We are disappointed that the judge has refused permission for a full judicial review of the controversial puberty blocker trial. In our view the trial as proposed is unethical, experimental and unsafe. Children as young as 11 will have their critical growth at puberty stopped for two years, introducing medical harm to previously healthy bodies.
The trial will go ahead despite leaving many questions unanswered and public confidence in the medical profession shattered. This is an unprecedented experiment on children who are too young to be able to give full consent.
When the risks are serious and profoundly life-changing and the benefits uncertain it is unethical to experiment on children. The trial as proposed is unlikely in any case to provide answers to the question of benefit and risk. We believe the results of the trial in its current design would almost certainly have been rejected by the Cass Review as low quality evidence.
This trial introduces a new low safety bar and sets a worrying precedent for the protection of children in future medical trials. If this trial is considered compatible with international standards, any medical trial with equally low safety standards can be justified.
The key evidence presented on behalf of the claimants at the permission hearing was that the trial as currently proposed does not meet the condition of clinical trials for minors in international regulations. The evidence presented at the two day hearing ran to 13,000 documents but the defendents still could not provide a clear answer to this fundamental objection.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) along with all the experts at Kings College London (KCL), the Maudsley hospital (SLaM), the Health Research Authority (HRA) and Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) could provide no evidence that blockers are ‘likely to’ produce benefits for the trial participants, but only offer a ‘reasonable prospect of benefit’, a lower bar.
The defendants also rejected evidence from animal trials and the data linkage study as necessary before conducting a trial on children.
The questions raised by the claimants are well-founded and worthy of the full scrutiny a judicial review would deliver. When the issue at hand is child safety the highest level of scrutiny is necessary both to protect children and to foster public trust in the medical profession.
We are dismayed that this experiment is happening in the UK. When a medical intervention carries such high risks there is a corresponding increased duty to uphold safeguarding standards. We believe that this trial does the opposite and weakens the established and necessary protections for children now and in future medical trials.
How is it that one naive person can be in charge of judging such an important decision? And how can that person disallow proper review of something so important that could allow the lives of innocent minors to be altered on the whim of irresponsible dogma ridden parents?
John P.
I used to think we were once a society that tried to protect Children, but that despite best efforts man will always find a way to access Children, when there is a desire to harm or abuse or worse.
Seeing how Cass has bowed of late to support the trial, one wonders what methods have been used to encourage positive support for such a heinous damaging trial. Big pharma, corporate greed? Who knows!
Anyone who thinks it’s necessary to pretend to someone that they can change their birth Sex is a liar, a trickster, a devil even, but for what means?
Do not trust them.
Appeal to a higher court and eventually the Supreme Court if necessary.
It is very frightening to hear this, & ultimately heartbreaking. Its like something from a dystopian world.
It’s NOT “like something”, – we DO LIVE in a dystopian world. I recommend Jennifer Bilek’s “Transsexual, Transgender, Transhuman”. Let everybody KNOW the technocratic, transhuman dystopia they are building for us….
Daaaaaaaaaamm that’s wild, UK! If it can happen there, sadly it will probably spread to US. What higher power is being served when they choose to put children at risk? Greed, most likely.