.S. received an injection. Less than 12 hours later, BioNTech and its partner, Pfizer Inc., said they, too, were beginning a late-stage trial, a study that will be conducted in the U.S., Brazil, and several other countries. They took advantage of mRNA’s rapid-response capability to create four slightly different vaccines, which they compared in initial trials before selecting the best one for large-scale testing.

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