In England, about 100 people have been inoculated with an experimental malaria vaccine in two clinical trials. Now, they no longer have access to the clinical trial staff if that vaccine were to cause an adverse reaction in their bodies.
If this isn’t a crime, it really ought to be as a violation of duty of care. It should not be possible to cut funding to trials like this mid-way and endanger the health and/or lives of the participants.
If there’s no one to enforce the law, then what is a crime?
It is literally a violation of international law
[The Declaration of Helsinki, a decades-old set of ethical principles for medical research that American institutions and others throughout the world have endorsed, lays out ethical guidelines under which medical research should be conducted, requiring that researchers care for participants throughout a trial, and report the results of their findings to the communities where trials were conducted.]
Thanks, but I’m not actually sure that the Declaration of Helsinki is legally enforceable. I’ve just skimmed through some search results and it sounds like this is mainly guidance with the moral imperative placed upon those running the trials.
[where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection…Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the agency is wasteful and advances a liberal agenda]
Marco Rubio thinks that a research study to prevent pregnancy and HIV “advances a liberal agenda”. This must mean the conservative agenda is to cause more pregnancies and HIV infections. Why didn’t the GOP tell people their new agenda before the elections?
Why didn’t the GOP tell people their new agenda before the elections?
They did, and they still won
Nope. They pulled a bait and switch. People thought they were voting against illegal immigration, not a new Department of Government Enshitification to massively degrade the quality of government. The only thing that happened on immigration was a one day stunt that arrested some US citizens. If it was easy to catch illegal aliens than Biden would have already done it. So we knew immigration was a bait and switch for something completely different, we just didn’t know what.
The ethical implosion here is staggering. Cutting off trials mid-stream isn’t policy—it’s human experimentation without accountability. Thousands left with untested devices in their bodies, abandoned like lab rats after the funding tap shuts off. This isn’t governance; it’s malpractice dressed as austerity.
Remember apartheid’s horrors? Colonial medicine’s ghosts just got a fresh coat of red tape. Trust built over decades incinerated overnight because some bureaucrat decided “wasteful” meant “saving lives.” The real virus here is the rot in systems that treat people as disposable. Democracy’s corpse twitches while trials collapse, proving once again that power cares more about optics than oxygen.
Jesus…
Millions of people are going to start dying due to the abrupt cessation of USAID resources around the word, access to safe food, clean water, medication, one day rigidly and faithfully dispensed, simply ended without warning. The death toll from this will be astronomical.
