Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Dunedan
Then of course you have the wonders of Thalidomide, which the FDA said was safe, and Gulf War Syndrome, which is now all but officially acknowledged as having been caused by using American soldiers and marines as guinea-pigs to test dangerous cocktails of various vaccines and other drugs. Add into this the apparent wide-ranging and quite Orwellian suppression of dissent, falsification and massaging of data, destruction of data, and obstruction of investigation and transparence at East Anglia, and you can see why people may have a hard time trusting scientists.
My take on it is not that science itself is being rejected, far from it. What's being rejected is intransparent, politicized, "do what we tell you because we're smarter than you, and don't you DARE ask for explanations when something doesn't make sense!" attitude which has crept into science over the last 50 or so years, ever since DARPA and the Manhattan Project made science a Gov't-sponsored growth industry. People are tired of being condescended to, lied to, and ordered around by people who are either unaware of or simply don't care about the effects these edicts have on people out in the wider world.
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Just a little correction on this about thalidomide. The FDA rejected the approval of thalidomide in the US, saving hundreds and thousands of babies.
From Wikipedia:
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, more than 10,000 children in 46 countries were born with deformities such as phocomelia, as a consequence of thalidomide use.[11] The Australian obstetrician William McBride and the German pediatrician Widukind Lenz suspected a link between birth defects and the drug, and this was proved by Lenz in 1961.[12][13] McBride was later awarded a number of honours including a medal and prize money by the prestigious L'Institut de la Vie in Paris.[14]
In the United Kingdom the drug was licensed in 1958 and, of the babies born with defects, 456 survived. The drug was withdrawn in 1961 but it was not until 1968, after a long campaign by The Sunday Times newspaper, that a compensation settlement for the UK victims was reached with Distillers Company Limited.[15][16] In Germany approximately 2,500 thalidomide babies were born.[13]
1962: FDA inspector Frances Oldham Kelsey receives an award from President John F. Kennedy for blocking sale of Thalidomide in the United StatesThe impact in the United States was minimized when pharmacologist and M.D. Frances Oldham Kelsey refused Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for an application from Richardson Merrell to market thalidomide, saying more study was needed. Richardson Merrell gave the tablets to doctors on the understanding that the drug was still under investigation. Seventeen children were born in the U.S. with the defects.[11]
In 1962, the United States Congress enacted laws requiring tests for safety during pregnancy before a drug can receive approval for sale in the U.S.[17] Other countries enacted similar legislation, and thalidomide was not prescribed or sold for decades