Vera Sharav
Vera Sharav is a public advocate for human rights and the founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), an information resource and public interest watchdog organization whose goal is to unlock the walls of secrecy in biomedical research and bring accountability to that endeavor. Mrs. Sharav's advocacy achievements include: suspension of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pesticide experiment (CHEERS) on children; suspension of smallpox vaccine on children; suspension of “violence prediction” experiment that exposed six to 11-year-old NYC boys of color to fenfluramine. Her complaints have led to federal investigations on the use of children in foster care as guinea pigs in experimental AIDS drug and vaccine trials, and opened a public debate about the ethics of psychotic relapse-inducing experiments in patients. She also organized families and victims of unethical research to join her in testifying before the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (NBAC) — re: unethical harmful experiments on mentally disabled psychiatric patients. Those testimonies led to a prize-winning series in the Boston Globe, “Doing Harm: Research on the Mentally Ill” — ultimately resulting in the shutdown of 29 clinical trials at the National Institute of Mental Health (1999). She served on the Children’s Workgroup of the National Human Research Protection Advisory Committee where she was the sole dissenter who objected to the expanded use of children in high risk medical experiments—some without parental consent. She has testified before academic and public policy advisory forums including the Institute of Medicine and the US Military Ethics Forum. Her publications include: “Medical Ethics and Contemporary Medicine” in Vaccine Epidemic, “Screening for Mental Illness: The Merger of Eugenics and the Drug Industry” and “Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research Harm Children With and Without Disabilities.”
