The process of selecting viruses for the yearly flu vaccines is complex and inexact. For the 2023-2024 flu season, there is reason to be optimistic that the vaccines will provide good protection.
vaccines
A clinical trial of various schedules for administering the two vaccines found that when they were administered together, "the quantitative and functional antibody responses were marginally lower compared to [COVID-19] booster vaccination alone. Lower protection against COVID-19 with concurrent administration of COVID-19 and influenza vaccination cannot be excluded." Thus, the data are somewhat equivocal, but I'll opt to get the two shots at different times.
The agency's primary functions are ensuring food safety, regulating tobacco products rationally, and expeditiously approving new drugs and medical devices. It's failing. Instead, we're getting increasingly complex organizational structures and the commissioning of endless reports.
Illicit fentanyl continues to kill tens of thousands of people annually in the U.S. In fact, this number may very well be increasing as the "fentanyl epidemic" continues unabated. But now a fentanyl vaccine – which could be of some use in mitigating damage – appears to protect mice from the drug. Will it succeed in humans and, if so, how might it be used?
Awful parenting advice proliferates across the internet, especially as it relates to caring for a new baby. Here are a few things I've learned in the first few months of fatherhood.
What went wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic? A team of public health researchers recently outlined some of the crucial policy mistakes we made and explained how we might avoid them in the future.
Given the abundance of readily available, free, effective (albeit imperfect) vaccines for many months, why are we seeing a surge in COVID cases and hospitalizations? Let's examine the three primary factors that dictate the severity of an outbreak of a viral illness.
Vaccine skeptics continue to insist that the COVID shots are dangerous. As always, their favorite sources are the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and other similar passive surveillance databases. As cases of supposed vaccine injury are investigated, we come to the reassuring, though admittedly boring, conclusion that COVID-19 jabs pose a low risk to most people.
The CDC is again recommending that fully vaccinated Americans mask up in certain circumstances. This is bad advice at odds with the available evidence that will only seed more vaccine hesitancy.
Natural News founder Mike Adams claims the US government has launched a five-phase campaign to force vaccines on American citizens. This is false, of course, but the bigger problem is that Adams is drawing attention away from real problems we need to solve before we face another pandemic.
As more and more of the US population is vaccinated, we are not clutching our vaccine supplies so tightly. We are beginning to send them to others in need. There is a great deal of talk about the costs, and you know, somewhere, some “bean counter” is doing a cost-benefit analysis.
As COVID-19 cases drop and immunization rates rise, Americans are proving the media's glass-half-empty predictions about vaccine hesitancy mostly false. It turns out that people don't like getting sick, and they'll take steps to protect themselves when given the tools to do so.