Submitted by SecretAgentIceBat t3_11dki5z in todayilearned
Damned autocracies, the same happened with the COVID doctors who blew the whistle in Wuhan!!
This surely falls under
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
Terrible situation.
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Care to elaborate?
It doesn't help that the government at the time was literally a mob of gangsters. They thought nothing of enslaving millions of their own people for free labor.
Science in the Soviet union was definitely fucky until Stalin died
That’s the most Soviet title ever. I’m surprised they even got released
The first doctors who informed about COVID were jailed for altering the public order or sth like that... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/02/04/chinese-doctor-has-coronavirus/
Same energy as the people screaming to lock up Dr. Fauci.
Time's ticking, America
Great way to keep all your people from dying of disease is to imprison any who research diseases
But why would they frame them at all.
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The people actually responsible for health and safety needed someone convenient to blame, other than their own failures.
If thousands of soldiers are getting sick from a tick-borne disease, someone has to answer uncomfortable questions about why they are surrounded by rats.
Much easier to blame evil scientists for sabotage.
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SecretAgentIceBat OP t1_ja95cgx wrote
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877959X17302042
Paywalled, academic source: "It was 1937, a period of massive oppression in the Soviet Union. This occurred in the party ranks, in the army, among scientists, artists, workmen, and peasants. The leader of the first expedition, Professor Zilber, and two of his team members, A.D. Sheboldaeva and T.M. Safonova, were arrested after slanderous denunciation. Zilber and his colleagues were accused of spreading Japanese encephalitis virus under the guise of performing scientific research and of spreading the newly discovered and isolated dangerous virus among military contingents in the Far East and among the inhabitants of Moscow (Kisselev and Levina, 2005). However, the charges were so absurd and Zilber’s innocence was so evident that he was released in 1939. Perhaps, this release occurred because of the arrival of the new leader of repressive measures, Lawrenti Beria, who tried to disguise mass terror by releasing a small number of prisoners (see also Kisselev et al., 1992). It also needs mentioning that Zilber’s followers and his colleagues, as well as the famous writer V. Kaverin and the microbiologist and epidemiologist Zinaida Ermolyeva, who gave the USSR penicillin during World War II, campaigned vigorously for Zilber’s release."