With the hearings on RFK Jr coming in the next week and his vaccine views sure to receive prominent discussion, it is a good time to consider when a vaccine did great harm, the consequences and their value today. A twofer!
“If anyone should have lobbied against the use of vaccines in this country, it was my family.
My Aunt Jean, my father’s older sister, was a victim of the infamous Cutter vaccine, an early variant of the polio vaccine presumed to contain an inactivated version of the live virus. Except that it wasn’t inactive. Some 200,000 children in Western and Midwestern states received that vaccine in the spring of 1955. That number included three of my cousins — Aunt Jean’s children.”
From Stat, The infamous ‘Cutter vaccine’ changed my family forever
“Pharmaceutical companies abandoned vaccines. In 1980, eighteen companies made vaccines. Within only a few years, four remained. Realizing that American children might soon be denied life-saving vaccines, the federal government stepped in. On October 18th, 1986, legislators passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. One month later, President Ronald Reagan signed it into law.”
From the ever-educating Paul Offit, A Dangerous Time for America’s Children: Part II
What’s in a name?
“There’s a reason some researchers hate taxonomy. It’s a sleepy meerkat of a scientific discipline, occasionally popping out to rename your favorite organism or say something absurd about the natural world: That there are, secretly, four species of giraffe, or that microbiologists’ had been misclassifying bacteria and fungi for decades; that humans arguably belong to the same domain as the microbes on deep sea vents; or, sheepishly, that “fish” do not exist.”
There is a new taxonomy for viruses, as reported by STAT. Want to start a fight among virus experts? Ask about HIV’s new name. Spoiler alert: it's “Lentivirus humimdef1. SARs-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, would be known as the Betacoronavirus pandemicum”
I’ve written on nutrition many times, especially as the MAHA crowd seeks their place at the dining table. For all their fixation on instructing us on the proper diet, only about 50% of Americans follow the government’s recommendations and for far more of us, our waistlines continue to expand.
“The biggest flaw in Kennedy’s plan is the assumption that he can change people’s eating habits by telling them what is and isn’t healthy, and banning a select few controversial ingredients. Changing those habits will require the government to tackle the underlying reasons Americans are so awful at keeping up with healthy eating. Not everyone suffers from an inability to resist Double Stuf Oreos: A survey from the Cleveland Clinic found that 46 percent of Americans see the cost of healthy food as the biggest barrier to improving their diet, and 23 percent said they lack the time to cook healthy meals.
If Kennedy figures out how to actually get people like me to care enough about healthy eating to resist the indulgent foods that give them pleasure, or if he figures out a way to get cash-strapped families on public assistance to turn down cheap, ready-to-eat foods, he will have made significant inroads into actually making America healthy again. But getting there is going to require a lot more than a catchy slogan and some sound bites.”
Nicholas Florko is singing my song. From The Atlantic, Public Health Can’t Stop Making the Same Nutrition Mistake
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
