Banana Ethics

Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren

As Congress dithered on what to do about Tom DeLay, the United States sank to new lows on the ethics front. Americans love to point fingers at corruption in little countries we term “banana republics,” yet we ourselves are a dismal example of public ethics.

What do I mean by public ethics? Regardless of whether conservatives or liberals are running the country, there ought to be enough agreement on what’s wrong with an official or corporation for Congress to investigate without delay. Yet we have the spectacle of our highest legislative body arguing for months over whether to scrutinize DeLay.

Banana ethics has spread its gangrene deep into biomedical research. Over the last six months, Americans are confronted by growing revelations that corporations and government agencies often collude to hide toxicity of drugs and abuses of human subjects in clinical trials.

Ever since I began covering the AIDS political front in 1998, there have been muffled noises about the ethics of how some trials are conducted, both in the U.S. and developing countries. Americans are finally learning that (for example) a high NIH official rewrote the results of an AIDS drug trial in Uganda, in an effort to hide several deaths and toxic reactions to nevirapine. Some conscience-stricken government workers were harassed when they tried to bring these problems to public attention.

The most pathetic example of ethics rot: Officialdom stonewalled for well over a year before the Incarnation Children’s Center case finally got budged from media coverage to actual investigation.

Children are a knee-jerk issue in the U.S. Let a single child be murdered by a sex offender, and the whole country is baying like bloodhounds. Any prosecutor who knew the suspect’s identity, but delayed action for a whole year, would be strung up by the heels by an outraged public. But here is a case where hundreds of HIV-positive foster children in a Harlem group home might have been subjected to criminal abuse as research subjects of drug trials involving the NIH, the State of New York, the NYC child-welfare agency, big corporations, and prominent hospitals, with alleged suffering and possible deaths of some children. And investigation was delayed. And most of the public simply shrugged. Why? Because most people are brainwashed into believing that “the AIDS authorities know what they’re doing and no one should challenge them or question them.” Indeed, some individuals who did speak out about ICC are being labelled “AIDS dissenters.”

In January 2004, the ICC story first broke in Boston Dig and altheal.com, written by investigative reporter Liam Scheff. It leaped to the London Times, New York Post, other papers around the world, the AP, even a BBC special. According to charges filed by the Alliance for Human Research Protection, the ICC trials may have violated federal regulations, which restrict the research use of children who are wards of the state. As early as spring 2004, a few New York City council members were demanding investigation. Yet it took till April 2005 to get the investigation rolling.

Most of these ICC children were black and Latino, both infants and young teens. When the headlines of “guinea pig kids” hit the Post, I kept expecting to see news reports of widespread protests. Governments of big cities have learned the hard way that a single instance of police brutality against a kid of color can fill the streets with noisy demonstrators. But let the kids of color be “subjects of legitimate AIDS research,” and suddenly the protesters on the street in front of the ICC were ignored by officialdom.

Hopefully federal investigators will finally deal with these children’s real lives—their identities, their histories. How legitimate were the reasons that they were torn from their families and crammed into these experiments? If any died, will there be autopsies? Will the autopsy reports be made public?

A&U readers can study the many cases piling up on the Alliance for Human Research Protection’s Web site (www.ahrp.org). The same nation that jailed Martha Stewart for “lying to the feds” about a stock-market trade is—so far—letting corporate executives and government officials go unpunished for these crimes. We have finally met the banana republic, and it is us.

Author of fiction bestsellers and provocative commentary, Patricia Nell Warren has her writings archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at patriciawarren@aol.com.