Media Claims Vaccine Victory After Scaring Public Half to Death on Measles
The University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, MI hired GfK Custom Research, LLC to design and conduct a survey of parents’ opinions about the benefits and safety of vaccines, compared to a year ago. GfK is a market research firm that prides itself on being able to “see the big picture.” Its descriptive motto is: “Our team of data scientists…
Pharma Cash Raises Questions of Undue Influence on SB 277
Over the last few months, California has been at the forefront of a heated vaccine debate in the United States. The SB 277 vaccination bill eliminates all personal and religious belief exemptions to the state’s childhood vaccine requirements for entry into public and private schools, as well as daycare centers. The state Senate voted 25-10 in favor of the bill on May 14, 2015.
India Still Reporting Cases of Polio-like Acute Flaccid Paralysis
India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has reported that it has investigated approximately 18,000 cases of Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) in the country since January 2014 as part of its national polio surveillance program, established in 1997, and that all of the cases have tested negative for poliovirus. Some 50,000 cases of AFP are being detected annually in…
Polio Wasn’t Vanquished, It Was Redefined
Perhaps the most egregious example of clever sleight of hand (and outright rewriting of history) on the part of public health officials in the United States occurred in 1954 when the U.S. government changed the diagnostic criteria for polio. It was the year that medical researcher and virologist Jonas Salk produced his inactivated injectable polio vaccine ((IPV). The vaccine was licensed in 1955 and began to be used…
Sugar Nation: Is Sugar the New Alcohol?
It is a common misconception to associate cirrhosis of the liver with alcohol abuse, but the truth is that more and more people who either don’t drink alcohol at all, or drink very little, are being diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which can range in severity from simple excess fat in the liver to cirrhosis or end-stage liver disease. The disorder has…
A Measles Death, Vaccines, and the Media’s Failure to Inform
Last week, it was widely reported in the mainstream media that the autopsy of a woman who died of pneumonia earlier this year in the state of Washington found that she had been infected with measles, making this the first confirmed case of measles-related death in the US since 2003. Playing its usual role, the mainstream media is up in arms, blaming the death…
