Following bettinafairchild, the problem isn't so much that these things didn't happen, but that they're being presented as a slapdash Gish Gallop intended to build a unified narrative where there is none.

Notwithstanding that many of these claims were not "secret" even at the time (Rhoades racist letter was publicized and investigated almost immediately), where factual events are presented, they are done so with out context or with key information missing. The point about the "U.S. military releas[ing] clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas" in 1953 to test airborne dispersal weapons, fails to mention the National Academy of Sciences found that "in populated areas where exposures from the Army's tests were the highest, residents were exposed to far more cadmium in their normal daily contact with soil, water, food, and air (between 12 and 84 micrograms) than they were potentially exposed to from the Army's tests."

Errors of omission such as this are replete throughout the page, and there are outright errors as well. The very first thing that caught my eye was "The Pellagra Incident," which claims the "director of the [U.S. Public Health Service] admits it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths occured within poverty-striken black populations."

This doesn't even begin to make sense.

I actually just made a few posts about the history of pellagra both in AskHistorians and HistoryofMedicine if you want some background, but the simple fact is that it would be very hard for the PHS Director to make the claimed apology in 1935 when the landmark paper linking pellagra to niacin deficiency wasn't published until 1937. The 20 year period cited presumably begins when PHS physician Joseph Goldberger first said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Maybe pellagra has something to do with diet?" Ten years later he was still trying to figure out what kind of diet could best protect against the disease.

Also, the claim that "millions of individuals die from Pellagra over a span of two decades is an outright falsehood. This paper, using US Census data, cites "99,420 deaths from pellagra in the official Death Registration Area between 1908, the first year in which pellagra deaths were officially reported, and 1940." A serious public health issue, no doubt, but to an extent that it was depopulating the American South.

Were there ethical issues with the early pellagra work? Yes, it's literally a textbook case used to illustrate some of the murky issues in working with wards of the state and prisoners. Was class and race a factor in the early work? Yes, the paper I just linked to exactly focuses on how one researcher's "inability to recognize the special toll pellagra took on African-Americans was embedded in the set of research practices he brought to these investigations." Does this mean there was a effort to prolong endemic pellagra? NO. Did the PHS' efforts actually lead to the identification of the cause of pellagra and steps to eliminate it? YES. Blaming the PHS for pellagra is like shooting Lassie because she didn't bring you a notarized letter (in triplicate) to tell you Timmy fell in the well.

The link is just some copypasta that is as ignorant as it is disingenuous. It takes an actual history of dubious and overtly unethical behavior and condenses it down to context-free half-truths and outright fabrications. It does so in the attempt to flood the reader with enough "facts" that they think they're getting something insightful, when in fact they are simply getting less than nothing. Note that not once does the page ever attempt to actually advance a position or a synthesis of the data; it puts up a bunch of factoids, links to Nuremberg Trials, and "Human Cloning Headlines," and then presumably sits back to allow the reader to come to their own conclusion based on the biased data in front of them. This is not just disingenuous, it's a cowardly tactic that preys on the fears of the readers. Not once does the "AMERICAN PATRIOT FRIENDS NETWORK" make a single original statement about why, how, or what they think is going on, instead preferring to spit out links and quotes on a vague theme of "the US Gov is Bad." It's the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy, in that it is voluminous, but insubstantial.

Well, the site is not so much accurate as semi-accurate. A cursory examination uncovers a number of serious factual errors and things framed in much more ominous ways than they actually were. Yet at the same time, the bare facts of many of them are true. For example:

The site says "1932 The Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins. 200 black men diagnosed with syphilis are never told of their illness, are denied treatment, and instead are used as human guinea pigs in order to follow the progression and symptoms of the disease. They all subsequently die from syphilis, their families never told that they could have been treated."

Yes, the Tuskegee experiments really happened and were pretty much as described. But they have some key facts wrong, about something that is well known and well-described in much literature. There were 600, not 200, black men enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis study, of which 399 had syphilis, with the rest of them being controls who were disease free. They didn't all die of syphilis. 28 died of syphilis, and 100 died of related complications. 74 were still alive at the time the scandal broke. There are actually other bad things that this website could have said about the study--many sexual partners were infected too, plus many children became infected at birth, which can lead to major problems, like deafness. So these pretty significant factual errors on your website make me question everything they say--they've clearly done a half-assed job. There are many other more accurate sites on unethical and/or secret experimentation on humans that you could look at. Even Wikipedia's page on unethical human experimentation is better.

Oh, and I also wanted to describe the things that were accurate on the site, yet framed in a frightening way and implying scary things that they don't have evidence for.

Like this: "1966 U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus subtilis variant niger throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million civilians are exposed when army scientists drop lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates."

Yes, it's unethical to do what they did. Yet it's important to note that Bacillus subtilis variant niger is believed to be harmless.

Then there's this: "1978 Experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the CDC, begin in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men." Followed by "1981 First cases of AIDS are confirmed in homosexual men in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, triggering speculation that AIDS may have been introduced via the Hepatitis B vaccine"

So first of all, that's not a secret human biological experiment. So it doesn't even belong there. But the juxtaposition of these Hep B experiments asking for promiscuous homosexual men, followed by mention of AIDS, implies that there was some relationship. Without any evidence. And in fact there IS no evidence, and knowing more about the circumstances can lead to it all seeming quite logical and reasonable. Hepatitis B was becoming quite common in promiscuous homosexual men at the time. The reason for this is that it's sexually transmitted. In fact, it's transmitted in a way similar to AIDS, though it's actually more contagious. With vaccine trials, you want to be testing it on people likely to be exposed to the disease. If you test on people unlikely to be exposed to the disease, then you're not really going to get any evidence about whether it works or not. The people who created the Hep B vaccine are medical heroes, and have saved countless lives. It's a terrible thing to make implications like this web page does, when they're clearly not true. Now on to the second point: first cases of AIDS confirmed, there's speculation it was due to the Hep B vaccine. OK, but we know it wasn't caused by the Hep B vaccine, so what's their point? We now know what causes AIDS. We also know that the risk and exposure profiles overlap closely with risk and exposure to Hep B. So it's no surprise that they've disproportionately affected the same population. We also know that AIDS was around long before the Hep B vaccine ever was created and that study took place. The only way that the Hep B vaccine could have contributed to the AIDS crisis is if needles were reused so that an infected person's blood was on the needle used to vaccinate someone else. But this is something they're not even claiming, and that, again, there's no evidence for. The website is just using vague innuendo with neither proof nor evidence. Which again makes them seem sleazy and loose with facts.

And there there are a bunch of links on that page to highly dubious websites with pretty outlandish theories.