Medystopia

December, 11, 2013 | 3 Comments

Comments

  1. A striking development in this historical episode occurred earlier this year when Art Caplan proposed the legal harassment of the non-vaccinating in Harvard Law Review, opposed by Mary Holland, but taken up again Dorit Reiss of Hastings law school in San Francisco.

    http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2013/05/23/liability-for-failure-to-vaccinate/

    http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2013/06/21/guest-post-crack-down-on-those-who-dont-vaccinate-a-response-to-art-caplan/

    http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2013/06/24/guest-post-no-liability-for-failure-to-vaccinate-the-case-has-not-been-made-a-response-to-mary-holland/

    According to Wiki:

    “UCSF is administered separately from Hastings College of Law, another UC institution located in San Francisco. In recent years, UCSF and UC Hastings have increased their collaboration, including the formation of the UCSF/Hastings Consortium on Law, Science, and Health Policy.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Hastings_College_of_the_Law

  2. Unlike their counterparts in the US the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation with unusual wisdom have long held off introducing a chicken pox vaccine perhaps because the destruction of natural immunity would cause a rise in shingles, which on the whole is more serious.

    http://www.hpa.org.uk/webw/HPAweb&HPAwebStandard/HPAweb_C/1221638180451?p=1204186170287

    Now that we have the vaccine for shingles the vaccination of infants for chicken pox will perhaps not be long delayed, and then we will all be stuffed.

    Best thing, I guess, is to keep up the dose of vitamin C (at least until the government bans it).

  3. Nice story! But I wonder if the real journey into myth and madness here will be found in Pharma’s quest to get more and more of us to take these very expensive and seriously risky potions. For those staring catastrophic disability in the face, maybe it’s a fair bargain. But the race is now on to unleash these strange brews for almost anything that ails us – including high cholesterol:

    http://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/news/20120326/biologic-drug-lowers-ldl-cholesterol

    I feel like we’re getting close to the ultimate absurdity foretold by old-time Yiddish comedians, where we kill the healthy chicken to make chicken soup for the sick chicken! In this case, people will be asked to screw around with their immune system in order to fix their high cholesterol. So maybe we all have within us a healthy chicken and a sick chicken – as well as an “at-risk chicken” or two?

    Or we could even take the old story literally, in a country that can contemplate a $25,000 cholesterol drug while balking at giving food-stamps to poor kids and their parents. Too bad for the chickens who ain’t got the “scratch.”

    Either way, looks like it’s the drug companies’ lives we’re being asked to save, not our own. I hope to hell they never figure out how to take out a patent on chicken soup.

Leave a Reply