Operation Whitecoat was a series of secret biological tests performed on Seventh-day Adventists.

The United States General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, the United States Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.

The quote from the study:

Many experiments that tested various biological agents on human subjects, referred to as Operation Whitecoat, were carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in the 1950's. The human subjects originally consisted of volunteer enlisted men. However, after the enlisted men staged a sitdown strike to obtain more information about the dangers of the biological tests, Seventh-day Adventists who were conscientious objectors were recruited for the studies.

Footnotes

1. Staff Report prepared for the committee on veterans' affairs December 8, 1994 John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia, Chairman.^*

Further reading

• PBS: Religion and Ethics Newsweekly "Over a 20-year period, beginning in the 1950s, the army used Seventh-Day Adventists to test vaccines against biological weapons. Today they look back on their experience, most of them with no regrets."
• Adventist News Network: Adventist Volunteers Lauded on "Operation Whitecoat" Anniversary
• Linden, Caree Vander United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases celebrates 50-year research tradition March 3, 2005 "Operation Whitecoat served as a model for the ethical use of human subjects in research"

Military operations | Seventh-day Adventist Church