AND YET IF YOU EXPOSED A SIMILAR PUBLIC HEALTH SCANDAL TODAY YOU’D BE ACCUSED OF “SPREADING MISINFORMATION” AND CENSORED: 50 years on, the lessons of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study still reverberate.

I can’t imagine why anyone would distrust the noble public health physicians: “The Tuskegee study was not the only ethically egregious STD study conducted during this troubling period. Between 1946 and 1948, Cutler was also involved in experiments that deliberately infected Guatemalan people with syphilis and gonorrhea and then treated them to test the efficacy of those treatments. This was initially done by having prisoners sleep with infected prostitutes, but the transmission rate wasn’t high enough. So the researchers began artificially inoculating Guatemalan soldiers, psychiatric inmates, and children in orphanages with the disease. (The notebooks contain graphic accounts of pulling back the foreskin of a subject’s penis and forcefully rolling a contaminated swab over the exposed area, among other methods.)”