Vera Sharav:

“When medicine veers away from the Hippocratic Oath that promises to respect the individual right to do no harm to the individual then you’re going to harm the community as well because the community is a bunch of individuals.”

“There are crossroads in life where you have to make choices and if you don’t someone who will make the choice for you is not going to make it for your best interest.”

“The idea of just following authority without considering, What if they’re wrong? What if it’s not in my best interest? I wouldn’t want to live in under such a regime. I know what it’s like. I know what that is and I don’t want, I would not do it again.”

Leah Wilson:	Vera, thank you so much for allowing me to be here today and for talking with me on camera. It’s truly an honor. Vera is the founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection. She has moved mountains to protect research subjects, primarily children, those with mental illness and minorities. Vera’s work has resulted in the suspension of government pesticide experiments on children, federal investigations into children in foster care being used as guinea pigs, the suspension of smallpox vaccine on children, the suspension of psychological experiments on young boys aged 6 to 11, most of them of color, in New York City and dozens of other accomplishments that have directly saved lives. The work that you have done is immeasurable and the benefit to society is truly eternal. So we thank you for standing in the gap and fighting for the moral and ethical issues that often go unseen if there weren’t people like you fighting on our behalf.
Vera Sharav:	Thank you so much.
LW:	Vera would you be willing to share some of your experiences as a child and as an adult that led to your value in safeguarding and protecting informed consent and parental rights.
VS:	I was a small child, three and a half years old, when my family was chased out of our home in Romania and we were herded into a concentration camp. My father soon died of typhus and my mother and I were left in a camp that was not a death camp. There were many other kinds of camps, essentially where people were left to starve. But with always the fear of being sent to one of the death camps. That was always in the horizon. I was in the camp for about two years. At that point they were supposed to essentially liquidate it as they were going to do with all the camps and just annihilate everyone. There was a deal made by which orphan children were allowed to be sent out of the camp if they had someone to sign for them. My mother sent me as an orphan and I knew I was not exactly an orphan but this was to save my life. I wound up for about a year going from one family to another. It’s kind of strange you know how a child absorbs these kind of traumas. For many years I didn’t really touch it. I just didn’t allow it to come out in my consciousness because it’s so painful. I can’t stress how awful it is for a child to be separated from their parents. It’s really really devastating in the sense of, even though I was not mistreated by anyone along the way, but the sense of self-worth goes very very deeply. After this year of wandering from one family to the other, it’s a long story, I was on my way to my mother’s sister in Israel. I had befriended a family on the train to the ships that were to take us from Romania, because I was sent back to Romania from the camp. The camp by the way was in Ukraine. On the train I met, I befriended a family and I got attached to them. One of the things that I learned as this wandering child is to choose to select grown-ups that I could trust. I was little and I did not trust to be with my peers, with other children who were bigger and all that. Because I knew I would not do well with them. I needed an adult. I wanted adults. When we got to where we were supposed to embark on boat, three boats were to go and they had lists of who was to go on which boat. I was supposed to go on a boat with the orphan children. The whole boat was going to be with the orphans. But I refused. I refused to be separated from this family that I had become attached to. And this is a very searing memory. There I was; everyone was already on the one of the three boats and I was sitting on my little valise just crying, screaming, I just was not going to go. No matter what. Of course in today’s milieu that would have been ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder and all sorts of things like that. This was one of the most important lessons that I learned that I would say, people should think about. And this is a child. By then I was six years old as we left and this was from Romania, it was to Istanbul. From there we then took a train to Israel which was a very unusual thing at the time. But anyway, during the night while I was asleep—I was not awake because I got very, I was very seasick so I could not be much on the boat, it was always to go down and go to sleep—a submarine drowned the boat with all the children.
LW:	The boat that you were supposed to be on.
VS:	That I was supposed to be on and I knew it. And when they told me I didn’t say anything. But I knew that I saved my own life by being oppositional defiant disorder. That’s a lesson that right now is very needed. Adults now are not rebelling against things that are wrong. People are being pushed around, denied normal interaction, and they’re just following it like sheep. There’s something very wrong. Part of what’s wrong is the idea of just following authority without considering, What if they’re wrong? What if it’s not in my best interest? Why? This is very dangerous that we have so many people, good people, people who think that they’re doing the right thing community-wise. But they might be devastating both the community—the economy of course has been destroyed—and their health as well. Just following without questioning. As I say, this incident, it just encapsulates I guess who I am. Why I have been sounding alarms when I recognize that they’re alarming. It’s a very very dangerous thing to do, to follow. That’s what happened in Germany, essentially. All Germans were not evil. But, most of them, the vast majority, simply went along. And of course yes, it was wartime and we’re always being told about war. And now it’s a war on a virus. I mean, that kind of thing should not eliminate basic human rights and basic respect for individuals. It starts in medicine especially which is so intertwined, as it was then. When medicine veers away from the Hippocratic Oath, which is an oath that promises to respect the individual right, to do no harm to the individual. If you don’t harm the individual you’re not going to harm the community. But if you wipe out the individual’s right, their human right, then you’re going to harm the community as well because the community is a bunch of individuals. It’s not some other entity.
LW:	Yes it seems that there’s been a confusion, people in authority have tried to make it confusing as to whether what’s good for me, if that can possibly be good for the whole. Or if I should be looking out for the whole before myself and that’s become such a source of confusion for many people during national crisis.
VS:	Look, I mean, going back to the sacrifice, you know, the decision that my mother made. I mean this was a terrible choice that she had to make. And it was to save my life. It had nothing to do with community but it was a sacrifice that she—as a mother—this is what motherhood is about. Yes, you need to sacrifice for your children.
LW:	And the community can only be as strong as the individuals that make it up. Is that what I hear you saying?
VS:	Absolutely. Certainly on a moral level but also on a practical one. If you deny the human individual the right to think and question and assess and make decisions based on their own judgment and experience then you are creating robots.
LW:	When did you first put together your passion for informed consent and safeguarding these rights with your experience as a six-year-old girl standing up for yourself?
VS:	That came later when I did a lot of research. Because I did want to know, How could it happen? One of the things when I came out of that whole experience, it was, the rest of the world went on. Where were they? Where was everybody? Why didn’t anybody stop this? I couldn’t understand that. That was my moral judgement. So I did a lot of reading and things and that’s when I realized that one of the worst things that happened—aside from—because the Holocaust is mainly focused on Jews because they wanted to annihilate the entire Jewish People. So that’s that’s where that is. But really, it took time for that plan to be acted out on. And the first victims of the Nazi regime were children, disabled children. They were taken from their families. They had organized a whole system whereby schools would identify them at birth. They were identified and their names would be sent to the central government and then they rounded up the children, took them away from their parents. They told the parents that they were going to be given special treatment and of course that was a lie. They took them and it was doctors, medical doctors, who made the selections. They made the selections of which children were going to be used for experiments before they were killed. The experiments included starvation, to see how long a child can subsist on practically no nutrition and they would record all this very methodically. And they tested the zyklon b which was later used in the gas chambers. So it began with the children. It then got expanded to mentally ill adults and eventually also the nursing homes, the elderly. The Nazis called them worthless eaters. And I shudder that today under this Covid-19 pandemic, nursing home residents in the United States, in Europe, were the largest percentage of casualties. This did not happen by chance. Yes, people in nursing homes, the elderly with all kinds of ailments, are vulnerable and everyone was told because of these vulnerable old people we must shut down society because we have to protect them. That was an absolute lie. Those people were targeted to die. In New York our Governor and the New York State Health Commissioner issued an order that older people coming to a hospital should be turned to a nursing home, with or without testing, whether they had covid or not, and disregarding completely that those nursing homes were completely ill-equipped. They had no protective gear, they had no way to separate—these are not, they’re not hospitals but they’re also understaffed, under resourced. I mean they didn’t have masks, they had nothing. So of course a very very high percentage got infected and died. They were not given treatment. This is a crime.
LW:	So based on age,
VS:	Yes
LW:	the order was that they should upon admission to the hospital be transferred to a facility.
VS:	Right they did not want to treat them in the hospital, right.
LW:	And there was no protocols in place to make sure they were receiving the care that they needed.
VS:	No and what happened in fact is both the elderly and staff, the caregivers, they also have a high percentage, who wound up dying. Because one of the things that really is true with this virus is it depends how much that you are infected. It’s not, at first we were told, oh the doorknobs and all this sort of thing, that was all nonsense. It’s really how much of the virus do you come in contact with?
LW:	The concentration of it.
VS:	That’s right. And these caregivers, well, they were right there without any, without any help, without any protection. So they, both got infected and infected others whom they went and cared for. Because one caregiver would be taking care of a whole lot of them. It’s a horror. It’s the kind of horror that really, there should be, there should be accountability. There should be a real investigation how this happened.
LW:	So when you’re drawing these parallels between what you’ve seen in history and what you’re seeing now is it offensive to compare Nazism to what’s happening in America today?
VS:	What’s offensive is what’s happening in America today. That the Nazis were savages, we know, that’s the history. Some have gone on trial. Some have been executed. History has told that story, not fully, but to a great degree. But here no one is held accountable at all. In fact, Governor Cuomo gave the nursing homes total immunity. Oh Yeah. It’s unheard of that this should happen today in 2020 and this is called civilized way of dealing with a public health emergency?
LW:	So what I hear you saying is it’s not too far of a stretch or a leap, it’s not extreme, to compare what we’re seeing with what we’ve seen in the past.
VS:	I think each one needs to evaluate it themselves. I mean, it doesn’t matter whether I link it, Nazism and—that’s not the point. The point is what was done? What were the policies? What was the rationale? They had a similar rationale. Remember: they wanted to get rid of what they called worthless eaters. Okay? Their economy was very bad at the time. This was wartime. Everything was going for the war. And civilians didn’t have enough to eat as well. There was shortages and all that. So this was their way of dealing for the folk. For the folk. Forget the individual. What I’m suggesting is that when you eliminate the sanctity of the individual person, you are crossing that line. You’re no better.
LW:	Let’s go back in history with Nazism. How were the people convinced to look out for the folk instead of for themselves or their individual loved ones? How did that look in the very beginning?
VS:	Under the Nazi regime—and the same thing happened under the Soviet regime and under the Chinese regime—you have a dictatorship that is running the society with fear. Constant fear and surveillance. They used at that time what they could which today is not comparable at all. Today one can do everything remotely with drones and with all sorts of technologies. But I do want to say one thing, another similar use of technology. Very few people know this actually. But IBM had a contract with Nazi Germany and they supplied their punch card technology which enabled the Nazis to identify and round up European Jewry. That’s what surveillance is for. And that’s how they were able to actually root out almost every Jew in Europe and send them to camps. That was the IBM contribution to the Holocaust. People had wondered all along how could it have been so efficient? Because this was industrialized murder. That’s how. This is business. This is big business. IBM had plants in different parts of Europe because they were selling their technology just as Bill Gates sells his technology. I mean this was a business. And in fact I’ve read also recently that in some concentration camps they actually had the IBM machine with the punch cards to decide which one is to be exterminated under which shift and whatever. Oh yeah. This was run as an industrial business.
LW:	So how did your journey as an activist begin protecting informed consent and digging into these issues here in the states?
VS:	It began really with tragedy, a different tragedy. My first born son developed a mental illness and I had to deal with the mental health system which is a terrible place. This is right here in New York with all the top hospitals and all that. Again the psychiatric community, those who are really ill, they are disqualified by the medical profession. So for example when someone with a mental illness, they really, if they claim let’s say, to be abused or anything, no one believes them. They’re disqualified because they’re mentally ill. They can’t, even if it ever got to that kind of thing where they have to testify let’s say in court, they would be disqualified because they’re mentally ill.
LW:	Lack of capacity and so their voice is totally silenced.
VS:	That’s right. So in that sense you have to do for them. They need an advocate. One of the tragedies in that whole system is that there was a shift. A business model has taken over completely which is drug-centered, pharmaceutical drug centered. By now it’s drug cocktails. It isn’t even just one drug. It’s lots of drugs. Now those drugs, every one of them, have serious side effects. So that taking the drug for, let’s say, depression or whatever, there are trade-offs which the person has no way of making because they’re not told and neither are their parents. Those drugs cause diabetes, they make people suicidal, and heart tremors and arrhythmias and all that. This is now known. But at the time when the drugs were launched they didn’t admit to any of these adverse effects. It was, These are wonder drugs. This is like penicillin, like the antibiotics. That was a lie. But it was a marketing lie.
LW:	Because they knew.
VS:	Well the companies, while testing them, yes, some of these adverse features showed up. But they didn’t disclose that. So as a result my son died of the medication that he was prescribed. The point is that the New York State Department of Mental Health, they tried to make the coroner change his cause of death on the death certificate. Well he wouldn’t. but they went that far. They wanted to hide, to conceal the fact, that the drug caused total organ arrest. It killed him. They didn’t want that because at the time they were using that drug as the first line. That was the recommended drug to use.
LW:	It was a standard of care.
VS:	And that’s what it actually did. In other words the risk surrounding the drug was concealed. That’s how things have been with many drugs, most of the psychiatric drugs. It only came out once they were no longer the exclusive patent. The drug, once it wasn’t really making as much money, then slowly things came out. But really the point is though that once you realize that this whole medical establishment has been lying, has been a party to a lie, to a very serious lie and people are dying and it’s not even being counted as being as a result of the drug. I realized I have to look further. Before this happened actually, because I started to advocate, to look for right treatments and so forth, someone anonymously sent me an article from the American Journal of Psychiatry in which it describes what happened to 28 veterans at the Bronx VA who were taken off—they were mental patients. They had schizophrenia. But most of them had been living in the community. So in other words they were in remission. They took them back to the hospital, took them off all medications that they’ve been on and they gave them L-Dopa. L-Dopa is a drug that’s used for Parkinsons. But L-Dopa is known to cause psychosis. Every one of them who had been in remission essentially had a relapse, a psychotic relapse. And this was a government-sponsored experiment. Now when I read it, the first thing I said, This isn’t possible. This is in the United States. These are veterans. I sent it to two psychiatrists that I knew and I said am I reading this correctly? Is this what they did? One of them was the Chairman of Psychiatry at Long Island Jewish (now the hospital has changed). And he said yes. That was, okay, this is deliberately causing patients to have psychotic relapses. I mean, what could be more Nazi-like? Because the mentality is the same. They don’t feel that these patients are human beings. They used their ability to exploit them and to exploit the Veterans Administration hospital to do this kind of research. That was the first complaint that I filed with the federal oversight agency. They’ve changed names but doesn’t matter. This was all done with the approval of the so-called institutional review boards which are supposed to be the watchdog within an institution before research on people is done. But it’s on paper only. That was the first. Then I had a whole series of similar, and—experiments that were done, many on children, as well. But this was during the 90s and 2000 around that time. But it’s been—things have not gotten better. They’ve actually gotten worse. Because now, mother isn’t asked even when she gives birth, if they should give her baby a tetanus vaccine. And why are babies given tetanus vaccines? It makes absolutely no sense in a medical way. But if you have contracts and business to worry about then I guess it makes sense. But these babies are being used.
LW:	And that’s an example of the deviation from the Hippocratic Oath. That it’s no longer looking at the patient as, First Do No Harm. But there’s contracts in place that muddle up.
VS:	Yes, exactly. And especially it begins in the Public Health arena. Public Health is government. And that was what happened in Nazi Germany. All of medicine wound up being Public Health. Once you have medicine in partnership with government there is no individual care. The Hippocratic Oath goes out the window. And since you have government behind you, the doctor is not responsible for their actions. They’re working together with the state. That’s when medicine becomes weaponized. And what I’ve described is weaponized medicine. If you dictate what medicine is given to your child and you don’t have a say, that invites all kinds of really serious violations of your child and your role. Children are sometimes taken away from their parents if the parent refuses, for example with psychiatric drugs, ADHD. If you don’t agree to give your child, they’ve taken children away. That’s called child protective services. Who are they protecting? Certainly not the children. There are many areas now where there’s been a complete incursion into private families. Who is to say where is the evidence that government knows best for what’s for your child? There is no such thing. It’s only if you give in and you obey, then you become, then you’re not meeting your responsibility to the child. Really, parents have to be willing to go to battle to protect their children.
LW:	And that’s what we’re seeing today: these legislative trends that are infantilizing adult men and women and saying the state knows best for you and for your child. And so we’re expected as parents to willingly give up our parental rights and our health care rights and give them to the state and into state mandates. I’ll ask you a hard question, admittedly because we’re all journeying this together: How do parents go to bat?
VS:	They have to organize. They have to organize. It doesn’t take the entire population to rise up. It’s enough if a certain number does. Now there is more awareness. There is more combativeness in Europe. In fact in Germany, Germany has had some very very large rallies. I mean I’m talking 50,000 rallies against mandatory vaccination. You don’t read about it in the media. Because the media is very much part of the business empire that’s ruling that. Vaccines are an empire and now they really want to do a vaccine globally. Do you know what kind of a market that is? More than 7 billion people for a vaccine. Can you even count the kind of profits no matter what they charge for it? That’s what their goal is. That’s the whole allure of this covid-19 vaccine. It’s that market.
LW:	And we’ve seen estimates recently, that the vaccine industry is currently worth an estimated 60 billion dollars annually and then we’ve also seen estimates with the covid vaccine that it could be worth over 300 billion annually because it’s global.
VS:	Bill gates said on camera recently, since he invested in seven factories for a vaccine that’s not yet developed. He was asked well, isn’t that a lot of waste of money? And he said, What’s a few billion dollars when we’re talking trillions? Yes, That’s what it’s about. It’s trillions.