In those years and the following, I tried to talk to people about what we were doing to the Dixwell Avenue community. No one cared. It wasn’t them. The victims were impoverished and with no social value.
I was also young and naive, and often broaching the subject with knowledgeable and experienced medical professionals from Yale who I knew socially. I approached them about it because I believed they would be the ones to follow their Hippocratic oath and they had the internal access to stop the unfolding atrocity. I didn’t know that this type of research was common in the United States and they were probably more than aware of it already, especially when working for a prominent research hospital. It wouldn’t have been a shock to them like it was to me. Even I, despite my experiences, had fallen for the false lull of comfort that comes with the 50-year classification of unethical medical research within the country.
From my conversations with the Yale medical staff and others, I began to realize it was possible that the people I was speaking to only cared if they were personally the victims, so I tried to appeal to that reasoning. I attempted an appeal to educated logic and explained that Yale research generally gets used by government, companies, and major organizations because it is authoritative and high quality, and thus, the unethical practices would eventually be used on the larger population, including the people I was speaking to. I didn’t know why those words had no effect. I figured that maybe they thought they would only receive positive benefits from the research done at the expense of other human lives. As if humanity is not interconnected at all.
I didn’t fully comprehend that this wasn’t the first time in recent history that U.S. medical researchers, often at the government’s behest, had given diseases to the impoverished and socially unwanted while lying to them and claiming to be there for their benefit.
What was going on in front of me in the 1980s and 90s was simply an echo from a not-so-distant past:
Image Source: International Journal of Maternal and Child Health and AIDS
“Between 1950s and 1972, children with mental disabilities at a State School in Willowbrook, Staten Island, New York, USA were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis in an unethical experimental quest to help discover vaccines.
In 1963, Dr. Chester Southam, another clinical researcher, injected live cancer cells to 22 elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, USA (without their knowledge or consent)… in an unethical bid to understand how the human body fights off malignant cells.
Perhaps, the most celebrated of these unethical studies was the infamous 1932 ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.’ …In this study sponsored by a government public health agency, researchers informed black men that they were receiving treatment for Syphilis—which was not true.
…By no means, limited to developed countries. In 1996, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer paid out thousands of dollars in compensation for conducting a Trovan study on children in Nigeria that raised fundamental issues around ethics and corruption in clinical trials.”
Text Source: International Journal of Maternal and Child Health and AIDS
I wouldn’t find out about how extensive that recent and continuing dark practice was until decades later when looking further into the subject. However, the experts at Yale clearly knew.
In a later interview (in this case about using abandoned and orphaned children in state care in the 1960s, rather than impoverished black communities too poor to relocate in the 1980s), a medical history professor at Yale let on how common the unethical and callous practices were when seeking research grants to experiment on the unwitting:
Image Source: CBS News
“’They were the raw material of medical research,’ says Susan Lederer, who teaches medical history at Yale University. She was a member of the presidential committee that investigated the radiation experiments, and she says she wasn’t shocked by the findings because researchers have been using disabled children in experiments for over a century.
‘Children in orphanages, children in homes of the mentally retarded, these are all good populations from the sense of medical research, because you have an easily accessible group of people living in controlled circumstances, and you can monitor them,’ says Lederer.
Lederer read the study that was conducted at Sonoma State Hospital, and says the children underwent painful experimentation ‘for which they received no direct benefit.’
…
Lederer says using captive populations meant big money for medical researchers: ‘It would even be an advantage in applying for grant money, because you don’t have to go to the problem of recruiting subjects.’”
Text Source: CBS News
They knew. The people at Yale knew how deceptive we were in our practices, in how we approached medical recruiting, and in how we exploited people while lying to them. And they did nothing to prevent it, even when they became recruitment targets for other purposes; and at Yale, in that CIA recruitment box, Yale students and staff absolutely were Intelligence recruitment targets, and it did not always go light on the manipulation or coercion.
Even despite that, they still could not see past their egos to understand that it was not only those with “no value” that our methodologies were being used on. It was those with “no value” whom we were experimenting on so that we could get the techniques correct before going after the ones with value – the larger population, those with money, those with land to steal, those with power, and everyone who ever thought they were “too necessary” to become a target.
But being necessary does make you a target. You have something an exploiter needs to control and an enemy needs to eliminate.
I still tried. Despite their egos and lack of compassion for others, I still tried to save them from what the medical experimentation would result in, by asking them to intervene before it got worse, before it expanded, before it reached them. You cannot say I didn’t try.
They simply were not interested. They did not realize the chains that were on others were the same ones on them as well. So, they did not remove the chains of the victims below them. They did not break the chains.
Their mindset is a large part of why we are where we are today, as I write this to you. The egotistical and unthoughtful mind often is.
So, with even less hope for humanity than I had previously, I spent more time hanging around George and the recruiter, blending into the background as they wove their way not just through grassroots organizations, but also through Yale’s campus and society. After all, they had both spent their university-age years on that campus. They were Yalies themselves. In those halls, in their Yale societies and away from prying eyes, that’s when I became introduced to the culture and mindset that were the money and power driving a lot of what we had been doing. Sometimes, I would join the conversation. Why wouldn’t I? I was there.
One time, when I was safe to speak behind closed doors, I asked about why some of the industry and academic planners there were reducing the ability of doctors to make truly patient-tailored diagnoses and treatments with thorough analysis. At that time, the standardization of medicine and education was producing a sharp decline in fine-tuned analytical and diagnostic skills. It was affecting more than one industry (and I was deeply concerned that we would lose the genius and detail of thought necessary to get our civilization out of a mess at a later date). However, medicine was the area that I felt would cause each of us the most personal damage, especially as the generations went on and the original knowledge became lost, further complicated by an increase in difficult-to-treat immune system dysregulation.
When we go to a physician, it’s often because we are damaged. The last thing we want or need in that moment is for them to damage us more, at least in my opinion.
Their response was disheartening, to say the least. The standardization was being done because, from a governance and management perspective, a standardized homogenous industry is much easier to manage and regulate. They wanted less work for themselves at the government, industry, and regulatory level. They also wanted fewer unexpected results and actions to contend with. In other words, they were lazy and afraid of competition. When I mentioned the problem of having to see a doctor who was less than ideally skilled, someone scoffed at me and said, “We have our own doctors.” Obviously, they could not comprehend that if you dumb down an entire society, eventually even your best doctors will be affected and their skills will be reduced. The less-honed skills and the (lack of) thought processes behind those will eventually seep into everything, including the Ivy League medical schools.
In the early years, it became obvious that the house of war criminals I was now a quasi-member of was exploiting the population so hard that entire nations were getting ready to collapse under the weight. Their thinking was that of a lazy drug-addicted predator accustomed to being served everything on a silver tray. I would attempt to reason with them and mention that you cannot take someone for 100% of their profits and expect them to still keep producing and giving to you year after year. They didn’t believe me. Every person and group they got their hooks into, they would eventually take for everything. When willing to tell me why, one of them stated something along the lines of, “They’ve always managed with nothing, so they’ll keep managing with nothing.”
That statement alone had so many flaws that I didn’t even have a response. I would have had to throw out any faith in their understanding and start at the beginning, much like what I’m doing with this book. If it feels like I’m overexplaining things, you can blame them. The way I see it, if the pros in charge can’t understand something as simple as why stealing someone’s food will result in them not being able to work, why would the people who “voted them in” and put them in charge understand the bare bones of how things function?
Back then, before I was aware that a larger population outside of the Ivory Towers even really existed, I was arguing for the sustainability of the recruiter’s Yale alumni cohort’s criminal enterprise atop government. I was trying to save them, the same as I’ve tried to save myself, the same as I’ve tried to save you. As it turns out, I’m a failure when it comes to reasoning with addicts and those who like life to be easy. They were too high on their own egos and Afghani heroin to care. Their victims were still happy to cling to the small comforts they were promised they could keep as long as they were well-behaved victims. And we were all heading for the cliff we’re now standing on.
They say knowledge makes people unhappy. This is why. Even back then, it was obvious that we were all heading for disaster while they were the nation’s and the globe’s chauffeurs.
As for the abundant failures of random politicians, media personalities, and others to fix the mess made by the war criminals and their thieving cohorts, the concept of some hero coming to the rescue was made by Hollywood, not reality. One person cannot save millions. It’s actually impossible. The physics of the model cannot conform to or function like that. Once they make waves, that one person is instantly swamped by all the predators who go for the peak prey – anyone with sway or access to power. There are no superheroes. Either we all pull our weight in not being bamboozled, or this ship sinks and that’s the end of it. And considering how many spineless nihilists we have these days, I’m not betting on survival. The odds are not in our favor. If they were, we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.
While my attempts to create some stability for myself, my world, and the world may have been paltry, the recruiter’s attempts at her own aims were not much better in some regards, although she definitely put a lot more funding and effort in. She still wasn’t happy about my level of obedience, so she started bringing in some of her buddies from research departments related to the ones she had been directly supervising. They “invited” me to become a more useful human being. By invited, I mean they showed up at the safehouse in the middle of the night, driving an ambulance.
I walked out to the ambulance with the recruiter. There was nothing wrong with me at all, but she assured a worried-looking neighbor that I was okay and just a little dizzy. I got into the back of the ambulance and they insisted on putting the oxygen mask on me. This trip happened several times. I remember because the usual man in the back of the ambulance was aware of my claustrophobic feeling of suffocating once the mask was on, and he was kind enough to always use a long rope of cotton along the edge of the mask to protect my skin and to create a small gap giving me the tiniest bit of ordinary air to breathe. When he didn’t and it was someone else, she abrasively put the mask on me directly. That resulted in my feeling panicked in the moment and with an acne outbreak around my mouth that went on for months after. The man had been right about the mask’s potential for creating skin irritation.
The oxygen wasn’t just oxygen. It knocked me out every time. On one occasion, I woke up in the clinic they had brought us to. I say us because I was not the only child there. There was a teenage boy I had met before. He was screaming down the hall as they hustled him out. He was screaming to change the meaning of the words. He kept repeating “knot the not” as they pushed him out the door.
My hospital bed in the clinic was behind a thin curtain. They kept the lights low and their voices hushed. All of the “patients” were sleeping. The medication made it impossible to move. We were kept immobile for what felt like weeks. I lost all sense of time. I’ve always fought anesthesia (a leftover from my survival instinct to fight the recruiter’s drugging), so my waking up despite the amount of drugs flowing into me via an IV was not unusual, not for me.
I woke up in agony. Because of the injuries to my spine that I’ve had since Argentina, being paralyzed on my back without the pillow being in the one position that’s actually comfortable for me caused every nerve in my body to scream and every muscle to seize up. I hurt so incredibly badly that all the anesthesia in the world would not have kept me sleeping. That’s when I became aware of the machine on my right. It was playing a recording over and over again, the same words, a command. It made me recall what the boy in the hall had said, “Knot the not.” Suddenly, his words made sense. The recording started with “I will not know.” I don’t remember the rest. Between the agony, going in and out of sleep, and my fighting to keep the words out of my head and change their meaning to make them ineffective, I simply didn’t allow them to take hold in my memory. I changed “I will not know” to “Eye will knot no.”
The pain, however, was still there. My right calf had become a solid knot and I couldn’t reach it to massage it. The hours continued to go by. I was fighting the words, I was fighting the drugs to stay awake so I could fight the words, and then I was in agony on top of everything. That’s when I went deep in my mind because it was the only thing I could control in the situation. I found that little pain switch in my head and I flicked it over from agony to ecstasy. That’s the moment I became a masochist. I’ve never been able to entirely flip that switch back to its original position. The result of that moment would be a disaster in my romantic relationships later on. It’s difficult to have a healthy dynamic when you require a sadist in order to get off, but I digress. We haven’t hit my adulthood yet, and I’d definitely prefer to compartmentalize that, for obvious reasons. Let’s get back to 1980s New Haven for now…
At least I was allowed to escape via school and summer camp sometimes. One of the summer camps was located on a small island off the coast between New York and Connecticut. The buses would park in a large lot, and from there, we would take boats with our camp counselors to get to the jellyfish-surrounded island. The amount of jellyfish there was actually ludicrous. Each day, before we could swim, the counselors would have to remove over a hundred of them from our small designated swimming area. Part of the fun of camp was watching the captured jellyfish get dumped on the beach.
The camp had historical roots. I believe it was the first government-funded boy’s military camp in the United States. When I was there, I knew none of that. However, I was in the first group of girls to be in the camp. We were younger than everyone else and we didn’t have the proper attire because they simply had not made regulations for girls yet. We stuck out like sore thumbs. But it was camp and I enjoyed it for the most part. If something was too terrifying (I was afraid of heights and didn’t want to climb up to attempt to maneuver the ropes they had between trees), I would act scared and they would invariably let me skip out on an activity because I was a girl. By the second week, my activity schedule card was mostly full of swimming. They had given up on involving me in anything else other than camp-wide activities.
Image Source: Connecticut State Library (PDF automatically downloads)
“On 6 July, 1916, 1200 boys, eager and enthusiastic but without military training or discipline, entered the First Federal Military Training Camp for Boys, at Fort Terry on Plum Island.”
Text Source: Connecticut State Library (PDF automatically downloads)
The experience became comfortable with all of that sorted out, and I was enjoying my days. Unfortunately for me, I was still connected to the recruiter. Another girl and I both had “parents” who chose to send us to that camp because they had direct connections to the research lab on the other side of the island, now known as the U.S. Office of National Laboratories (ONL) Plum Island Animal Disease Center. We would sometimes be called to meet them at that lab when they were stopping by the island or if they needed to pick us up early for any reason. On those days, we would walk along a path from the beach and enter the lab from the side. As we walked along the left side of the building, on the dirt path, with the sounds of angry dogs (there was an ongoing rabies research project at the time) in their path-facing kennels snarling at us, our ankles were getting eaten alive by fleas.
In the moment, the fleas were simply an annoyance and the dogs were scary but relatively harmless (no one led us onto the hall where we would have had direct contact). However, in retrospect, I would like to note that biolab was funded by a government that supposedly has enough money to keep things professional, sanitary, and free from lab leaks. And yet, visitors and anyone who walked nearby were being bitten by the same fleas that were biting ill and rabies-heavy dogs. This is a lab being run by the same “professional government scientists” the public blindly trusts to keep them safe.
Image Source: US Department of Homeland Security
“Plum Island Animal Disease Center
Location: Orient Point, NY
Since 1954, the DHS S&T Office of National Laboratories (ONL) Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) has served as the nation’s premier defense against accidental or intentional introduction of transboundary animal diseases (a.k.a. foreign animal diseases).”
Text Source: US Department of Homeland Security
These “experts” are the ones the public has complete faith in to protect them from “accidental or intentional” contact with animal diseases, in addition to being happy to be lied to by them. These same experts who allowed children and scientists to be exposed to whatever transmittable diseases their actively rabid dogs may have had.
I have to say, I’m not shocked that many people believe that Plum Island is where the major tick-carried Lyme Disease outbreak came from. It’s geographically close enough to Lyme, Connecticut, and campers and scientists who spend time on that island bring ticks home, to Connecticut and New York, on their clothes every day. While I have some doubts regarding the validity of the overdone theories about the lab having created a new version of Lyme Disease in that time frame, I have to acknowledge that lab may have simply been housing one of the older strains and let it get into the wild. They had no effective safety protocols in place to prevent spread. In fact, their safety levels were so low, that I would call them an ideal starting point for uncontrolled spread of animal-human transmitted illnesses.
The government, its bureaucrats, its scientists, and its workers are not competent, honest, responsible, or mature enough to handle biological weapons to a high enough level to contain them, despite their outwardly impressive credentials, badges, and military brass that could be easily replaced by 1-cent gold-star-shaped stickers intended to reward a child for cleaning their room by shoving everything under the bed. They never have been responsible enough. This has been proven countless times.
The unspoken and yet standard policy of glossing over errors and blaming bureaucracy or unnecessary requirements is born from the level of deceit that appears to be a requirement for the majority of people in academic and professional circles if they wish to meet on-paper-only hiring requirements. The desire to attain a better paycheck and a higher title does not create a positive outcome when it comes to the sciences.
In fact, their need for personal gain above lab safety limits the likelihood that those in the labs and imposing the rules will have the actual scope or capability to have honest conversations about problem areas that need to be rectified. Instead, they bow to authority and the need for face-saving in order to maintain their pay, ranking, and status. In doing so, they gloss over problems and errors in a desperate attempt to appear professional and highly competent without ever attaining the same level of professionalism or competence that the gloss portrays. Their self-necessitated deceit causes them to intentionally error, rather than admit to errors. They pile disaster on top of disaster, thinking that somehow more lies will fix the very tangible problem of lab failures.
Biowarfare research protocols, when created and maintained within a deep-seated culture of deceit, simply cannot be attained at a level that will guarantee containment. Science requires honesty. So does containment. All it takes is one error for a mistake to become fatal. When you have twenty errors because the people and departments involved have additional motives other than pure science and containment, and are capable of using deception to hide the fact that they have given their other motives priority above safety, global fatalities become guaranteed.
Then the scientists go home and pray their errors don’t follow them. Even that, I’ve personally seen go wrong.
The recruiter worked with various labs and projects over the years. One was actually doing cancer research. And, due to lab contamination, she developed tumors up and down her spine when I was around ten years old. She spent the next year getting experimental treatments from that same lab (as far as I know, she talked about them but I never went with her for those) and also ingesting food-grade peroxide right in front of me, in small but seemingly frequent quantities diluted in beverages. When I asked why, she said it was because cancer needs an anaerobic environment to thrive. The more oxygen you push at it, the better your chance of survival. I’ve never tested that theory, myself. However, her tumors did eventually resolve due to some combination of what she had been doing.
On the subject of labs under the recruiter’s supervisorial domain, one lab from that same group was working on what may have been one of the surface projects funding and providing support and biological materials for the hidden research our tight-knit group of scientists from the dinner parties was doing with the AIDS virus. The lab in question’s stated research purpose was to enhance immune systems to increase chances of survival during nuclear and biological attacks. So, they did just enough research on immune system enhancement to make the project look legitimate for their funders. At around the same time, as referenced previously with documentation, the more blatant walking pneumonia/HIV hybrid research would be hidden in plain sight under the umbrella of vaccine research.
When I saw what was going on within that immune system enhancement project was when I first started to worry about everyone’s immediate safety. Not about a future time when things might snowball out of control, like I was with the AIDS research. Nope. In the case of the immune system research, I was already concerned for humanity then and there. The researchers decided that hormones were the key to unlocking the full potential of the human immune system. As a result of the hormones they altered to test that theory, every research subject of theirs that I met had developed overactive immune system dysfunction symptoms ranging from severe life-threatening allergies to full-blown lupus.
I wasn’t there to witness it as an assistant that time. I was one of the human numbers in the research subject pool. They had been short on participants and the recruiter volunteered me to fill one of the spots on the list. As a result, if you so much as sneezed near me, my immune system would go into overdrive and my skin would end up covered in a persistent sandpaper rash. I struggled with constant aching, dizziness, and an overactive immune system for decades after. It was not great for the self-esteem of someone prone to acne for life – every zit became swollen up to ten times the size it should have been, due to near-instant, sustained, and systemic inflammation that could only be halted with long courses of antibiotics. A doctor in Italy who was treating my skin later on told me that my hormone profile matched that of a teenager. I was forty when he told me that.
One time, while driving to a pharmaceutical company’s campus, the recruiter told me not to worry. She said that when she signed me into medical and pharmaceutical research programs, she always used her influence to make sure that I would be in the placebo group. At this point, it’s rather obvious that was a lie.
The only thing that makes me feel a little better about it all is that, in my fear of being seen as weak (I was convinced that the recruiter’s psychopathic instincts would go into overdrive if she knew how close to death I was and that it would lead her to finishing me off, so I always did my best to look okay even when I wasn’t), I may have skewed their early research some as a test subject. There’s a chance that their target market – the people who were happy to use unwitting test subjects to further their own survival – were being told the treatment was safe for them to use when it was not.
Actually, there is one other dark silver lining. The woman in charge of that particular lab, I can never remember her name. Maybe it was Jody. She wasn’t interested in keeping soldiers alive or finding cures for the bioweapons we were creating. It is very likely that she had been recruited from a university campus in the middle of the late 1960s to early 1970s psychedelic drug craze. Yes, she may have had the potential to be a brilliant scientist when she was in university, but by the time she graduated, she was full-on Age of Aquarius new-age mantra pie in the sky delusional about what could be achieved and how she would achieve it. The drugs and insanely unrealistic culture had altered her thoughts. She was misusing Department of Defense research funding to attempt what she was really interested in – finding the fountain of youth through science. She wanted immortality and felt she was “peak human” enough to find it. That’s all she ever actually worked on. It didn’t matter what a research proposal said or where her funding was coming from. Achieving a fountain of youth was all she was ever working on. When I met her, she was convinced hormones were the answer (my Italian dermatologist might half agree with her – after all, his aging patient did manage to retain the acne of a fifteen-year-old).
But enough about that portion of the ego-borne insanity. The reason I became concerned for all of us was because, shortly after witnessing the statistically very significant symptoms of allergies, lupus, and general overreactive immune system issues in the research subject group, I started noticing them popping up in the larger population and in new and unusually high amounts. It wasn’t just funders who were getting the treatment. Remember when groups of kids started getting peanut allergies around the same time? Giving a treatment to alter hormone levels to cause an immune system overreaction at the same time as administering a vaccine that included peanut oil (a vaccine ingredient at that time), wouldn’t just cause the same severe allergies and immune dysregulation the research pool was already seeing. It might actually cause even more.
I’m fairly certain, especially considering what lab I was standing in for that one, that the U.S. government was experimenting on its own people, possibly for what they believed to be genuine reasons and in the favor of the citizens for once.
This would have been done without the people’s consent, understanding of the side effects, or knowledge as to what was being hidden in the standard childhood vaccines they were permitting to be injected into their children with trust in the medical system and faith in pharmaceutical companies to produce quality products without something extra thrown in. Yes, the U.S. still uses its own population as test subjects. It never “stopped 50 years ago.” That’s just the 50-year classification rule doing its job of making sure all the victims are dead of old age and bad health before they can sue.
What was that line again, the one from Military Medical Ethics, Volume 2? Ah, right:
Image Source: U.S. Army Medical Center of Excellence
“The Atomic Energy Commission expanded the practice of maintaining secrecy to encompass public relations, especially the threat of ‘embarrassment’ and legal liability.”
Text Source: U.S. Army Medical Center of Excellence
Because the easiest victims to ignore and lie to, and about, are the injured ones. After all, the injured and disabled have so little value in society that they wouldn’t have enough of a voice even if the government weren’t burying them to save a few dollars. That’s just the sad truth about society. It’s a leftover from our herd instincts, back when we left the weak to be eaten by predators. Sadly, not much has actually changed despite our moving into the modern day of germ warfare and advanced weapons research. We still leave the weak to be eaten.
Unfortunately, in doing so in the modern context, we’ve set everyone up to become the weak. Is there any question as to why the predators among us have, in sensing weakness, now become brazen and emboldened enough to attack the population?
In addition to what I personally saw, there are too many prior examples of unethical research to go through them one by one, and the declassified published information on those within the United States almost all suddenly stops 50 or so years ago. The practice didn’t stop. I was there for several newer projects, and I’m not 50 quite yet.
Next: Entrenchment at Yale