Last week, there was a small chickenpox outbreak at a Marysville High School in my state. Unvaccinated students were sent home. Now antivaxers are protesting. Same as it ever was.
Tag: chickenpox
Stroke: An underappreciated complication of chickenpox that we should never see
An 11-month old boy suffered a stroke after chickenpox, an underappreciated risk of varicella zoster infection. This catastrophe could have been avoided if his parents had just vaccinated his two older siblings.
Dr. David Brownstein fought Shingrix, and Shingrix won
Dr. David Brownstein is a "holistic" family practice physician in my area. Consistent with being "holistic," he is antivaccine to the core. That's why he's unhappy with the recent CDC recommendation that adults over 50 receive the new shingles vaccine. He thinks he's found a clever argument to show it doesn't work. Unfortunately, his argument only reveals his bias and misunderstanding.
Andrew Wakefield claims “natural Herd Immunity” is better than anything vaccines can do, never mind all that suffering
Andrew Wakefield, his claims to the contrary, is antivaccine to the core. To be honest, I’m not sure if he was always antivaccine. After all, around 20 years ago when he was doing his “research” into whether the MMR vaccine causes autism, he was being generously funded by a barrister seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers and he was developing a competing measles vaccine (for which he filed for a patent) that would be unlikely to be profitable unless the MMR became discredited. In retrospect, knowing what I know now about these aspects of Wakefield’s “research,” I consider it highly likely …
When a parent won’t abide by the understanding behind a non-medical exemption to school vaccine mandates
As I write this, I’m kind of beat. The reason for this is simple. Traveling sucks the energy out of me, and I just got back from almost four days in Houston for the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) meeting. Yes, I was a mere dozen (at most) miles from that Heart of Darkness known as the Burzynski Clinic for a few days, and I didn’t even succumb to the temptation to catch a cab out there and take a selfie with the Burzynski Clinic in the background. Part of the reason was that it would just be more expense …