Completely different, sorry, and a wildly disingenuous comparison. There was no public health crisis at the time that required this, let alone to run it for 40 years. Let's keep to intellectually honest discourse and avoid hyperbole shall we? This is a contentious enough topic as is.

Both were public health officials lying to citizens about the effectiveness of particular actions in protecting their own health. The Tuskegee Experiment directly damaged the health of 458 people and killed 128 of them. The CDC lying about masks put the health of 330 million people at risk and killed...who knows? Maybe it saved more than it killed, but it did kill people.

And that's the thing. The CDC didn't come out and say "we lied to you but the ends justified the means; killing some of you was worth saving more of you". They just tried to pretend it never happened, or alternatively that nobody could possibly have any idea that face masks could help you not infect your neighbors.

Primum non nocere

> wildly disingenuous comparison

No, it is not. The parallels are there so strikingly.

The only similarity is an authority figure said something untrue. By that measure the NORAD Santa tracker is "like Tuskegee."

Shades of grey exist and context matters. The world is not black and white and that isn't comfortable. However the point of delegating authority is to make difficult decisions with imperfect information in challenging circumstances that don't make sense at an individual level.

Further down thread, we acknowledge that certain doctors were dosing people with medicine and lying to them about it.

>As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer.

>“At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the lawsuit says. “Further, Plaintiffs were not informed of the side effects of the drug administered to them or that any results would be used for research purposes.”

>As a result, these men experienced diarrhea, bloody stools, stomach cramps, and vision problems, the lawsuit says, all of which suggest ivermectin poisoning.

Since this was in the middle of a public heath crisis, that behavior is acceptable and the doctor in question should not have lost his license, right?

For those not already familiar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study