AMA Code of Medical Ethics Opinion 2.2.1 https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/pediatric-decision-making As the persons best positioned to understand their child’s unique needs and interests, parents (or guardians) are asked to fill the dual responsibility of protecting their children and, at the same time, empowering them and promoting development of children’s capacity to become independent decision makers. In giving…

Skip navigation https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000445.htm While the legislature has gone mad, fueled by fake news and Pharma largesse, forgotten are our minimum, legal standards that guarantee informed consent and prevent US patients from being forced to comply with vaccinations and other medical procedures.   Interestingly, the NIH has not forgotten we have this right. U.S. National Library of…

I am a board-certified internal medicine doctor.  I graduated with a degree in biology from MIT, attended NJ Medical School and the University of Mississippi Medical School. I have practiced in Maine since 1997.   I am passionate about improving the lives of my patients.  I try to find the least toxic methods of treatment for each…

Four incorrect (but widely repeated) claims were made by Maine representatives to justify getting rid of religious and philosophical vaccine exemptions.  Here I list them and provide documentation to show why they are wrong. 1.  “Only 6 states have higher opt-out rates.”  “We have one of the worst vaccination rates in the country.”  The CDC published vaccination…

Who are the anti-vaxxers, really? If I asked you whether you were for or against pharmaceutical drugs, you would think my question absurd.  Obviously, each drug is different and should be judged on its own merits; furthermore, the usefulness of a drug depends on the specific needs of the person to whom it is given. …

Re: US county bars unvaccinated children from public spaces amid measles emergency Cite this as: BMJ 2019;364:l1481 New York state is one of 47 states that allow parents to claim a religious exemption from their children’s vaccines. One to two percent of parents take advantage of this legal avenue to avoid vaccinating their children. The US has…

https://bangordailynews.com/2019/03/28/opinion/contributors/why-americans-dont-trust-vaccine-makers/ Why Americans don’t trust vaccine makers George Danby | BDN By Meryl Nass, Special to the BDN • March 28, 2019 8:39 amUpdated: March 28, 2019 8:53 am Trust in the pharmaceutical business hit a low in 2018. Only 38 percent of those Americans polled by the Edelman Trust Barometer said they trusted the industry. Some of the reasons for…

Sunday, July 5, 2015 Public Health Gone Awry: Birth Dose of Hepatitis B Vaccine (IOM chimes in on lack of good vaccine data) Hepatitis B is a serious disease.  It is highly prevalent in many countries in Asia (nearly 10% of Chinese carried the illness in 1992), but fortunately is of low prevalence in the…

Hepatitis B vaccine (HBV), administered according to the CDC’s schedule on the day a baby is born, is the thread that unravels the claim that “science” underpins the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule.  Hepatitis B vaccine is unnecessary for 99% of newborns:  those whose parents and siblings do not have contagious Hepatitis B.  Hepatitis B is…

A premier science journal, Science Translational Medicine, pointed out that extraneous substances in medications can and do make people sick–in an article written by scientists at MIT and published March 13, 2019.  Why would anyone assume the same is not true of vaccines? “Inactive” ingredients in oral medications 1.     Daniel Reker1,2,3,*,  2.     Steven M. Blum1,4,5,*, …

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr March 19, 2019 I flew to Hartford, Connecticut last night at the invitation of the Sen. Josh Elliott and the Connecticut State House’s Democratic leadership who are proposing to abolish Religious exemptions for vaccines. (Connecticut has among the highest vaccination rates; 97% With no threat to herd immunity, Pharma profits and…

My name is Dr. Meryl Nass. I am here today to oppose LD798 and support LD987. ·       I am a physician in Ellsworth, Maine. ·       I graduated from MIT and the University of Mississippi School of Medicine. ·       In 2010, I was the chair of a commission established by…

Table. Adjusted vaccine effectiveness estimates for influenza seasons from 2004-2018 Influenza Season† Reference Study Site(s) No. of Patients‡ Adjusted Overall VE (%) 95% CI 2004-05 Belongia 2009 WI 762 10 -36, 40 2005-06 Belongia 2009 WI 346 21 -52, 59 2006-07 Belongia 2009 WI 871 52 22 ,70 2007-08 Belongia 2011 WI 1914 37 22,…

2016 Reportable Infectious Diseases Summary, Maine Scroll down to the Annual Reports to get to those for years 2003-2017 at the following URL: https://www.maine.gov/dhhs/mecdc/infectious-disease/epi/publications/#annualreports (Wish I could find a URL directly for the most recent, 2017 report, but so far have been unable to do so.) 2017-2018 Maine School Immunization Assessment Reports Table 1: 2017-18…

1.  National Notifiable Infectious Diseases and Conditions, 2017.  CDC (Note: these numbers do not always agree with other official government counts of disease.) 2.  FIGURE. Estimated percentage of kindergartners with documented up-to-date vaccination for measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR)*; exempt from one or more vaccines†,§; and not up to date with MMR and not exempt¶ — selected states…

TABLE 1. Estimated vaccination coverage* for MMR, DTaP, and varicella vaccines among children enrolled in kindergarten, by vaccine and immunization program — United States and territories, 2017–18 school year Immunization program Kindergarten population† No. (%) surveyed Type of survey conducted§ Local data available online¶ MMR** DTaP†† Varicella 2 doses (%) 4 or 5 doses (%)…

* Statistics obtained from the Maine CDC and federal CDC publications, collated by Meryl Nass, MD.   I contacted the Maine CDC and was directed to online documents that had the data I was seeking. (I could not find them in searches:  the URL was dictated to me.)  Let me know if you want more detail…

Wednesday, January 2, 2013 (reposted) Michael Osterholm on flu shots: “It’s all a sales job; it’s all public relations” / NY Times I missed this November article on flu shots from the NY Times blog.  Yes, it repeats material I have covered before.  But as healthcare workers continue to be fired from their jobs for refusing flu…

Meryl Nass, M.D. March 10, 2019 Pertussis is a common bacterial infection that is uncommonly diagnosed, with probably over a million cases yearly in the US.  Worldwide there were an estimated 24 million cases, per CDC.[1] “The confirmation of Bordetella pertussis infection is still one of the most difficult diagnostic challenges facing the clinician, particularly…

While the deaths of 129 children due to the new dengue vaccine Dengvaxia are being investigated, and charges are being filed against Ministry of Health and Sanofi officials in the Philippines, the European Medicines Agency approved Dengvaxia in December 2018, and the US FDA gave Dengvaxia an abbreviated review (as a priority) last October, with a…

While the supposed justification for imposing vaccine mandates throughout the United States is to protect the immunocompromised, the actual justification is to protect Pharma profits and then to increase the number of government-recommended vaccines, for which pharmaceutical companies face no liability for injuries.  Pharma’s plan is to greatly expand vaccine sales, from $38 Billion in 2018…

It is not a question whether vaccines are safe, the real question is how safe?  8 weeks ago a famous cancer specialist died hours after receiving a yellow fever vaccine.  For him, they were clearly not safe enough.  From CNN: “(CNN)  “A leading cancer expert, who was described as a “pioneer” in his field by…

–Meryl Nass, MD All have been due to failures of testing or failures in manufacturing processes.  Most of these tragedies occurred before vaccine manufacturers were given virtually complete protection from liability in 1987. With the duration of patent exclusivity determining how much new products earn, products are rushed to market as quickly as possible, most…

The following blog post is about something so unbelievable and so terrible it kept me awake most of last night.  Here it is: “All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis.”  A highly respected group of Danish researchers say this…

Hat tip to Dr. Mercola for this tidbit. Is this the dirty secret of measles outbreaks in the USA today?  That many cases are actually due to vaccines? In 2016 the following paper was published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, authored jointly by staff from the Canadian Public Health Agency and the US CDC. …

Will anthrax vaccine eventually become part of the childhood vaccine schedule?  When we are now vaccinating children for many diseases that they have less than a million in one chance of catching, why not add anthrax vaccine? Those diseases American children aren’t being exposed to are diphtheria, rubella, and polio.  There were only 8 meningitis…

Meryl Nass, MD March 3, 2019 Sixteen different vaccines are recommended for all American children by the CDC.  The schedule for delivering multiple doses of each can be found here. Three of these are used for diseases have been wiped out, and there is less than a one in 50 million chance that a child in…

My 2019 published letter to the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal):  BMJ 2019;364:l312 Measles: two US outbreaks are blamed on low vaccination rates. Another perspective Please allow me to make a few corrections and add context to Ms. Tanne’s article. Endemic measles has been eradicated from the US and the whole of the western hemisphere, per…

     Disease            Number of New Cases, 2017              Deaths 1.  Gonorrhea                     500,000                                       ? 2.  Syphilis                          100,000                                       ? 3.  HIV                                  33,000   …

Meryl Nass, MD First written in May 2015, updated in February 2019 In April-May 2015 there were multiple news articles, and testimonies in the Maine and Vermont legislatures, about the need to impose vaccine mandates to protect immunocompromised children.[1] [2]  I attended the vaccine bills’ hearing in Augusta, Maine on May 11, which lasted into the…

Babies get much higher doses of Diphtheria, Tetanus and Pertussis toxins in vaccines than adults! Tdap DTaP Adults, Pregnant Women, 12 year olds 2, 4, 6 months 18 months 5 years Boostrix Adacel Infanrix Daptacel Tetanus Toxoid 5 Lf * 5 Lf 10 Lf 5 Lf Diptheria Toxoid 2.5 Lf 2 Lf 25 Lf 15…

The CDC website posts information for each of the last 14 flu seasons on the effectiveness of each year’s flu vaccine.  Averaged out, the effectiveness of flu vaccines is 40.5%. Figure. Effectiveness of Seasonal Flu Vaccines from the 2004-2018 Flu Seasons While that may not sound too bad, it means that 60% or 3 out of every…

State medical boards license doctors.  They also enforce standards of practice.  For example, medical boards took away the licenses of over 50 doctors who treated chronic Lyme disease, and investigated many more.  Frustrated Lyme patients, unable to find doctors to treat them, went to their state legislatures to fight back.  As a result, every state…

It is only one study.  But it was carefully done, used interesting methods, and it tried to explore issues that have rarely been studied.  Researchers from the University of Maryland studied students who had new symptoms of influenza to see if infectious flu virus spread during coughs, sneezing, or regular breathing.  They looked at nasal…

Probably the best data on the severity of yearly influenza epidemics comes from deaths in children, because there is mandatory reporting of each death as related to influenza.  Flu-related deaths in adults are reported as due to flu (very few), pneumonia (more) or underlying chronic medical illnesses that contributed to death during or after a…

On January 3, 2018 the Maine Legislature’s joint committee on health discussed adding the Meningococcal ACWY vaccine to the list required to attend school.  France just added 8 vaccines to its required list last week.  Around the world, a push to get more and more vaccines into schoolchildren, using the threat to withhold schooling, has…

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/ No need to run and get that flu shot, the one that is reported to be only 10% effective this year. Yes, the same flu shot that will get me 10% off my grocery bill, if I get vaccinated at the supermarket. When you consider that a shot this year would likely make shots…

Here is a short article, by a doctor I don’t know, which explains how the medical ‘system’, which changed during the Obama administration with a bucketload of new demands, has ruined the profession of medicine for doctors, and brought it to its knees for patients.–Meryl I’ll never leave, but the joy is gone, says Jordan…

TwitterFaceboReddiAn ex-spy chief who spoke out publicly against Trump while inspiring other career intelligence figures to follow suit has admitted his leading role in the intelligence community waging political war against the president, describing his actions as something he didn’t “fully think through”. In a surprisingly frank interview, the CIA’s Michael Morell – who was longtime Deputy Director…

from today’s BMJ (British Medical Journal) Tom Jefferson: The UK turns to Witty, Vallance, and Van Tam for leadership: revolving doors? http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2017/12/06/tom-jefferson-the-uk-turns-to-witty-vallance-and-van-tam-for-leadership-revolving-doors/ December 6, 20173Revolving doors are used to facilitate entry or exit into a building. The trick with using these doors is always to get your timing right. Too fast or too slow and…

In a report just issued (November 2017) by the United Nations Office on Drug Control, we learn that Afghanistan had a huge, bumper crop of opium in 2017.  Its biggest ever.  And if you read the details of the methods used to estimate the amount of opium produced, you will see that there is a…

Ebola Virus RNA detection in Semen More than Two Years after Resolution of Acute Ebola Virus Infection  Abstract  Among 149 men who survived Ebola virus disease (EVD) and donated semen 260–1016 days after EVD onset, Ebola virus (EBOV) ribonucleic acid (RNA) was detected in 13 (9%). Of 137 men who donated semen 2 years after…

Drug companies spent the most money to promote the most useless drugs, according to the following study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal: The relation between promotional spending on drugs and their therapeutic gain: a cohort analysis Joel Lexchin MSc MD Abstract Background: Whether drug promotion helps or hinders appropriate prescribing by physicians is debated. This study…

Chilling report from STATon how Big Pharma is suing governments and overturning patent laws around the world to raise the price of its meds: By BROOK K. BAKER and KATRINA GEDDES AUGUST 21, 2017 Seven months after President Trump accused the pharmaceutical industry of “getting away with murder,” he is busy lining the pockets of large pharmaceutical companies worldwide by…

from  What the demise of the CIA’s anti-Assad program means Washington Post Opinion by David Ignatius July 20, 2017 “What did the CIA’s covert assistance program for Syrian rebels accomplish? Bizarrely, the biggest consequence may be that it helped trigger the Russian military intervention in 2015 that rescued President Bashar al-Assad — achieving the opposite…

Here is a very good start at diagnosing inherent problems in the medical research enterprise, and suggestions for correcting them.–Meryl BMJ 2017; 357 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j2973 (Published 20 June 2017) Carl Heneghan, director1, Kamal R Mahtani, deputy director1, Ben Goldacre, director EBM DataLab1, Fiona Godlee, editor in chief2, Helen Macdonald, head of education2, Duncan Jarvies, multimedia editor2 A response to…

A paper has been published here and, while in draft form, discussed at length here, which reanalyzes the features of Zimbabwe’s anthrax epizootic, which began in 1978 and slowly tailed off after 1980. The authors include an MD and geography specialists from the University of Nevada, Reno.  The first author, James M. Wilson, MD, has…

http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/05/12/boston-electronic-medical-records?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170512 By Drs. John Levinson, Bruce H. Price and Vikas Saini It happens every day, in exam rooms across the country, something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago: Doctors and nurses turn away from their patients and focus their attention elsewhere — on their computer screens. By the time the doctor can finally turn…

One big contributor to ridiculously high administrative costs of medicine in the US is the federal government. Constantly changing federal rules seem to aim for complexity.  Compliance is nearly impossible for small medical practices, because Medicare changes its rules every few months. Doctors have to play by its rules, but it is very difficult to…

Former NY Times journalist and non-practicing physician Elisabeth Rosenthal’s new book, An American Sickness, lists 10 economic “rules” of US medicine that are guaranteed to make money, but not to improve outcomes: More treatment is always better. Default to the most expensive option. A lifetime of treatment is better than a cure. Amenities and marketing…

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) just issued a report that said the NSA had FISA court permission to spy on less than 100 people (terrorism suspects) in 2016, but it collected information on 150 million phone calls instead. You might ask how NSA whittled down the billions of phone calls made…

According to the LA Times and echoed by many other outlets,  “France’s foreign ministry says deadly sarin gas used in a chemical attack in Syria this month that killed 87 people “bears the signature” of President Bashar Assad’s government. A six-page report by French intelligence services claims the nerve agent came from hidden stockpiles of chemical…

1.  The 2013 sarin attacks in Syria, despite efforts to pin it on Assad, were never proven to come from the Syrian government. On the contrary, the chemical weapons were probably supplied to al-Nusra Front ‘rebels’ by agents of Turkey.  In 2014 Seymour Hersh wrote: British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the…

I wrote about Syria’s earlier gas attacks, in 2013.  There was never any evidence linking Syrian government troops or the Assad government to the attacks then.  No proof in the document given to the UN.  And the US report making the case to Congress admittedly was full of unsubstantiated claims and guesswork.  After initially pushing for action, France did a…

The US government spent half a $Billion (yes, with a B) on a UK public relations firm to make fake videos that were supposedly made by al Qaeda (and, I read elsewhere, ISIS.) A former contractor for a UK-based public relations firm says that the Pentagon paid more than half a billion dollars for the production and dissemination of fake Al-Qaeda videos that…

Finally some good news!  Legalizing pot may have large, unpredicted benefits, according to NBC and this Reuters article: In states that legalized medical marijuana, U.S. hospitals failed to see a predicted influx of pot smokers, but in an unexpected twist, they treated far fewer opioid users, a new study shows.  Hospitalization rates for opioid painkiller…

ANTHRAX VACCINATION The multi-billion dollar vaccination for Anthrax that the DoD has required many of its personnel to receive may be one of the largest scams in recent history. Despite numerous congressional inquiries, the program being shut down on multiple occasions, and scientific peer reviews questioning its ability to protect in an actual anthrax attack,…

By the end of 2016, Maine overdose deaths totaled 378, and the black and green lines were a lot steeper.  The black line was off the chart (literally). Also note that overdose deaths from prescription (legal) narcotics have actually been stable, and fallen a little, since 2002.  Legal drugs are not a factor in the…

https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates​National Overdose Deaths—Number of Deaths from Heroin. The figure above is a bar chart showing the total number of U.S. overdose deaths involving heroin from 2002 to 2015. The chart is overlayed by a line graph showing the number of deaths of females and males. From 2002 to 2015 there was a 6.2-fold increase in…

1.  Monday, September 7, 2015The Real Afghanistan Surge is in Heroin Production and Tripled Opium Cultivation since the US military arrived/ UN and US Government documents 2.  My vanished post, and important comment, recovered from the WayBackMachine, about how US heroin comes mostly from Afghanistan, not Mexico, and the US Government could easily stem the…

CIA staff specialize in overthrowing foreign leaders they don’t like by planting stories in the media. Skill now used on US president? — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 24, 2017

100 Strange Russian deaths Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s UN ambassador since 2006,  died unexpectedly at age 64 in the consulate, two days ago.  And while it was said initially that Churkin died of a heart attack, that is not the case, according to his autopsy. He is the fifth Russian diplomat to die unexpectedly in 3 months….

Source: MichaelPRamirez.com

FEBRUARY 17, 2017by DAVID PRICE in Counterpunch With members of the CIA and NSA leaking materials on Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian officials, we are witnessing a slow boiling domestic coup that will transform American governance and the Executive Branch’s relationships with intelligence agencies. It remains to be seen whether these moves signal broader attacks on the…

The U.S. military under former President Barack Obama quietly hid “potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes” from the American public that likely killed hundreds of civilians in war-ravaged Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, the Military Times has found. In 2016 alone, U.S. combat aircraft conducted at least 456 airstrikes in Afghanistan that were not recorded as part of an open-source…

​By Mark Crispin Miller Attacking everything Trump says as wholly false, just because Trump said it, is just as mindless as Trump’s own knee-jerk attacks on everything his critics say. And since Trump, now and then, surprisingly refutes some Big Lie that no other president—or any other major player in the political establishment (the press…

I recently spent a lot of time in Spain, did a lot of reading about Spain, and got some surprises. The Spanish are the longest-lived people in Europe (barring tiny places like Monaco and San Marino), and are between the 5th and 10th most long-lived nation in the world, depending on who is counting. The…

The issue of healthcare worker (HCW) flu vaccine mandates is of particular interest because no one has shown the shots help patients.  Healthcare workers have had to accept many vaccines, including that for Hepatitis B, for decades.  But flu vaccination mandates are particularly egregious. The flu shot is given yearly.  It does not prevent flu…

From Reuters came a short piece on a new Executive Order, without much commentary to put it into perspective re how things worked in former administrations. President Donald Trump on Saturday put restrictions on the kind of lucrative lobbying gigs his White House aides and other administration officials can accept after they leave government.  Trump,…

MERCURY and VACCINES RFK, JR manifesto on mercury and vaccines > I am pro vaccine. I had all of my six children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines save millions of lives.  So let me explain why I edited the book Thimerosal: Let The Science Speak, which exposes the dangerous—and wholly unnecessary—use of the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in vaccines being given to millions of childrenand pregnant…

An interesting study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, was discussed yesterday on Medscape.  Unsurprisingly, it appears we doctors overestimate the benefit of what we do, and underestimate the risk–by a lot. “Clinicians are likely to underestimate harms and overestimate benefits of tests and treatments, according to the results of a review of 48 studies published online January…

From Mike Whitney at Counterpunch, what we all should consider, as we seek to understand the craziness of the last several months :  “Trump wants to fundamentally change Washington’s  approach to policy, that is, he wants to abandon the destabilizing wars and regime change operations that have characterized US policy in the past and work collaboratively with countries…

I don’t understand why many people are still upset about Donald Trump’s election victory. The movement to keep all things Trump stirred up is unprecedented. The only conclusion I can draw is that many Americans have gotten lost in the jungle of identity politics that was created by and for the Hillary campaign, and are…

Below is the EEOC decree on the Erie, PA hospital’s flu vaccine mandate from December 23, 2016. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the end for flu vaccine mandates for healthcare workers.  And also the beginning of the end for financially-motivated flu shots for all patients hospitalized from October to April each year, unless…

Will Requiring Flu Vaccinations Leave Employers Feeling Under the Weather? Wednesday, January 4, 2017 With flu season quickly approaching, health care employers may be considering mandatory influenza vaccinations for their workforce. Mandatory vaccination policies may dramatically increase patient safety, but they may also cause friction within the workforce when employees object on religious grounds to…

In the last post, I explained that CDC was the source of the plan to investigate rates of healthcare worker flu vaccinations.  CDC collaborates with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to use staff (and patient) flu vaccination rates to calculate hospital “quality” — and the “quality” number determines up to 4% of acute…

A hospital in Erie, PA fired 6 healthcare workers for refusing the annual flu shot.  Taken to the EEOC, the hospital has settled by offering them their jobs back with $300,000 in back pay. The interesting piece to me is the acknowledgement that the hospital imposed its mandate (with over 99% compliance of its remaining…

The following piece was written by DC Dave, who shares my take on the opioid crisis, and its roots in the US deployment in Afghanistan.  He has elaborated on the heroin epidemic, noting how the mass media have shied away from a realistic discussion and interpretation of the epidemic of injected opioids sweeping the world,…

Drug overdose deaths in the United States hit record numbers in 2014 More people died from drug overdoses in 2014 than in any year on record. The majority of drug overdose deaths (more than six out of ten) involve an opioid.1 And since 1999, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioid pain relievers and heroin) nearly…

Last week’s Washington Post had a very sad, haunting story about the death of a twelve year old girl from flu-related causes.  Her mother had tried for ten years to have her, and finally succeeded using in vitro fertilization.  Then her daughter developed flu, organ failure and died, in rapid succession, last January. It was…

Saturday, January 30, 2016 NY Times’ penetrating look at the heroin epidemic gets the cause and solution all wrong On October 30, 2015 the NY Times published an in-depth article on the heroin epidemic, focused on New Hampshire, which saw the greatest increase in deaths from drug overdoses (74%) in the US between 2013 and 2014.  New Hampshire…

Government Corruption beats Terrorism and Fears of Economic Collapse by a mile.  Little wonder, with two presidential candidates who each have crooked foundations (used at a minimum for money-laundering and apparent foreign policy ‘quid pro quo’s’ for the Clinton Foundation). Hillary stole White House furniture and gifts when she left in 2000, while Trump used…

FDA Adds Boxed Warning to Hepatitis C Drugs, Warns of Hepatitis B Reactivation Risk  Posted 04 October 2016By Zachary Brennan The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday warned of serious risks for some patients who have been infected with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and are being treated with certain direct-acting antiviral (DAA) medicines for…

A NYT editorial discussed healthcare costs last week using two simple graphs. In case you still have good insurance, take a look at what has happened to the rest of us.  Over seventeen years, the cost of insurance premiums has risen at 6 times the rate of inflation.  Over ten years, deductibles rose at 16…

NPR tells us influenza vaccine comes in twelve flavors this year.  You can pick 3 antigens or 4.  With or without a squalene adjuvant? (Fluad is the first US vaccine to use the MF59 squalene adjuvant, though its manufacturer worked to get it into the US market for almost 2 decades.)  High dose or regular strength? Made in…

From Dr. Mandrola at Medscape, a compilation of recent events in medical “science” that make one wonder whether the practice of medicine is going to last much longer, given the amount of corruption now woven into it:   Cynic: A person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or…

Developed under the direction and sponsorship of Merck. Helpful information when talking to parents about HPV vaccination Prescribing Information     Patient Information When talking to parents about the HPV vaccine… Focus clearly on cancer prevention The CDC suggests:Consider telling parents that HPV vaccination is about cancer prevention: cervical, vaginal, vulvar, and anal1 Example: “HPV can cause certain cancers,…

Remember when we kept on hearing that the next big disaster was going to be avian (bird) flu?  Well, bird flu petered out and instead of jumping to humans jumped into a black hole.  The lack of flu vaccinations for farmed chickens and ducks in North America may be key.  The following excerpts come from…

Political Corruption comes in many forms.  Here is just one of them–Meryl Leaks Show DNC Asked White House to Reward Donors With Slots on Boards and Commissions by Alec Goodwin, Center for Responsive Politics Email exchanges involving top officials at the Democratic National Committee released along with private documents by WikiLeaks show that DNC officials hoped to…

I wrote an Op-Ed for the Portland, Maine Sunday Telegram about my bizarre journey trying to get a prescription filled.  It was published August 7, 2016. Here it is. http://www.pressherald.com/2016/08/07/maine-voices-drug-costs-should-make-you-blink/ ELLSWORTH — Pricing of and access to medication are handled in an insane manner in the United States. It has been said that between 20…

 After the dizzying disclosures of the Panama Papers, Madeline Ashby writing in the Ottawa Citizen asks: But what does all this mean? It means that the austerity measures proposed in Britain and elsewhere are complete nonsense. If the people “hiding their piggy banks” in the islands would simply pay their fair share, their countries could…

Today, CDC admits a lab worker got ill from a salmonella strain being studied. But I cannot tell what the disease was.  Salmonella gastroenteritis?  Typhoid fever?  A complicated bloodborne infection that may affect the heart, joints, etc.? How long was the worker ill? Was this person spreading the infection via the oral-fecal route,  as did…

I wonder how these 61 people were selected to have the President commute their sentences? I’d have expected him to start with jailed drug users, not dealers.  Some of these people were jailed for selling kilos of cocaine, for example.  Today’s WaPo lists the names and charges of every one of these 61 lucky people.

On March 29, 2016 the White House issued a press release on its new heroin initiative.  The Washington Post described how much Obama proposed to do.  The long list of fixes and new public-private partnerships address addiction treatment almost exclusively, with a sop to law enforcement.  The 1 billion dollars spent, Obama said, will treat…

Why is oil so cheap these days?  Maybe part of the answer is that the US government absolutely had to stop fracking– because it finally admitted the resulting earthquakes could not be tolerated, nor could the poisoned water be ignored any longer. Like so much else in our modern USA, the profits derived from fracking…

Can you be sickened any more by the us role in Syria?  how many sides has the us government supplied?  how much must the syrian people pay for our recklessness?   how many us troops are shooting at each other in syria? Below is verbatim from the March 27 Los Angeles times:  read it and…