Distrustful of authority, tonight's special guest, a Holocaust survivor became a fierce critic of THE medical establishment. She is one of the most effective and passionate - some would say extreme - advocates for the rights of medical research subjects in the US. She has exposed experiments testing HIV drugs on toddlers in New York's foster care system and helped scuttle government research that would have paid low-income Florida families $970 to test their children's exposure to household pesticides. She helped pressure the National Institutes of Mental Health to rewrite protocols on dozens of psychiatric studies to better protect patients. And her relentless advocacy was key to forcing US drug regulators to warn about the suicide risk that antidepressants pose to teenagers. For years, she sent out a near-daily barrage of emails to thousands of journalists, activists, and scientists accusing academic researchers, pharmaceutical executives, and drug regulators of manipulating research findings or failing to protect patients. Being a holocaust survivor gives her the unique perspective to identify the parallels we are seeing today. We still have time to remain free. If you want to know. Stay with us.
Mrs. Vera Sharav is a public advocate for human rights. Her odyssey as a child survivor, gave her insight about the consequences that follow when medicine marches in lockstep with government. That unholy alliance has led to the adoption of public health policies that violate the autonomy and human rights of individuals. Vera is the founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), whose mission is to uphold the humanitarian values and ethical standards of medicine and the universal human right to voluntary, informed consent to medical decision-making. The AHRP filed the only Amicus Curiae brief in support of the Maryland Court of Appeals decision against the Kennedy-Krieger/Johns Hopkins experiment that exposed African American toddlers to lead paint. Vera has testified before public policy advisory forums, including the FDA, the National Academy of Science, and the Institute of Medicine. She testified against exposure of children in experiments that put them a risk of harm; against mass mental screening of children, which served as a market expansion tactic to increase the use of psychiatric drugs. She testified against human pesticide experiments sponsored by Bayer CropScience; her advocacy was instrumental in the suspension of a government pesticide experiment in young children, called CHEERS; the suspension of smallpox vaccine tests on children, and anthrax vaccine tests in children. Her complaints led to the suspension of a -violence prediction- experiment in which 6-11 year old boys in New York City who were exposed to fenfluramine (Fen-Phen) a dangerous drug that was later recalled by the FDA. Vera served on a federal children`s research ethics advisory workgroup where she was the sole dissenter who objected to the loosening of federal regulations to expand the use of children in medical experiments without parental consent. Her complaints have led to federal investigations on the use of children in foster care as guinea pigs in experimental AIDS drug and vaccine trials. And her complaints opened a public debate about the ethics of psychotic relapse-inducing experiments in mental patients. Her efforts and testimony before the President`s Bioethics Advisory Committee resulted in the shutdown of 29 clinical trials at the National Institute of Mental Health. Mrs. Sharav has testified against the use of prisoners in pharmaceutical drug tests. Vera was an invited panelist at the World Federation of Science Journalists Conference Her publications include the chapter, -Medical Ethics and Contemporary Medicine- in Vaccine Epidemic; -Screening for Mental Illness: The Merger of Eugenics and the Drug Industry- in Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry (2005);-Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research Harm Children With and Without Disabilities- in Journal Disability Policy Studies (2004); -The Impact of FDAMA on the recruitment of children for research- EHPP (2003); -Children in Clinical Research: A Conflict of Moral Values," American Journal of Bioethics (2003)
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