adjuvant
oracknows | September 21, 2017
"Why, oh, why do I have to die in the cause of such crappy science?"
For antivaxers, aluminum is the new mercury.
Let me explain, for the benefit of those not familiar with the antivaccine movement. For antivaxers, it is, first and foremost, always about the vaccines. Always. Whatever the chronic health issue in children, vaccines must have done it. Autism? It’s the vaccines. Sudden infant death syndrome? Vaccines, of course. Autoimmune diseases? Obviously it must be the vaccines causing it. Obesity, diabetes, ADHD? Come on, you know the answer!
Because antivaxers will never let go of…
oracknows | February 16, 2016Believe it or not, I frequently peruse Retraction Watch, the blog that does basically what its title says: It watches for retracted articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and reports on them. Rare is it that a retracted paper gets by the watchful eyes of the bloggers there. So it was that the other day I noticed an post entitled Journal temporarily removes paper linking HPV vaccine to behavioral issues. I noticed it mainly because it involves a paper by two antivaccine "researchers" whom we've met several times before, Christopher A. Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic in the Department…
ddobbs | October 1, 2009
Last week the Times ran a story by Andrew Pollack, Benefit and Doubt in Vaccine Additive, that covered some of the ground I trod in my Slate story, "To Boost or Not to Boost: The United States' swine flu vaccines will leave millions worldwide unprotected. Pollack also had the room to explore something I lacked room for -- the fascinating history of adjuvants, and the strange mystery of how they work.
Like so many things that work in medicine, adjuvants were discovered more or less by accident -- and were in fact a "dirty little secret" in a fairly literal sense. As the Wikipedia entry…
ddobbs | September 17, 2009
My latest piece for Slate examines the unsettling consequences of the United States' choice of swine flu vaccines.
The good news about these vaccines is that, to judge by the first vaccine trial results, published last week, they appear to work fast, safely â and at about a half to a quarter of the doses that the CDC expected. This means we effectively have about two to four times as many vaccines as we had figured we would. Since we ordered 195 million doses, we could vaccinate damn near the whole country.
If the fast-tracking efforts continue to work and the flu peaks closer to Christmas…