That is, IMO, a lie.
Heroin was known at the time to pass placental barriers, as children were being born addicted to it.
I can't believe they didn't know.
I think you misunderstand how the whole thing happened. This is before there was such a thing as rigorous medical testing.
The drug was tested on animals and found to be safe. It was not tested on pregnant animals at all. So it was released for use on the general public as a sedative. Doctors also prescribed it off-label as an anti-emetic, which means they prescribed it mostly for pregnant women.
It was this prescribing the drug to the general public that was the human testing. That's how things were done before there was proper and rigorous testing of drugs, because science-based medicine was still a relatively new field and there was a strong belief amongst both the general population and within the medical field that drugs were incredibly beneficial and would cure all ailments within the next few decades. There was huge, blind enthusiasm for science-based medicine at the time.
The fact that it had been given to the general public was exacerbated because the doctors who were trialling it on their patients mostly didn't follow up up their patients. This means that when problems
were starting to be found, when the first babies were delivered, how widespread the problem was wasn't realised straight away.
The story of Thalidomide is
not a cautionary tale about how scientific evidence is often wrong. It's a cautionary tale about acting without
enough scientific evidence. It's
because of Thalidomide that we now have the rigorous approval process that exists for drugs.
The mistake was not in trusting the evidence, the mistake was in not gathering enough evidence. That's the lesson that needed to be learnt, and that is the lesson that
was learnt.
I explained all of this to you yesterday. You ignoring it and then using Thalidomide as the cheap shot that you used it as yesterday, is dishonest. I'm sorry, but it is. Rather than trying to take dishonest cheap shots, you should concentrate on making intelligent, informed arguments, backed up by actual facts. If you can do that, then not only with the quality of your debating improve, but you'll be more likely to end up where you want to go.
And if you
can't do that, then the only honest course of action is to re-examine your conclusions. If you have to lie in order to make your conclusions seem true, then you must not have that much faith in your conclusions.
And, also, why would you link to a source that you thought contained lies? That's also dishonest, isn't it?
