The Price of Medical Denialism
Every morning I wake up, and every evening right before I fall asleep, a thought enters my mind about all the children around the world who will receive or have received vaccines that day. The thought nags at me… until I finally get up or doze off. It’s a huge number of kids whose lives are being subjected to medical Russian roulette. According to the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “More than 10 million vaccines per year are given to children less than…
On the Question of Vaccine Effectiveness
On February 26, 2015, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its vaccine effectiveness estimates for the vaccine against the influenza A and B H3N2 viruses for the 2014-2015 season. The CDC announced that the vaccine was 18% effective against the predominant A strain of the flu and 45% effective against the B strain. An earlier CDC estimate (on January 16) of the vaccine’s effectiveness against the A strain was 23%.
Vaccines: A Stacked System
The “system” with regard to vaccines and vaccination policy is stacked against truth finding and truth telling. Vaccine makers, by law, are not liable for any harm caused by their products. When people seek compensation for vaccine harm from the US government’s Vaccine Court under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and, after years and years of litigation, they happen to win their case, they are prohibited by law from talking about their case to anyone.
Pushing a False Dichotomy on Vaccines
At the end of her commentary on U.S. Congressman Bill Posey’s July 29, 2015 statement on the floor of the House of Representatives regarding whistleblower Dr. William Thompson’s allegations of fraud against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) involving a CDC study on the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and possible links to autism, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson writes…
DDT and the Rise and Fall of Polio
I love watching old black and white newsreels from the first half of the 20th century. It’s a fascinating period of history, and it’s one of the few in which we can go back and revisit almost as if we were there. There was a span of years immediately after World War II, however, that is particularly interesting, because it doesn’t normally get a lot of attention, compared to the war years and the “the fabulous ’50s.”
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…