The Nuremberg Paradox

Life and Death on the Global Animal Farm

During Mandate-mania this time last year, we frequently found ourselves referencing the Nuremberg Code during heated debates, and the self-evident violation of the bedrock principle of informed consent. We considered impeccable the moral authority of this document, arising out of a determination to never again allow the horrors of the Nazi medical tyranny to be visited upon a helpless population.

There were two main arguments derisively offered against this point of view. First, we were told, it wasn’t a medical experiment, it was an approved vaccine. This, of course, is horribly distorted; the mRNA mass “vaccination” was the most feverishly rushed intervention of its type in history.

There was no long-term safety data whatsoever. It simply didn’t exist. Every claim made about efficacy and safety has since fallen at the hands of inconvenient reality. The technology had never been previously deployed, indiscriminately, in large populations. If it wasn’t an experiment, why were there constant surprises?

The other, more troubling argument made was that the Nuremberg Code did not apply, that it lacked the force of law, so it could not be invoked against mandates. This argument, in particular, represents one of the most morally bankrupt rationalizations to accompany the entire episode. As if the only barrier to repeating the horrors of involuntary human medical experiments is the matter of legality.

What a great many people failed to appreciate is that the comparisons to the trials of Nuremberg are not frivolous; they are uncanny. The entire Nazi regime operated under a public health premise: racial hygiene. Jews, for example, were targeted as likely to harbor lice and therefore typhus; relocating them to concentration camps was billed as a quarantine. This narrative was maintained right up to the showers, which of course stopped the spread once and for all.

In a bid to preserve hospital beds for incoming wounded soldiers, disabled and mentally disturbed individuals were executed by nursing staff, who generally followed these gruesome orders. And then, there are the experiments.

These experiments were carried out by some of the most innovative physicians of the time. Unhindered by ethical concerns, doctors like Mengele could indulge any curious whim, testing all kinds of tortures and surgeries on a captive population. The advantage of this may not be obvious to those who simply recoil at the evil of it all, but on a scientific level, human experimentation does allow for rapid progress, and a great deal of useful knowledge emerged.

For civilized post-WWII medicine, the standard of ethical experimentation is animal vivisection. There is a selection bias in biomedical fields which favors a psychology comfortable with making utilitarian sacrifices on behalf of others, solving the trolley problem by pulling the lever. Every single individual in these fields participates in animal experimentation, directly or indirectly, often agreeing to it as a condition of career.

We might be comfortable with this exchange, but is it ethical? Thousands of animals, including primates, are frequently sacrificed simply to ascertain that the latest Pharma concoction is, indeed, too unsafe to test on humans. While that knowledge is valuable, is it worth dying for, from the animal’s point of view? Informed consent, embattled as it frequently has become, is not possible for these subjects, who are presumably utilized precisely because of their inability to complain.

There is a distinct Venn overlap between veterinary medicine and vaccines. Domestic and livestock animals are subjected to a battery of jabs, which are administered without regard to the desires of these animals. We have justifications, of course. They are often held in such conditions of overpopulation that an outbreak can be catastrophic.

Of course, this is a deep web of a problem with no ready solution. Experiments require sacrifice. Without these experiments, human medical research would become impossible, and we would be subject to the same risks as other animals. We could not enjoy our artificial reprieve from the ravages of our artificial lifestyles. We all love living.

It would be a difficult privilege to relinquish, even impossible considering the crowded and toxified conditions of our civilized sprawl. But as we wonder how we arrived at this place, with an insensitive medical establishment more than willing to test out their new toys on a captive population, it might be worth a thought or two to how willing we’ve been to let animals do this on our behalf, without a shred of benefit for their own species.

We are being put out to pasture on the Animal Farm. Jabbed arm good. Horse de-wormer bad. Farmer Gates has made a deal with the pigs for our futures. It’s not really a metaphor after all.

The Nuremberg Code is an honorable declaration that humans should be immune from the exploitation that we comfortably consign to animals. How secure can it be, really, so long as we are happy to visit these miseries on other species for the sake of sparing our own?