TRUST THE SCIENCE: Nature: When scientists gave 1,000 vulnerable people hepatitis over 30 years: What sort of system nurtures a decades-long programme of deliberately infecting children and prisoners with a dangerous disease? “There was a time when we could have casually looked down our noses at mid-twentieth-century ignorance about infectious diseases. But with the world still in the throes of a coronavirus pandemic, I was struck by the parallels. Witness how efforts have been focused on the acute impacts of disease (hospitalization, death) without much thought to long-term consequences (disability). Or think of how those with the least agency — children, people in prison, people with severe mental illnesses — have been put at risk by those with the most power.”