Beware! Remember Thalidomide!
US President Donald Trump is hell-bent on pressurising medical researchers and doctors in the United States, to produce an ‘instant’ vaccine to immunize people against the COVID-19 Virus.
His own leading experts, such as Dr Anthony Fauci are resisting, insisting that proper and thorough tests should be done first, and safety, not big profits , nor Trump’s re- election, should be the priority.
The bitter lessons of the 1960’s drug, Thalidomide have been buried in rhetoric and politicisation of a medical, (not political) problem!
In the 1960s, a German pharmaceutical company sold a drug known as Thalidomide, as a treatment for pregnant women for a range of conditions including ‘morning sickness’ to sleeping difficulties. In the greed for profit, full scale testing of the drug, wasn’t done. It was not tested on pregnant women.
For women in 46 countries, mainly in Britain, France, Canada, Germany and even in the USA - (the countries where it was widely used), it became “the biggest man made medical disaster ever,” with over 10,000 children born with a range of severe deformities. Of the total number of people affected by the use of thalidomide during the mother’s pregnancy approximately 40 percent died.(Source-Wickipedia and the New York Times).Those who survived had limb, eye, urinary tract and heart defects. Many had deformed arms and legs.
The sale of Thalidomide in the United States was blocked in 1962 by the Food and Drug Administration pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey who later received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service.
The company paid some compensation later, but it is very likely that Thalidomide victims in the Third World countries received nothing at all!
Thalidomide is an example of why, where medicine is involved, caution and circumspection must take precedence over expediency. Under political pressure from an electioneering President in the United States, if a vaccine appears, ostensibly as a miracle cure for COVID-19, “Let the buyer beware!” - especially if sold by American/Western multinational pharmaceutical companies to the Third World.
They will prematurely sell their drugs to us without sufficient testing, and obtaining compensation from an American company is an impossibility!
Beware! Remember Thalidomide!