A monumental ethical issue is hovering over the entire medical establishment in the United States that threatens its integrity and trust. The human element is being removed from the equation, replaced by computers to give us our options, and legislation to remove our choice in medical care. Somewhere in the shuffle, the individual’s informed consent was broken down, lost in the paperwork, and made irrelevant.
Informed consent is the process by which the treating health care provider discloses appropriate information to their patient so that the patient may make a voluntary choice to accept or refuse treatment. It originates from the legal and ethical right that the patient has to direct what happens to their body, and from the ethical duty of the physician to involve the patient in their health care.
Concerning the current hot button area of vaccination in the United States, the patient is not given proper informed consent of side effects or the actual vaccine inserts to look at prior to injection. If they did receive the insert, they would quickly see the repeated words “there have been no controlled trials” and “safety and effectiveness have not been established.”
It is no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the public is the final phase of vaccine trials, and we are an uninformed participants. This practice immediately breaks most of the Nuremburg Principles/Code prohibiting medical research when there is even a remote possibility of injury, disability, or death.
To date, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out over 3 billion and counting for injury, disability, and death. This concept of you as the uninformed research subject also applies to genetically modified food, electromagnetic fields (EMF), and many pharmaceutical drugs. Only after adverse health effects are reported and lawsuits begin to pile up do corporations adjust their practices and products accordingly to protect their bottom line.
A key component of informed consent to participate in medical research is the understanding that research is not the same as treatment. When you receive a vaccine, do you believe to be aiding a pharmaceutical company’s product research or getting a therapeutic medical treatment? When research participants do not understand the difference between research and treatment, there exists a therapeutic misconception which undermines the informed consent process. Put another way, this therapeutic misconception exists when the participant does not understand that the defining purpose of the research they are a part of is to produce a body of general knowledge.
In 1986, President Ronald Regan passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, giving legal (and moral) immunity to pharmaceutical companies for any damages caused by their products. No matter what a public relations campaign aimed at you says, in the United States, the legal order of importance goes: vaccine manufacturer’s rights, acquiring general research knowledge, and then finally, your health.
Additional Sources:
Effectiveness of 2014 Flu Shot
Nuremburg Code
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