So, two articles that both address the government's willingness to cover up data showing various chemicals to be harmful, and/or use human test subjects as guinea pigs:
EPA Using Data From Chemical Tests on Humans from today's Washington Post, and
Deadly immunity, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data -- and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic."
I am just... appalled.
This is a fairly big concern of mine, because I suspect that my natural tendency toward food allergies may have been exacerbated by exposure to cropdusting chemicals when I was in grade school (I had allergies as an infant, seemed to 'grow out of them', but they came back with a vengeance when I was in second grade and we moved out into the country near soybean and cotton fields).
We should NOT be treating our citizens as guinea pigs. We should NOT be allowing harmful preservatives to be put into children's vaccines. Haven't we learned anything?
The common tie, of course, is that these decisions are in favor of the big corporations who stood to lose money if they were forced to remove all thimoserol-laced vaccines from the market, or who would have to test their chemicals in another way than using duped human 'volunteers'.
In the long run, none of this benefits the corporations in question -- I hope they WILL get sued. If corporations would behave like good citizens in the first place, they wouldn't open themselves up to lawsuits. But, again, this is proof that corporations need to be regulated by a government that is looking out for the best interests of its citizens, not the interests of corporate donors.
(Not to mention that the testing in the Post story shows yet another example of bad science -- results contrary to what the researchers were hired to find were apparently rejected:
"The scientists conducting the tests frequently ignored the fact that they were putting their subjects -- who were often students or minorities -- at risk, the report said. In one case, three dozen subjects took an insecticide pill with orange juice at breakfast; in another, eight people received a dose of a toxic insecticide for 28 days, during which time all eight "experienced adverse events, including headaches, abdominal pain, nausea, coughing and a rash. The researchers declared that every single adverse event was unrelated to dosing.")