Meet the Speakers

Vera Sharav

Human Rights Advocate & Holocaust Survivor

Vera Sharav is a long-time human rights advocate and founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), an information resource with the goal of breaking down the walls of secrecy in biomedical research. Her focus has been on violations of informed consent, particularly the plight of children of color as involuntary subjects in medical experiments that often exposed them to harm from hazardous substances.

As a survivor of the Holocaust, Mrs. Sharav recognizes ominous parallels between that time and the current breakdown of democracy, including the suspension of personal freedom, civil and legal rights; restrictive, unilateral government dictates; and ever-tighter centralized control and intolerance. Now, as then, dissenters are ostracized and demonized. This pattern of centralized control led to the Holocaust.

At the age of 85, she produced a documentary series — “Never Again Is Now Global” — that fearlessly confronts the disturbing parallels, including the imposition of experimental medical products and procedures in gross violation of the Nuremberg Code — which was adopted to ensure that never again would human beings be subjected to experimental medical procedures without “voluntary, informed consent.” The film also exposes the power and control wielded by a few financial-corporate and family dynasties whose insatiable ambitions are now global.

Her achievements include the suspension of several unethical experiments:

• CHEERS, an EPA experiment that sought to expose Black toddlers to pesticides to prove their safety;
• a “violence prediction” experiment that exposed 6- to 11-year-old NYC boys of color to fenfluramine – a dangerous drug recalled by the FDA after causing heart valve damage.

Her complaints led to federal investigations and opened a public debate about the ethics of conducting psychotic relapse-inducing experiments.

• She organized families and victims to testify before the President’s National Bioethics Advisory Committee (NBAC). Those testimonies were the catalyst for a prize-winning series in the Boston Globe — ultimately resulting in the shutdown of 29 clinical trials at the National Institute of Mental Health (1999).
• Her complaints led to federal investigations of the illegal exposure of Black and Hispanic children in New York City foster care to experimental AIDS drug and vaccine trials. These grossly unethical experiments were co-sponsored by the NIAID under Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Her publications include:

• “Medical Ethics and Contemporary Medicine,” a chapter in the book “Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children”
• “Screening for Mental Illness: The Merger of Eugenics and the Drug Industry”
• “Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research”
• “Children in Clinical Research: A Conflict of Moral Values” in “The American Journal of Bioethics”
• “The Impact of the FDA Modernization Act on the Recruitment of Children for Research”