Category
1945–2024 · United States
The claim that fluoride was added to water to pacify populations dates to 1950s anti-communist pamphleteering. The dental benefit is real and measured. The dosing question has been revised downward on evidence, which is what a health policy is supposed to do.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2016–2024 · Global
US diplomats and intelligence officers reported sudden, directional sensations followed by lasting symptoms, starting in Havana in 2016. Seven years of investigation produced two credible and incompatible readings of the same case files.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2006–2023 · Global
A solution that becomes chlorine dioxide when mixed as instructed, sold as a cure for HIV, cancer, malaria, autism and COVID-19, with the claim that regulators suppress it because it is cheap. People have died. Its distributors were convicted.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2002–2024 · United States
People report fibres emerging from their skin, along with crawling sensations and lesions, and are told by doctors that no infection is present. The distress is genuine and the condition is recognised clinically. What is not supported is the claim that a pathogen is being covered up.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1950–1969 · United States
In 1950 the US Navy sprayed bacteria over San Francisco from a ship offshore to model a biological attack. It was one of hundreds of open-air tests conducted over American cities for two decades. Residents were not told, then or for twenty-six years afterwards.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1953–1973 · United States
For twenty years the CIA funded research into chemical and psychological control of human behaviour, including administering LSD to people who had not consented and did not know. Most of the files were destroyed on the director's order in 1973. What survived was enough.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1953–1957 · Global
To measure how much fallout from nuclear testing was ending up in human bone, the Atomic Energy Commission collected thousands of tissue samples — many from dead infants — from around the world, without telling the families. The programme's own transcripts record officials discussing the difficulty of obtaining bodies.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1950–2024 · Philippines / Brazil / Global
Practitioners appear to open a patient's body with their hands, remove diseased tissue and leave no wound. The tissue is chicken. The technique is sleight of hand, and it is sold to people with terminal diagnoses.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1994–2015 · United States / United Kingdom
A drug trial in adolescents that failed on every one of its eight pre-specified measures was published as showing the drug was effective and well tolerated. Two million prescriptions a year followed.
Medicine & Public Health · 4 min
1929–1980 · Global
Asbestos manufacturers knew by the 1930s that their product killed the people who worked with it. They edited the medical literature, kept diagnoses from workers, and kept selling for another forty years.
Medicine & Public Health · 2 min
1981–2023 · Global
A chain email circulated from the 1990s attributing multiple sclerosis, lupus and blindness to a sweetener, and a corrupt approval to Donald Rumsfeld. The disease list is fabricated. The regulatory history is real, contested in public, and more interesting than the conspiracy version.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2019–2024 · China / Global
Two hypotheses remain live: that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through the wildlife trade, and that it escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. Serious scientists hold both positions. The decisive early evidence sits in China and has not been released.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2017–2018 · Puerto Rico / United States
Puerto Rico's official Hurricane Maria toll stood at 64 for eleven months. Independent researchers estimated thousands. The government fought the release of death records, lost, commissioned its own study, and revised the figure to 2,975.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1951–1998 · Korea / China / Soviet Union
China and North Korea alleged in 1952 that the United States was dropping plague-infected insects on Korea. Captured American airmen confessed. The Soviet files record the whole thing as a fabrication and describe how it was assembled.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2020–2022 · United States
New York published a nursing home death toll that excluded residents who died after transfer to hospital. The Attorney General found the real figure was about twice as high. The administration's own aide said the data had been held back.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1992–2008 · Democratic Republic of the Congo / Global
The claim that HIV entered humans through a polio vaccine trialled in the Congo in the late 1950s. The vaccine was tested and was clean, and the virus is older than the trial.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1980–1995 · United States / Canada / United Kingdom
For more than a decade, therapists, police and prosecutors across the English-speaking world pursued a conspiracy of satanic cults abusing children in daycare centres. More than twelve thousand accusations produced no corroborated case. People went to prison anyway.
Cults & Movements · 3 min
1965–1980 · United States
In the 1960s a sugar industry trade group paid Harvard nutrition researchers to write a review that shifted blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat. The funding was not disclosed. The review shaped dietary guidance for decades.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1953–1998 · United States
Tobacco companies knew their product caused cancer and was addictive, and spent four decades and enormous sums manufacturing public uncertainty about both. The internal documents are now searchable online because a court ordered them released.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1932–1972 · United States
For forty years the US Public Health Service followed 399 Black men with syphilis in Macon County, Alabama, without treating them — and, once penicillin became standard, worked to keep them from getting it. The study was not secret. It was published in medical journals for decades before anyone stopped it.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2022–2024 · Ukraine / Russia
Russia told the UN Security Council that the United States operated a military biological weapons network in Ukraine. The laboratories are real and their funding is published. What they do is upgrade the security of Soviet-era pathogen collections.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1936–1945 · China / Japan
A Japanese army unit in occupied Manchuria conducted lethal human experimentation and biological warfare on a mass scale. After the war the United States granted its senior officers immunity from prosecution in exchange for their data.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1998–2024 · Global
The claim originates in a twelve-child study that was retracted, whose author was found to have manipulated the data and to have been paid by litigants. Cohort studies since have followed millions of children and found nothing. Measles came back anyway.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min