In the post this morning my dad recieved a letter asking if he would like a pneumococcal vaccine, since he is over 65. Standard practise it seems. Well my mum looked up what company manufacturers the vaccine on the NHS website. Turns out its Merk. Anyway, she then looked up the vaccine ingredients on the FDA website for the vaccine.
Turns out one of the magic ingredients in phenol. So, looking to wikipedia to found out what this chemical they wanted to inject into my dad was, she was somewhat horrified to find this.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')njections of phenol have occasionally been used as a means of rapid execution. In particular, phenol was used as a means of extermination by the Nazis before and during the Second World War. Originally used by the Nazis in the 1930s as part of its euthanasia program, phenol, inexpensive and easy to make and quickly effective, became the injectable toxin of choice through the last days of the war. Although Zyklon-B pellets, invented by Gerhard Lenz, were used in the gas chambers to exterminate large groups of people, the Nazis learned that extermination of smaller groups was more economical via injection of each victim, one at a time, with phenol. Phenol injections were given to thousands of people in concentration camps, especially at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately one gram is enough to cause death. Injections were administered by medical doctors, their assistants, or sometimes prisoner doctors; such injections were originally given intravenously, more commonly in the arm, but injection directly into the heart, so as to induce nearly instant death, was later preferred.
