The State Of Our English Language Untelligentsia 2020

If you had bothered to look at the link I provided, you would find that the article was not an ancient reference to a long-passed item of pop culture (as you no doubt saw it) but to a March 23rd, 2020  New York Times piece ABOUT THE RELEASE OF DOCUMENTS about the attempts by drug companies in the United States to convince judges to force the federal government to allow the sale of Thalidomide in the United States after it had been blocked.  I gave it as an example of the kind of pressure that the implementation of the Pure Food And Drug Act has been under all during its existence, in which those with financial interests have forced the permission of things that are supposed to be prevented by the Act. 

For those who aren't familiar with that sixty-year old story, which I remember as it was happening:

In July 1962, the Food and Drug Administration sent an urgent message to its field offices with an assignment it said was “one of the most important we have had in a long time.”

Overseas, thousands of babies in Germany, England and other countries were being born with severe defects tied to their mothers’ use of thalidomide, a drug widely taken for insomnia, morning sickness and other ailments.

Meanwhile, the federal government sought to figure out what had happened in the United States, and how many babies had been affected.

The drug was not approved in the United States in the 1960s, but as many as 20,000 Americans were given thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s as part of two clinical trials operated by the American drug makers Richardson-Merrell and Smith, Kline & French.

Here is the story of the F.D.A.’s investigation, told through a sampling of the more than 1,300 pages of documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

‘Great public interest’
On Aug. 1, 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued a warning: “Every woman in this country, I think, must be aware that it’s most important that they check their medicine cabinet and that they do not take this drug.”

I also remember that for some of the bigger assholes I went to school with, "Thalidomide babies" was the butt of lunchroom comedy, as were those who were retarded or otherwise disabled.  Which, I am less surprised than I'd have expected to be, apparently survives in assholes of that cohort who survive into their senior years.  I saved myself the trouble of rethinking the point by never thinking those guys were anything but assholes when I heard them in the late 50s and 60s.  They're still assholes. 

The reason I included the link was to prove my point about the possibility of money corrupting even a good law passed to regulate things and as an example of the impossibility of ensuring universal compliance with something that doesn't exist, a "world law" they can't even ensure that level of compliance with national laws. 

A pill treated as casually as aspirin

Federal inspectors uncovered evidence that thalidomide, which was to be sold under the brand name Kevadon, was passed among doctors and family members with seemingly little awareness that it was considered experimental in the United States. In this F.D.A. memo from August 1962, inspectors reported on two cases from North Carolina.

Although the names are redacted, the text is revealing: In one case, a doctor had been using thalidomide himself and prescribing it to his wife. In addition to the wife’s loss of vision, the doctor mentioned peripheral neuritis, nerve pain that is a side effect of thalidomide.

The other report is even more alarming — a nurse had given birth to a baby without arms or legs and, as a registered nurse, “she may have had access to the item.”

And how even those who certainly are aware of the law and the reasons for them can be as apt to violate them as those who would so so out of ignorance. 

The case against Richardson-Merrell intensifies
By September 1962, investigators were beginning to conclude that, even by the laxer standards of the day, Richardson-Merrell had illegally promoted thalidomide before it had been approved. That month, Dr. Ralph W. Weilerstein, an associate medical director at the F.D.A., reported on his impressions after visiting a division of Richardson-Merrell. (The F.D.A. also investigated Smith, Kline & French, which conducted a smaller trial, but concluded that the company had acted legally.)

Richardson-Merrell employed many of the same tactics that modern-day drug companies have used to promote their products, the memos show, including hiring influential doctors to vouch for thalidomide, as well as helping the researchers to write scientific articles, “almost to the extent of ghost writing for them,” Dr. Weilerstein wrote in an internal memo.

In his memo, he referred to the doctors who participated in the clinical trial as investigators.

One word, Oxycontin.  Another word, Sackler. 

The idea that the answer to preventing epidemic and pandemic zoonotic diseases is "regulating the shit" out of animal husbandry, which, as I pointed out, has probably more of a regional-economic means of corrupting the system than even the drug companies do, is, to put it in terms such people as I answered would understand, fucking stupid. 

It's even more fucking stupid for unversities and colleges to graduate people who don't even bother to look at citations and who then lie about what was said when they didn't read them.   But such is the state of the American and, as we are increasingly finding, the Brit untelligentsia.

My point isn't expecting that the human population is going to give up eating meat,  I said that was not going to happen.  My point is that is the terrible reality we face in trying to deal with this pandemic and others, almost certainly even worse, that will arise due to the eating of meat.  The best anyone can expect they could do about it is to not share in the blame for it when it happens, though they can't expect to escape the consequences.  In the meanwhile,  yeah, I do blame meat eaters for their part in this.