Stanley Plotkin MD

More than 500 of Dr. Plotkin’s articles have been published and he has edited several books including Vaccines, now the standard textbook in the field. He was chairman of the Infectious Diseases Committee and the AIDS Task Force of the American Academy of Pediatrics, liaison member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and chairman of the Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Research Committee of the National Institutes of Health. His contributions have been recognized with the Bruce Medal in Preventive Medicine of the American College of Physicians, the Distinguished Physician Award of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and the Clinical Virology Award of the Pan

Stanley Plotkin, MD

Good old Stanley Plotkin
'Those were . . . the good old days,' Stanley Plotkin, Koprowski's former
colleague confided, 'when people were deciding themselves what was ethical
. . . rather than referring it to a committee.'


Segments on Hilary Koprowski (former CAN scientific Board member)and former
colleagues and Oral Polio vaccine
....note 'volunteer' populations----mentally handicapped (below).

 
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n05/print/port02_.html
 
In fact, it seems that key evidence is to be had: samples of the relevant
polio vaccines survive in commercial and government laboratories - in the
Wistar Institute, the Swedish Institute for Disease Control in Stockholm,
and perhaps elsewhere. Till now those institutions have refused to allow
the vaccines to be independently tested for the presence of HIV-1 precursor
viruses, demonstrating at the very least the tendency among scientists to
close ranks against outsiders. Hooper makes much of what he regards as
tell-tale memory lapses and self-contradiction among those he interviewed,
and of the mysterious disappearance of vital documents: most of Koprowski's
papers from this time had been 'lost in a move'. He describes how he and
fellow whistle-blowers were threatened with defamation writs by Koprowski
and others, and how interviewees who had initially been forthcoming later
clammed up, sometimes after phone calls from Koprowski or his attorney. A
cover-up is not implausible. After all, the consequences - legal, political
and financial - for individuals, governments, pharmaceutical companies and
international agencies like the WHO if the OPV/Aids hypothesis were to be
substantiated would be unimaginable.
 
Considerations like this are central to Hooper's second
book-within-the-book. Whether or not he has nailed the source of Aids, his
investigations give a remarkably clear picture of the way science and
medicine were conducted a generation ago, of the protagonists' subsequent
rationalisations of their conduct, and of the politics of science today.
 
Mid-20th-century science, as recalled by Hooper's interviewees, was a world
of swashbuckling optimism: antibiotics were conquering infectious diseases,
DDT was promising to eradicate malaria, the WHO and other agencies were
waging war against tropical disease. Everything was up for grabs; science
and medicine were patently 'good things', and it seemed that there was no
limit to what could be done in the name of progress and the relief of
suffering humanity (even if it might involve some pretty dodgy contracts
with the military). British and Belgian, American and African scientists
reminisce about the time when a young researcher could anticipate being
saluted as the conqueror of this or that lethal disease and becoming a
Nobel laureate. Funding and experimental animals were readily available;
and, as the interviewees candidly admit, few obstacles were put in the way
of those who wanted to do trials on such 'volunteer' populations as
prisoners, children in orphanages, the mentally handicapped - and black
Africans. 'Those were . . . the good old days,' Stanley Plotkin,
Koprowski's former colleague confided, 'when people were deciding
themselves what was ethical . . . rather than referring it to a committee.'