Sharyl Attkisson on experiments performed on newborns

"Public Citizen, a watchdog group that does great work in the health space, had been following the controversy over a federally funded study being done at organizations like Duke, you know, very famous hospitals, that in retrospect, according to the government's own watchdog, was unethical. It put babies in, extremely fragile premature babies, in a study that manipulated their oxygen levels not for their own good, but for some kind of test purposes without, according to the parents, telling the parents that they were doing this. So the parents didn't get, according to them, informed consent. The ethics watchdog said they didn't get informed consent. They were told, according to the parents, and multiple ones have the same story, as they're being rushed in to have a premature baby, they're handed a piece of paper and said, this will help provide support for you. So it was their understanding. So get into the study and you'll get extra support for your baby. They didn't even use the word study.
They just thought they were signing to have their babies' weight and height measured and get emotional support for how hard it was going to be. So it turns out they had signed away the right to have their babies put in an experiment, the roll of a dice, flip of a coin, put them in either a high oxygen or low oxygen group, according to watchdogs, caused the death of some babies that might not have otherwise died. And the women didn't know until some years later when this came exposed through kind of happenstance. And what surprised me is the pressure from the establishment medical community came down on their watchdog that worked for the government, not to apologize for what they'd done, but to try to get him to back off enforcement action. When the story broke, it was unethical. They did a hit job really on the person that came forward. And just to be clear, they were using these babies to test.
If I remember correctly, low oxygen levels could cause death, and too high would cause blindness and was it swelling in the eyes or some sort of... Or vice versa. I don't remember which. One causes blindness, one causes death. They wanted to know where the sweet spot was, but here's the kicker. By keeping a baby in the oxygen level that they were assigned, normally it's adjusted depending on how the baby's doing.
The oxygen monitors were disabled to provide false readings on purpose. Parents weren't told this. So that the medical personnel caring for the babies wouldn't be tempted to put them in the right range for them. This is how horrific that was. So that they go to the, let's say, the good level, they don't realize it's high because they're in a study that they don't know about or low. And so blindness occurs, deaths occurred, all of these things.
And it was really just, let's just monitor these kids and see which one does what to me. For future babies, cause then we'll be able to see what happened to these babies. Or that it's that greater good argument. Well, we'll be helping babies in the future, but at the expense of the ones who are in the study that the parents said they didn't know about."