Bernice Eddy Warned of Defective Salk Polio Vaccine
During the Republican primary presidential debate on September 16, 2015, CNN moderator Jake Tapper noted a U.S. Treasury Department announcement that a woman would appear on the $10 bill. He posed the following question to the 11 candidates on stage, “What woman would you like to see on the $10 bill?” In response, the candidates mentioned eight women, including civil…
WHO Wants to Market Vaccines Like Burgers and Soda
On August 18, 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a press release from Geneva, Switzerland titled “Vaccine hesitancy: A growing challenge for immunization programmes.” The focus of the release was to highlight views expressed by public health officials in special edition of the journal Vaccine, which was “guest-edited” and published by the WHO.
Viruses, Always the Easy Scapegoat
One of the problems with the current and evolving discussion within within the global health community and the media about the Zika virus (… Have you seen all those cockeyed, sensationalistic headlines?) is the assumption that the virus is dangerous and we should all be worried about its spread. This is similar to what has occurred with the poliovirus. The fact is that…
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…