Vera Sharav’s Speech: We Can’t Forget

Vera Sharav’s Speech: We Can’t Forget (6/28/24) + Profiles in Courage: Vera Sharav by Margaret Anna Alice

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Profiles in Courage: Vera Sharav

When most people hear the name “Vera Sharav,” the first thing they think of is “Holocaust survivor.” But surviving the Third Reich was just the beginning of this feisty librarian’s hero’s journey.

Like many heroes, Vera’s greatness blossomed from tragedy. Born Vera Roll in Romania in 1937, she was nearly four when Romania allied with Germany in 1941. Vera and her parents wound up in the Mogilev concentration camp, where her father later died of typhus.

Speaking in a 1984 oral history interview, Vera’s mother, Mary Roll, recalled, “I couldn’t get a piece of bread, and [Vera] would cry so bitterly. Days and days, nothing in her mouth.”

Famine and disease stalked them daily. “Every morning,” Mary said, “they would bring out … loads of corpses, frozen to death, loaded like wood on these carts and transported to mass graves.”

Fearing her daughter would starve to death, Mary decided to lie. She got Vera into an international rescue mission for orphans by saying Vera was one, too.

In 1944 at the age of six-and-a-half, Vera was to set sail on the Mefküre merchant ship with sixty-one other children.

But she refused. “I was sitting there crying,” Vera remembers. “I didn’t want to go on that boat. Nothing would move me.”

Instead, she insisted on boarding the boat with the family she had befriended on the way to the harbor city, a family she trusted to take care of her.

“The voyage entailed crossing the Black Sea from Romania to Istanbul, Turkey, en route to Palestine by train along the Mediterranean,” Vera told me. “This route crossing Syria and Lebanon was only open for several weeks in 1944.”

She continued, “Between the time I was rescued from the concentration camp and the voyage to Palestine took about eight months.”

When I asked Vera where she stayed during those eight months, she recalled, “That was an odyssey—bouncing two months with one family, three months another, then three months with mother’s brother the banker, the family having converted and having a princess as friend. It’s during these months that I learned to discern people whom I could trust.”

Vera said, “For three years, I was raised by my mother’s sister and family on a family farm in Palestine. These were the happiest years of my childhood, during which I healed. After a four-year separation, I was reunited with my mother in New York in January 1948.”

Fusilladed by machine guns and cannons, the Mefküre was to sink two days later. Only 5 of the 320 refugees survived.

Vera would never forget this lesson about life-saving disobedience. “That’s where I would have been,” she notes, “had I listened to authority.”

The ultimate badass, Vera later traced her ungovernability to this experience. “I realized why sometimes I would be very stubborn—nobody, no ideology, no rationalization would change my mind.”

This fierce determination would empower Vera to transcend her devastating grief after tragedy struck again in 1994.

That is when Vera and her husband, Itzhak, learned about the cataclysmic consequences of not being given informed consent.

Their firstborn son, Ami, suffered a deadly reaction to clozapine, a purported “miracle” drug that had been prescribed for the schizo-affective disorder he’d been diagnosed with as a teenager several years prior.

When Vera reported Ami’s symptoms of weakness and difficulty walking to his psychiatrist, the psychiatrist not only failed to recognize the signature signs of neuroleptic malignant syndrome—a known potentially lethal reaction to antipsychotic drugs Vera had never been informed about—but he increased the dosage of clozapine and threw on another antidepressant.

Ami died three days later.

Her grief compounded by guilt, Vera lamented, “After all I had learned about not trusting authority, I trusted this doctor and pushed Ami to take the medication.”

This unfathomable loss lit a conflagration under Vera, who would go on to found the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), an organization committed to defending medical ethics from corrupting influences. Guided by the Nuremberg Code, Hippocratic Oath, and 2005 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, AHRP members advocate for freedom of choice; honest disclosure; informed consent; and truth and scientific integrity.

“I tried to find the best treatment, and I wound up bumping against the obscenity of the mental health system,” Vera told Nature reporter Charlie Schmidt in 2008. “I became an outspoken critic of modern medicine, a watchdog. And to my surprise, I had no competition, and I still have no competition.”

Pouring herself into her newfound calling as a human rights activist, Vera discovered the eugenicist underbelly of biomedical research.

Vera’s peer-reviewed article Children in Clinical Research: A Conflict of Moral Values appeared in the American Journal of Bioethics in 2003. The abstract reads in part:

“This paper examines the culture, the dynamics and the financial underpinnings that determine how medical research is being conducted on children in the United States. Children have increasingly become the subject of experiments that offer them no potential direct benefit but expose them to risks of harm and pain.… Emphasis, however, is given to psychoactive drug tests because of the inherent ethical and diagnostic problems involved in the absence of any objective, verifiable diagnostic tool.”

Vera—who earned a master’s degree in library science from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1971, nearly two decades after majoring in art history at City College of New York—has written other influential peer-reviewed articles, including:

The Ethics of Conducting Psychosis-Inducing Experiments (Accountability in Research, 1999)
The Impact of the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act on the Recruitment of Children for Research (Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 2003)
Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research Harm Children with and Without Disabilities (Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 2004)
Screening for Mental Illness: The Merger of Eugenics and the Drug Industry (Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 2005)
Protecting People with Decisional Impairments and Legal Incapacity Against Biomedical Research Abuse (Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 2008)

Vera spoke out against unethical research on mentally ill subjects, organizing testimonies by victims and their families at the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (NBAC) that led to the cessation of twenty-nine National Institute of Mental Health clinical trials.

She raised awareness about the suicidal tendencies triggered by antidepressants, bringing together bereaved parents to testify at FDA hearings.

Vera would later break the story about an internal GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) memo acknowledging Paxil—which GSK had admitted in 2006 increased suicidal behavior—was no better than a placebo at treating depression, leading to its 2012 conviction for federal fraud charges and a $3 billion fine.

After discovering New York Psychiatric Institute researchers had conducted unethical experiments on black and Hispanic boys using the drug fenfluramine, Vera leaked the story to reporters, leading to the 1998 New York Times article Experiments on Children Are Reviewed and the Boston Globe series Doing Harm: Research on the Mentally Ill by Robert Whitaker.

Whitaker—who would go on to make a career out of covering medical research and pharmaceutical industry corruption, winning the George Polk Award for Medical Writing—credited Vera with setting him on that trajectory.

“It all came from Vera,” he said. “Her work brought me into this field.”

With her lifelong instruction in the hallmarks of totalitarianism, medical tyranny, and eugenics, it’s no wonder she was one of the first—if not the first—to expose the COVID propaganda and its authoritarian, democidal agenda.

Vera published Coronavirus Provides Dictators & Oligarchs with a Dream Come True on March 26, 2020—a mere thirteen days after President Trump had issued the COVID-19 Emergency Declaration.

In that article, she documents philanthropath Bill Gates’s digital surveillance aims and vaccine-profiteering scheme, quoting a Reddit AMA session where he stated, “Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”

Vera observes that this statement “acknowledges the intent to utilize digital technology to gain control over people’s compliance with government-dictated medical interventions—especially regarding compliance with vaccination—Bill Gates’ particular obsession.”

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