mandatory vaccination & the 1947 Nuremberg “medical ethics” Code

Much of the following is probably pertinent more to France than to other countries. This might well be due to the fact that there seems to be marginally more skepticism amongst the French towards Covideologies than in many other countries and that France has a marginally greater history of recent resistance to the state than many other countries.

On French TV recently a man critical of the propaganda moving towards making the vaccination programme compulsory mentioned the Nuremberg Code and was immediately shouted down, and prevented from speaking, by some ignorant journalists saying how dare he compare the current situation with the Nazis. What this guy was trying to talk about was the Nuremberg Code on medical ethics, dated 1947, and not the 1945-46 trial of Nazi leaders.

A few days later on the same channel a journalist and and an economist went ballistic, suggesting that those who haven’t been vaccinated should not have the same rights as those who have been, that they should be sequestrated and even sent to prison. Meanwhile, France’s Minister of Health has threatened to contact all GPs to provide the Ministry with a list of all their patients who have not been vaccinated. So much for the Hippocratic Oath. Vaccinationavirus has clearly surpassed pandemic proportions. Even an apparently anti-state marxist – S.Artesian – is infected with it, advocating mandatory vaccination. This makes all of those infected with the Vaccinationavirus even worse than the Council of Europe that on 28th January this year at least said that there should be no social or professional discrimination against anyone refusing the available vaccines, though this clearly contradicts the introduction of France’s “passe sanitaire” – the “Health Passport”, increasingly being used for events such as concerts or other gatherings this society promotes endlessly as an apparent source of pleasure. Under the reign of the “health emergency” the state is obviously developing an unprecedented totalitarianism, not as crude as Nazism or Stalinism, but invading aspects of life that these archaic forms of capitalist social control hadn’t dared or even thought they could invade. The result is more a gulag of people’s critical capacity, the imprisonment of their ability to even marginally think and act for themselves rather than literal concentration camps. Those whom the state wish to destroy they first drive mad with confusion.

Much of these developments conflict – at least at a superficial level – with the 1947 Nuremberg Code. The court established in 1947 was American, without the participation of the three other powers who had been a party to the first Nuremberg trials in 1945. Previously, for example, in the second half of the 19th century hospital researchers in Lyon used abandoned orphans as guinea pigs without any misgivings. And in French Indochina Alexandre Yersin, one of the heads of the Pasteur Institute, inoculated the bacillus plague into Cochin-Chinese prisoners. About a year ago 2 high-ups in the state-run INSERM (France’s state organisation that tests and then allows or disallows medical products to be used by the general public) suggested that vaccines should be experimented with in Africa on Africans. They had to withdraw their comments a few days later after denunciations of racism but not on the basis of conflicting with the Nuremberg Code.

The code was intended to prohibit the type of medical experiments that had taken place in the Nazi camps. At least the most unsupportable ones because many of them were an integral part, from the end of the 18th century at least, of experimental medicine, including in the territory of modern nation states, such as the United States, and in their colonies. The Nuremberg Code presented Nazi medicine as the infamous exception to the general rule of medical ethics, the famous oath attributed to Hippocrates. A falsiﬁcation that misses out how defenders of the followers of Dr. Mengele^* at the trial occasionally reminded people of the experiments still being carried out at the time in the United States. Such as the Tuskegee Study, which allowed dozens of black sharecroppers to die from untreated syphilis. They gave them stuff such as hot meals etc. in exchange for being guinea pigs. Similar things are happening now in places such as Israel: for example, municipalities are giving away treats for children such as ice-cream, movie tickets etc. with posters, designed to look like it’s all a bit of fun, inviting and encouraging them to be vaccinated.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, during an outbreak of hepatitis Dr. Saul Krugman deliberately infected healthy children at Willowbrook School for the “mentally retarded”, New York, with the hepatitis virus reasoning “that it was justifiable to inoculate retarded children at Willowbrook with hepatitis virus because most of them would get hepatitis anyway”. Similarly, between 1951 and 1974 Dr. Albert Kligman subjected nearly a thousand inmates of Holmsburg Prison, Pennsylvania, to toxic chemicals in order to see how skin reacted to them. He said “All I saw before me were acres of skin…It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” An example of how objective bourgeois science is: it sees people as objects, as mere acres of skin, as things. The thing is, people aren’t. And anyone with a bit of sense would see that the current vaccination programme is similar to these previous forms of functionalising people, and that its “one-size-fits-all” methods and mentality are utterly and dangerously indifferent to differences, that as guinea pigs they are being merely used as a means to an end totally out of their control, to the profit of capital. And acceptance of this logic makes individuals incapable of seeing, or even wanting to see, whether vaccination is pertinent for them or not, let alone capable of informing themselves of potential risks and/or benefits.

The Nuremberg Code stated that “some types of medical experiments on human beings, when they are inscribed within reasonably well-defined limits, conform to the ethics of the medical profession in general”. The judges justified their positions “on the basis that such experiences produce results for the good of society, which are impossible to obtain by other methods or means of study” [ⁱ]. In addition, the code specified that such rules of ethics only applied to “the territory of the States concerned”. This amounted to authorizing the said States to continue to use the territories they controlled around the world, beginning with their colonies, as fields for medical experimentation.

From such rules of commercial morality, all that was left was to quantify, as closely as possible, the degree of suffering acceptable and accepted in the name of “the progress of the human condition”. This is why the judges accepted the very idea of hierarchically-directed human experimentation, not to mention animal experimentation which obviously did not pose any problem of conscience. They laid down “the fundamental principles” to be observed “in order to respond to moral, ethical and legal concepts”, namely: “The experiment must be based on the voluntary and enlightened consent of the human subject” … “The experiment should be conducted in such a way that all unnecessary suffering and all physical and mental harm is avoided” … “The level of risks to be taken should never exceed that of the humanitarian importance of the problem which the experiment should solve”, etc. Given that the notion of “humanitarian importance” in the context of conventional, and conventionally uncritical, medical practice is that of the state and capital, the Nuremberg Code left the door open to a lot of experiments, in laboratories and elsewhere, carried out by the wo/men in white coats and de facto contrary to the tables of bioethics law that were supposed to sanction it. As Guy Vallancien, Professor at the Descartes University, Paris, and a member of the Society of Predictive and Personalised Medicine, declared at a congress in 2016, in Montpellier: “Ethics are only the mirror of the evolution of a society, it comes after, it is not the spearhead. If we put it before cold and amoral science, we would stop everything.”

In addition, the notion of “informed and voluntary consent of the subject”, posed in terms of formalistic legal terms, evades de facto that of the content. Firstly, even though the tests were, and remain, carried out by experimenters who underline its uncertain and even sometimes dangerous character, how can human guinea pigs grasp their nuances, modalities and consequences? They can only do so in vague probabilistic terms. Ultimately, most people, lacking any intricate knowledge, can only take medical knowledge at its word. Because where there are so-called subjects, there are also masters. The conventions that followed Nuremberg, such as that of Helsinki in 1964, only refined the Code further and insisted, at a formal level, on taking into account “exceptions”, in particular those concerning “voluntary consent” by introducing the idea that the experiment could be accepted by those legally responsible for the human guinea pigs, such as minors, sick or not, or those incapable of making decisions for themselves! [ⁱⁱ] We can see in the current epoch a development from using those at the margins or bottom of “polite society”‘s hierarchy (orphans, prostitutes, the mentally retarded, prisoners, etc.) as guinea pigs to using the whole population as guinea pigs^**. That’s progress!

It is clear that the fear of dying, sometimes for people on borrowed time, often plays the role of the decisive factor in the acceptance of the proposals of the experimenters and the rules of bioethics which are supposed to frame their actions. This, in the current situation, despite the chances of the vaccine hastening the death of people with a short life expectancy, something which is kept largely unspoken of in the dominant media [ⁱⁱⁱ]. “Of all the passions, fear is the one that most assures submission to laws”, as Thomas Hobbes affirmed in Leviathan [^iv]. In normal, pre-Covid circumstances, individuals tested by laboratories are, as a rule, paid, which in France is legal, at least outside the hospital setting. Which explains why they have been from the poorest sections of the population. In the current Covid epoch nobody is paid – the world is a costless risk-free laboratory for the pharmaceutical companies (the various states, rather than the companies themselves, cover any potential cost of legal compensation for “adverse effects” such as death, though unscientific and purely anecdotal evidence suggests that compensation for death has not been much genuine compensation for the victim).

Aspects of all this is being made abundantly clear in the current vaccination programme, for which the 3^rd stage of the trial has not been restricted to, say, 30,000 volunteers but has been spread to the whole world. In fact, the 3^rd stage officially doesn’t end until 2022 for some of the vaccines and 2023 for others. Moreover, in extending the gap between first dose and the second from 3 weeks to 3 months, and in allowing different vaccines for the 2^nd dose from the 1^st one (eg Moderna for the first, Pfizer for the 2^nd), the powers-that-be are using the world as its laboratory in ways that even go against a scientific protocol that is already suspect. And Pfizer has also gone against its own protocol in giving the vaccine to psychologically vulnerable children.

The notion of “informed consent” is now a sick joke: 99.9% of information is that which the state and capital permits. This is especially so given the current rampant censorship on Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo and elsewhere. And the rest of the 0.1% is automatically parodied as “conspiracy theory” or “anti-vaxxer”, regardless of whether it fits into these categories or not.

This French text says that France’s “Minister of Health, in a letter to the President of the CNOM [Conseil National de l’Ordre des Médecins – National Council of the Order of Doctors], relieves doctors of the responsibility to inform patients of the risks of vaccination. I quote: “Doctors cannot be held liable on the grounds that they have provided insufficient information to patients about adverse effects unknown at the time of vaccination”. What are we to think of doctors’ knowledge on the subject, when they are only entitled to one source of information, the official one, any other being vilified or censored. The official information? That of the only laboratories already multiply condemned for having hidden side effects in other cases. Moreover, the information is watered down by the authorities. An example: the messenger RNA remains in the deltoid muscle, according to Inserm and the authorities. What did Pfizer and Moderna write in their studies that the authorities did not mention? “We found elements of the vaccine in all organs, including reproductive ones”. So how “informed” is consent? When a vaccinator tells patients that vaccines are safe, made like others from attenuated viruses, is the person in charge who must enlighten others well informed? Our Minister, the same one, has just threatened to make vaccination compulsory for carers in nursing homes if they do not vaccinate more. In “informed consent”, there is the word “consent”. What is consent under threat, under blackmail? Is it consent? Moreover, what scientific and medical justification is there for this blackmail when 90% of the residents are vaccinated and therefore protected? (Remember that the vaccine is 98% effective…). Are we in the spirit of the Nuremberg Code? It specifies in its first article that: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person concerned must have the legal capacity to consent; that he or she must be placed in a position to exercise free choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, coercion, trickery, deception or other underhand forms of constraint or coercion.” In the above-mentioned letter, the Minister also talks about compensation for victims of the CVI vaccine. Usually, it is the laboratory that is responsible for the consequences of what it markets, so it is careful before launching its product on the market. In this case, the state has entered into a contract with the laboratories, “taking responsibility” for liability and compensation for any consequences. The laboratories therefore have fewer precautions to respect, their portfolio will not suffer in case of shortcomings. They have already been fined billions of euros in recent years for withholding information and defects, but this does not prevent our authorities from not only trusting them with their eyes closed, but also from relieving them of their responsibilities.”

Some of this article comes from “Des souris et des gènes” (“Of mice and genes”) by André Dréan, though the wording is entirely mine.

In Galicia in Spain vaccines have become compulsory; fines of up to 60,000 euros for non-compliance. More here

And Indonesia has threatened 1 year in prison plus a $7,000 fine for those who don’t get vaccinated

Google translate:

“ While in most countries of the world the criterion for receiving corona vaccines is old age or background diseases, in Indonesia these days the picture is the opposite. The huge country, which has a population of 267 million people on a vast area of thousands of islands, has decided that one of the first groups in line for vaccines will be … everyone over the age of 18 to 59. The rationale behind this approach is that this group is the “engine” of the corona plague – many asymptomatic patients, who have multiple social connections …36,000 residents have died so far in the epidemic in Indonesia, out of 1.3 million residents infected with Corona. As in Europe, in Indonesia the second wave recorded during December-January was much larger than that recorded at the beginning of the epidemic, but morbidity has been declining in recent weeks. Indonesia has acquired most of its vaccines from China, which was the first country to develop a vaccine for corona, although it has not yet been approved for use by medical authorities in the West. The vaccine was developed by SinoVac and is widely used in China itself. The vaccination campaign in Indonesia began on January 13, and since then aims to vaccinate about 1.3 million health care workers as well as a group of police officers, public servants, teachers, athletes, journalists and more (estimated at 17 million people). Everyone will get the vaccine for free, subsidized by the authorities. But one of the significant differences compared to other countries is that the vaccine is defined as “mandatory”, although it is not yet clear what sanctions will be imposed on those who do not get vaccinated. A government minister said the penalty to be fixed by law for those who do not get vaccinated is a year in prison and a $ 7,000 fine, but the government still needs to offer the vaccine in adequate quantities to make sure residents get the chance to get vaccinated. Amnesty International has criticized the government’s statements, saying the vaccination was “contrary to human rights”. … it is possible that in the coming weeks young people and adults without background diseases are also expected to start receiving the vaccines. This group numbers about 150 million people, and the country hopes to end their vaccinations by the end of 2021. Vaccinate first those who are important to the economy … Critics said the government decided to do so in an attempt to preserve the economy by first vaccinating the most efficient, working-age workers.”

Footnotes

* In January 1937, the same year he joined the Nazi party, Mengele joined the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, where he worked for Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a German geneticist with a particular interest in researching twins. Mengele focused on the genetic factors that result in a cleft lip and palate, or a cleft chin. His thesis on the subject earned him a cum laude doctorate in medicine (MD) from the University of Frankfurt in 1938, the same year he joined the SS. It’s generally thought, in the scientific world, that Mengele’s published works were in keeping with the scientific mainstream of the time, and would probably have been viewed as valid scientific efforts even outside Nazi Germany. Why mention this? Because there are some people who think that accuracy and correct evidence-based papers are the essential criteria for judging science, and the practical uses of such ideas are something separate.

i Here they affirmed the classic ideology of Benthamite utilitarianism, taking as their criteria the morality and legislation of “the happiness of the greatest number”, even if this means, in case of “necessity”, the misfortune inflicted on the “smallest number possible”. He claimed to be able to calculate the ratio between joys and penalties from the perspective of statisticians (like Petty), the combination of individual interests resulting in the common interest of society, and therefore that of the State.

ii For example, current experiments in stem cell therapy on toddlers, or experiments presented as their prerequisites, with the sometimes enormous risks that they involve, are tolerated and even encouraged within such a code.

** It’s worth pointing out that arbitrary sections of the population – not just those at the bottom of the hierarchy – have secretly been subject at times to experimentation, though not on such a grand scale, nor openly and publicly. Although not directly related to medical science at all, Operation LAC in the 1950s, involved the US military spraying whole ares of the USA (and even Britain) with Zinc cadmium sulfide, whose long-term or repeated exposures have harmful effects on the kidneys, bones, and respiratory tract, resulting in kidney impairment, osteoporosis, and chronic inflammation of the respiratory tract. This was done to test dispersal patterns and the geographic range of chemical or biological weapons. Means and ends in perfect harmony!

iii https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1372 “People with a very short life expectancy have little to gain from being vaccinated…, noting a genuine risk that the time of death will be brought forward and that they will experience adverse reactions to the vaccine in the last days of their life. The benefits of vaccination for very frail people with very short life expectancy should therefore be carefully assessed against the associated risks, and it may often be better not to vaccinate”. Despite this, it seems that the part of the Nuremberg code which says “Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death” is mostly being ignored.

ivLeviathan , published in 1651, the year the radical tendencies (to which Hobbes was totally hostile) in the English Civil War were crushed. Hobbes defined the bases of the sovereignty of the modern state, born out of the counter-revolution.

***

The following extracts from a paper written by K, is also relevant given the context of a critique of the separation between ethics and science, even though this does not refer to medical science:

“By the late 1800’s, declining soil fertility in Europe drove both scientific research and imperialist land grabs. The search for a means of chemically fixing atmospheric Nitrogen, the main component of what would become Ammonia based fertilizer, was the holy grail of modern Chemistry. The process which broke the deadlock, and which is still in use today, was named the Haber-Bosch process after the two men who created and refined it. The former, Frtiz Haber, invented the laboratory-based method and the latter, Carl Bosch, was responsible for its engineering on an industrial scale. Both men were employees of the German chemicals company Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik, or BASF.

Within the first two years of the longer-than-expected war with France and Russia, the Deutches Heer was in desperate need of both food and munitions due to the Entente’s naval blockade of German ports. By increasing the productivity of domestic German agriculture and supplying a ready source of the Nitric Acid used in explosives, the Haber-Bosch process provided for both necessities and considerably prolonged the war. In 1932, Carl Bosch reflected, “I have often asked myself whether it would have been better if we had not succeeded. The war perhaps would have ended sooner with less misery and on better terms. Gentlemen, these questions are all useless. Progress in science and technology cannot be stopped” (Hayes 356). Not only was Bosch’s work directly responsible for the massive death toll, the shell shocked and amputated generation which resulted from the first war, but for Bosch these outcomes were of secondary importance to the progress of technology. Bosch’s motivations and intentions can be described solely in terms of scientific development, industrial and commercial efficiency, and managerial efficacy. …

Bosch’s complicity in the horror of war does not end there. Due to his success with Ammonia synthesis Bosch was promoted to chairman of BASF. His ambitions in the service of progress would lead him to play an instrumental role in the creation of the world’s first iteration of the military-industrial complex, and the largest chemical company of its time, the German conglomerate IG Farben. Under Bosch’s leadership, IG Farben developed Coal Hydrogenation, a chemical process for synthesizing gasoline similar in nature to Ammonia synthesis, as well as the means of producing synthetic rubber. …

Before the armament of the German war machine, before the industrial planning behind occupations in the Ukraine and France, before the development, production and sale of Zyklon B to the Schutzstaffel or the construction of a synthetic rubber factory next to Auschwitz, IG Farben executives Carl Bosch and his protégé Carl Krauch were intimately familiar with death and destruction. In 1921, an explosion of the BASF/IG Farben chemicals plant at Oppau killed 561, wounded 2000, and left 7,000 homeless (Hayes 358). Under the direction of Krauch, the plant was restored to full production capacity in three months’ time. This prefigurative insensitivity to the human costs of industry pales in comparison to the efficient slaughter of the holocaust. Additionally, after the incident at Oppau there was no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials to assign blame and hang the judged. And yet, this more socially acceptable collateral damage of progress exposes the moral vapidity of Bosch’s justifications precisely because of its inherency to industrial production. If progress cannot be stopped, then the pile of bodies in front of and behind it must not be accounted for.

After the conclusion of the second war, IG Farben was broken up into its constituent parts including BASF and its pharmaceutical equivalent, Bayer [^v]. The global center of Ammonia synthesis moved from Germany to a former forced subsidiary of IG Farben, the Norwegian company and BASF competitor Norsk Hydro. Today, Norsk Hydro is known to the world as YARA and its North American operations produce more synthetic ammonia than any other company on the planet. Bayer, the former chemical weapons manufacturer, heroin distributor, and co-founder of IG Farben, currently owns Monsanto and is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies. The scientific, industrial, and even corporate legacy of the Haber-Bosch process lives on.

While some scholars argue for the impossibility of feeding the world’s current and projected population without the chemical synthesis of Ammonia (Smil), others warn of its compounding detrimental effects which contribute to the existential crisis of an economy and way of life based on industry and petrochemicals. The continued concentration of Nitrogen in our soil and water creates toxic, abiotic conditions, and the release of Nitrous Oxide through the denitrification of Ammonia contributes to the greenhouse effect (Duke), to say nothing of the carbon dioxide produced during the synthesis process. In addition, the improper application of anhydrous ammonia, a common form of ammonia fertilizer, can result in evaporation leading to more pollution, seed destruction, skin blistering and lung tissue damage. In light of these facts, not even the increased food production associated with Bosch’s work can be judged as historically neutral. Here we have yet another outcome, the weight of which buries the intentions of its authors and traps our imaginations between mass starvation and inevitable environmental collapse. A dissection of the arguments around the false choices of petrochemical based industrial agriculture is the subject of its own essay, but the partisan role of corporate propagandists in the public conversation is central to this one.

…Monsanto promotes itself, not as a complicit harbinger of the end of the world, but as a source of life-giving nourishment whose products are necessary in a world with an ever-increasing human population. Contrary to this public relations presentation, in 2019, Monsanto was sued in civil court for, among other things, manipulating the scientific publishing process, colluding with government regulators, and infiltrating media outlets. In an incident which calls to mind Bernays’s infamous subversion of the suffragist movement with his “torches of freedom” media stunt (Century), Monsanto paid fake reporters to spread misinformation to real reporters and thus conscript legitimate media outlets in their propaganda war (Gillam). Never mind that Monsanto products, just like cigarettes, cause cancer. … a scientific pursuit which enabled war and genocide in the last century threatens the basis of life itself in the next.

The Nuremberg trials did not ultimately convict the German executives of IG Farben for their role in the holocaust. The massive quantities of an odorless particulate marketed as pesticide and sold to the Nazi bureaucracy were insufficient to justify a hanging (Jessbenger). The purported use for the pesticide was the maintenance of Jewish ghettos with their cramped conditions. At Nuremberg, this intention was judged as somehow less intrinsic to the outcome of the genocidal process than the gassing itself. It would seem that the authors of Allied military justice agreed with Bernays, unsurprisingly, more than Marx. In yet another noteworthy contortion of history, the patent for Zyklon B was held by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH (“German Corporation for Pest Control”), or Degesch for short. Degesch being controlled by IG Farben and its parent company Degussa, which in turn was chaired by none other than Nobel laureate and German nationalist Jew, Fritz Haber. Haber notoriously attempted to create gold from seawater in order to pay German reparations for the first war. This modern alchemy was an ultimately unworkable proposition, the improbability of which is tempered by Haber’s equally ambitious success in creating explosives from thin air. Haber’s former collaborator Carl Bosch escaped the judgment of tribunals altogether, dying in obscurity of alcoholism and ill health in 1940. One of Bosch’s contemporaries and fellow IG Farben board members, NSDP party member Fritz ter Meer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_ter_Meer), was sentenced to a mere seven year’s imprisonment and upon his release was re-elected as chairman of Bayer.

Nuremberg raised the question of individual responsibility for social crimes and its utilitarian answers favored the likes of Meer and NASA’s Wernher von Braun. Significant numbers of its trials ended in acquittal and shockingly brief sentences. The rising authoritarianism, mass dislocation, hunger, disease and global conflict suggested by our continued non-responsive orientation to the degradation and collapse of our biosphere provides a parallel that meets the epic tragedies of the world wars in terms of scale if not in terms of historical judgement. Will future generations convene their own tribunals? Will they find any use for the technocrats and organizers of industrial death? Or will they decide to finally halt our steady forward march over the edge of a cliff? Only time will tell, but the isolation of intention from outcome demonstrated by previous generations has surely met its expiration date as a useful measurement of responsibility and value. Indeed, the critical examination of what we produce and how we produce it is a task to be undertaken with utmost urgency.”