“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
— William Wilberforce
Opinion | Politicians are dreaming of a “Manhattan Project-style effort” to develop and distribute a coronavirus vaccine “for most Americans by year’s end.” To accomplish this dramatic cut in vaccine development time, “the program will pull together private pharmaceutical companies, government agencies and the military.” Normal vaccine development time is significantly longer. Fourteen potential coronavirus vaccines are vying to […]
His story starts in the same place it almost ended, a hospital where doctors treated him for pneumonia in 2014. When I was being discharged, the nurse said, oh, hey, by the way, you need a flu shot. He says that flu shot nearly killed him, causing Guillain-Barré Syndrome. The pain was just massive. A […]
Opinion | Bills to either remove or restrict vaccine exemptions have been filed across the U.S. in 2019. One of the most striking was New York’s A2371, which eliminated the religious exemption to vaccination in one day, with no public hearings. Soon after, New York state health officials eliminated the ability of doctors to grant medical […]
The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has awarded the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) a five-year $10 million contract to study the polio-like condition known as acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), also sometimes referred to as acute flaccid paralysis (AFP).1 2 According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “As part […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on July 9, 2019 that it had confirmed 11 cases of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) in eight states this year, including four cases in California and cases in Maryland, Nebraska, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and West Virginia. The CDC is investigating another 46 possible cases […]
Sometimes topics for opinion pieces just fall out of the sky. Last week, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that the new estimate for the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine during the second half of the 2018-2019 “flu season” was only nine percent. That’s pretty bad even by influenza vaccine […]
The government of Peru declared a 90-day health emergency earlier this month following an outbreak of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) that has killed at least four people in the country. According to the Institute of Neurological Sciences (INCN) in Lima, Peru, the emergency was declared because the cases “have unusual and atypical characteristics that require rapid […]
In October 2017, the government of Costa Rica added the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to the country’s national vaccination program. The decision to do so was based on the recommendation of the Costa Rican Ministry of Health’s National Commission on Vaccination and Epidemiology (CNVE), which is the Costa Rican government’s equivalent of the U.S. Centers […]