Conflicts of Interests or Crooked Deals with Taxpayer Dollars? Do they make Democracy a pipe dream?

From the Daily Mail: A retired surgeon campaigning for a full coroner’s inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly will have his case heard by a High Court judge  on Monday (December 20). David Halpin, 71, is seeking permission to challenge the Government’s decision in June not to order a coroner’s inquest into the…

Wonderful article by economist Uwe Reinhardt clarifying bizarre hospital charges and third-party reimbursements, and how much of the healthcare dollar they waste. Excerpt: Americans can be forgiven their ignorance on this issue because, as I put it in a recent paper on the subject, the pricing of hospital services is best described as “Chaos Behind…

Unbelievable.  4 years ago, the FDA gave contractor Battelle half a million dollars to study the use of commercial decontamination equipment, using hydrogen peroxide gas, on N95 masks.  Battelle said the method worked in 2016.  But we are only just hearing about it, as thousands of healthcare workers get infected due, in part, to lack…

The NY Times’ Gardiner Harris has covered a crucial issue unpinning the use of drugs in modern medical practice.  As I point out on the left side of this blog:  “Clinical data generated or presented by the manufacturers of drugs, vaccines and devices cannot be trusted: there are hundreds of studies proving this. But this…

A two-paragraph article in today’s NY Times, sans byline, appears to end discussion of the so-called “chemical signature” said to identify the source of water used to grow the anthrax letter spores: On Tuesday at an American Society for Microbiology conference in Baltimore, an F.B.I. scientist, Jason D. Bannan, said the water research ultimately was…

Not to put too fine a point on it, but today’s Reuters story has even more bad news on safety at our highest containment labs: According to a 2012 report by CDC scientists, there were 16 incidents of lost or escaped microbes from select-agent labs in 2004, meaning everything from misplaced samples to an infected…