These medical conspiracies turned out to be true! For this list, we’ll be looking at famous conspiracies involving medical science that have a dash of realism about them.
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00:00 only you have the power to forgive. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're
00:05 counting down our picks for the top 10 medical conspiracies that turned out to be real.
00:10 They had to figure out a way, Joe, to make a profit on a product that they could not sell
00:14 in America. For this list, we'll be looking at famous conspiracies involving medical science
00:19 that have a dash of realism about them. Which conspiracy theories are the most unbelievable
00:24 for you? Let us know below! 10. Fake Vaccine Drive
00:31 In 2011, news leaked that the CIA had planned to create fake vaccination drives with the aid of
00:36 Dr. Shaquille Afridi. The spy group believed that the infamous Osama bin Laden was hiding in a
00:42 compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. So they sent Afridi and medics to the area to
00:48 offer free vaccinations for Hepatitis B. He passed key intelligence to the United
00:52 States, and for that, Pakistan charged him with spying.
00:56 Starting in a poorer part of town, the health workers only administered one of the three
01:00 required doses before moving on to bin Laden's neighborhood. Their real aim was to extract DNA
01:06 from patients to see if bin Laden or his family were in the area.
01:10 I don't know anybody who has been forced to do a DNA test after Laden's death. I only know that
01:15 people who had lived inside a nearby the building where they found bin Laden were vaccinated for
01:21 their DNA collection before Laden's death. However, this concept allegedly failed.
01:26 Regardless, this caused massive issues in the area since locals became untrusting of
01:31 legitimate vaccine programs, potentially putting thousands of lives at stake.
01:35 9. Bad Booze Looking back, the notion of
01:45 prohibition was a ridiculous idea. After all, if people want to do something, they'll find a way
01:50 to get it. However, no one expected the government to go this far. In 1926, people began noticing
02:00 that alcohol made by bootleggers was regularly causing serious illness and even ending lives.
02:05 As it turned out, authorities were behind it. They had ordered that industrial alcohol,
02:11 which bootleggers stole and used, would be tainted with toxins such as methanol.
02:16 What the government then looked at was, "Can we do something to this alcohol that makes it much
02:22 riskier to drink and use that essentially as a chemical enforcement of prohibition?"
02:28 The plan was to instill fear in potential drinkers that they would become ill. But it,
02:32 of course, didn't work. By the end of prohibition, it was estimated that at least 10,000 people
02:37 perished to this careless concept. It was clear that prohibition had not brought the
02:41 social improvements it had promised. Instead, it contributed to political corruption and organized
02:47 crime. 8. Operation Paperclip
02:50 While the Soviet Union had Operation Osievakim, the US had Operation Paperclip,
03:02 previously known as Operation Overcast. After the defeat of Germany in World War II,
03:07 the US brought in around 1,600 scientists to use their knowledge.
03:11 However, many of them were members and leaders of the fascist regime.
03:23 When murmurs about this secret project were reported in 1946, people were uncomfortable.
03:37 One recruit that helped the US with medical science was Walter Schreiber,
03:40 a doctor and a general in the German army who worked on preemptive measures against
03:45 biological weapons during the war. He was also accused of conducting "horrific human
03:50 experiments," which he denied. Schreiber left Paperclip in 1952 and relocated to Argentina.
03:56 7. Sugaring the Truth
03:59 When they took the fat out, they had to do something because when you take the fat out,
04:04 the food tastes like cardboard. They added salt and they added sugar. And they added sugar in
04:14 such a way as to basically make it irresistible. People wouldn't lie about health issues to make
04:20 money, would they? Nowadays, the New England Journal of Medicine requires proof that
04:25 researchers don't have conflicts of interest in their papers. Back in 1967, those checks
04:30 weren't present, and the sugar industry took advantage. The Journal of the American Medical
04:35 Association reveals that scientists were paid in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and
04:40 heart disease and instead make saturated fat the culprit. An article by Harvard nutrition employees
04:46 Dr. Frederick Stare and Mark Hegstead aims to blame cholesterol and fat in a diet for the cause
04:52 of heart disease, not the sweet stuff. In 2016, it was discovered by Dr. Kristen Kearns that the
05:12 duo was funded by the Sugar Research Foundation at the cost of $6,500 at the time, around $49,000
05:20 today and thus turning the sucrose companies into billion-dollar industries.
05:25 Number six - the heart attack weapon. A silent weapon that can induce a heart attack doesn't
05:30 sound like real life, instead confined to the pages of a spy novel or a blockbuster film.
05:45 Except it exists, and that's terrifying. Old-school CIA was involved in some of the
05:50 most ambitious and bonkers plots possible. During the Church Committee in 1975,
05:56 where the agency was being examined for abuse of power, the heart attack weapon was showcased to
06:01 the room.
06:02 Does this pistol fire the dart? Yes, it does, Mr. Chairman. The round thing at the top is
06:10 obviously the sight. The rest of it is what is practically a normal .45, although it's special.
06:18 It was devised to fire a frozen dart formed of a shellfish toxin noiselessly that could induce a
06:25 cardiac arrest in the target before melting away and removing all evidence beyond a small skin
06:30 prick. The weapon then vanished from public viewing and hasn't been seen since.
06:35 Number five - smoking and cancer. Today, we know that smoking isn't great for us and can cause
06:48 various diseases and cancers, but we could have found this out decades earlier if the tobacco
06:54 industry didn't conspire to hide the truth.
06:56 He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for 30 years and hasn't found any
07:00 conclusive results. The man's a genius. He could disprove gravity. In 1950, studies began showing
07:07 the link between smoking and ill health. Straight away, the tobacco firms went into damage control.
07:13 The Tobacco Institute released a statement that criticized the papers highlighting the issue
07:18 and promoted the practice of smoking. In 2011, researchers from UCLA discovered that the
07:24 industry had known about cancer-causing particles in tobacco since 1959, yet they hid that from the
07:30 public. All cigarettes cause cancer, lung disease, heart attacks, and premature death. Known as
07:35 polonium-210, the radioactive material could have been removed by producers, but they chose not to
07:42 and instead lied about it. Yikes. Consumers cough up for higher prices because they crave the drug
07:48 in tobacco, nicotine. And without nicotine addiction, there would simply be no tobacco
07:53 industry. And the industry knows this. Number four, the Tuskegee syphilis study. In 1932,
08:00 U.S. Medical Services started a study for then-incurable syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama.
08:06 Sounds reasonable. Instead, it became one of the biggest misuses of ethics in the states.
08:11 But their recruitment plan centered on a lie. 399 black men with the disease and a control group of
08:17 201 were put in the program that lasted until 1972. Participants were told that they would get
08:24 treatment for their bad blood, yet received placebos instead, even though penicillin had
08:30 existed since 1947. The experimenters wanted to document what happens to people with untreated
08:40 syphilis. Unsurprisingly, terrible things occur, such as mental illness and passing away. In the
08:46 60s, researcher Peter Buxton tried to stop this disturbing study, but the authorities refused.
08:52 So he went to the press, forcing the grim experiments to finish. On behalf of the American
08:58 people, what the United States government did was shameful. And I am sorry. Number three,
09:08 Bayer Medicine spreads AIDS. They wanted to keep it secret. They didn't want to publicize
09:14 something which would be damaging for the company. In the early 1980s, Cutter Biological,
09:20 a subsidiary of Bayer, was making medicine for hemophiliacs for blood clotting.
09:25 The medicine's called Factor 8. It was an injection medicine that was used for hemophiliacs,
09:31 mostly children. Children had been born with an incurable disease. Hold on, Mike.
09:34 However, epidemiologists soon realized that various blood products had been contaminated
09:39 and were spreading HIV. Even when a safe, heat-treated alternative became available,
09:44 Cutter continued to manufacture the old product for a while. After they switched, they still had
09:49 a lot of the old product sitting in their inventory. So they sold it in Asia and Latin America,
09:55 spreading the disease through an unsuspecting populace.
09:58 This company knew absolutely that they had a problem with the product. They knew that it
10:03 was infected with AIDS. They dumped it because they wanted to turn this disaster into a profit.
10:09 The company has since paid hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits.
10:13 The documents show that there was no question that this company absolutely understood the risk.
10:18 They knew that it was contaminated. It wasn't a possibility. They knew it was contaminated.
10:23 Number 2. Project Sunshine
10:25 If there was a category for the biggest misnomer in history,
10:29 Project Sunshine would be in the running for the imaginary prize.
10:33 In 1955, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission devised this program to monitor the effects
10:38 of nuclear fallout from atomic testing on the human body.
10:42 But the Department of Defense was very interested in the effects of total body irradiation.
10:46 Because if there's a nuclear war and people get irradiated,
10:52 are they going to be able to function?
10:55 The problem was, they needed samples. They had scientists in Europe and Australia send them the
11:00 bodies and body parts of deceased people, most of them very young, without the permission of the
11:05 next of kin. Altogether, around 1,500 subjects were forcefully added to the project.
11:10 It was a really, really ugly experiment.
11:14 Some parents weren't even able to dress their passed-away children for funerals to hide the
11:19 terrible deed. In 1995, the morbid study was publicly discovered.
11:23 The United States of America offers a sincere apology to those of our citizens
11:28 who were subjected to these experiments, to their families, and to their communities.
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11:47 1. Project MK-ULTRA
11:53 If you weren't already wary of the CIA, you will be in a moment.
11:57 In 1953, the agency created Project MK-ULTRA to find a way to control human behaviour with drugs
12:05 and psychological torment. Essentially, they wanted to brainwash people.
12:09 The CIA spent 25 years and $25 million on secret mind control research.
12:15 Brainwashing could be a powerful ideological weapon, and the U.S. had to have it. And when
12:21 the agency didn't undertake its own studies, it funded someone else's.
12:25 The CIA conducted experiments in the U.S. and Canada, often in hospitals and prisons.
12:31 One infamous example had the CIA using LSD to see what that did to participants' willpower.
12:37 "The experiments are conducted on military volunteers,
12:40 but the young servicemen have no idea what they are letting themselves in for."
12:45 Some folks willingly signed up for the experiments, but many did not. Regardless,
12:50 there were cases of subjects perishing or experiencing lifelong mental trauma from the
12:55 study. Project MK-ULTRA ended in 1973. After being leaked to the press, the experiment became
13:02 publicly disclosed during the Church Committee in '75.
13:05 Everyone from unwitting housewives, to soldiers, to even criminals like gangster Whitey Bulger,
13:12 is tested.
13:13 "You know, what the CIA really dreamed of was sort of like a drug you could give to someone,
13:18 get them to commit all sorts of unspeakable acts,
13:21 and they wake up the next day and they don't remember what they've done."
13:24 [music]