CDC Advisory Committee Votes Against Universal Use of MenB Vaccines
The Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met on June 24 and voted against universal recommendations for MenB vaccines. These vaccines were recently approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for use in adolescents and young adults. Considerations used by the ACIP when making universal (Category A) recommendations for vaccines include disease incidence, and benefit…
Tara Haelle’s ‘Straight Talk’ on Science, Medicine, Health and Vaccines
Business magazine Forbes regularly features a column by freelancer Tara Haelle. The column goes by the slogan, “I offer straight talk on science, medicine, health and vaccines.” The phrase “straight talk” gives the impression that the brand of writing is independent, balanced, and well-informed—which would suggest a minimal level of editorial bias. During the…
Biomedical Scientist Imprisoned for Fraudulent HIV Vaccine Research
On July 1, 2015, Dong-Pyou Han, a former biomedical scientist at Iowa State University, was sentenced to 57 months in prison for falsifying clinical trial data on HIV vaccines. He was also fined $7.2 million and will be under supervision for three years after his release. The story has been covered extensively by the media in the United States and abroad, including…
America’s ‘Good Medicine’ Mindset
The idea that you can give someone a disease, or something worse than that disease, by giving them a medicine designed to cure that disease or prevent the patient from contracting it and spreading it to others is so counter-intuitive, so unethical, so downright insane that it is unthinkable, unconscionable, unbelievable. After all, isn’t the first principle of medicine to “first, do no harm”? And yet… I think one of the greatest songs of all time is the one by…
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It’s Time to Challenge Those Ruling Our Health Care System
The public conversation about whether we should have the freedom to choose how we want to maintain our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health has become one of the most important public conversations of our time. It is a conversation that challenges us to examine complex public policy, scientific, ethical, legal, philosophical, economic, political and…