A substantial proportion of frontline healthcare workers are refusing to accept the COVID vaccine. This poses an unacceptable risk to public health. They should take the jab or lose their job.
science and law
Scientists say that talcum baby powder doesn't cause cancer. Trial lawyers say it does. As usual, the lawyers win. Scientists, common sense, and Americans lose.
Completely banning alcohol would only prevent about 3.5% of cancer deaths. That, of course, means the other 96.5% of fatal cancers are caused by things other than alcohol. Given that cancer is the #2 leading cause of death in America, there's a good chance that you're going to die of cancer no matter what you do. So chill out and have a drink.
Many public health officials have called for mandatory vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The motivation for this policy is understandable, but forcing parents to immunize their kids emboldens the anti-vaccine movement. By incentivizing people to vaccinate and holding them legally accountable when they don't, we can preserve individual autonomy, maintain herd immunity and undermine the anti-vaccine movement.
Americans are uniquely litigious. There are reforms that could be made to the legal system that would fix this, but lawyers are financially incentivized to resist them.
It shouldn't really be a surprise when this California city, which doesn't have a clue about the importance of public health, implements a policy that will help kill people.
Too many journalists are experts in nothing and behave like partisans and activists. That's how a journalist can go on social media and celebrate that her poor reporting caused a company to lose hundreds of millions in market capitalization.
California is a trendsetter. It’s home to world-class wine, championship basketball teams, beautiful weather and legendary cities like San Francisco. But sadly, it's also a trendsetter when it comes to wrongheaded public health policy. There’s no better example of this than Proposition 65, a law that as of 2016 has cost California businesses close to $300 million.
Not only did Americans vote on members of Congress this week, but citizens of several states also voted on various science- and health-related policy issues. How did those turn out? On the upside, an anti-fracking law was defeated. On the downside, workplace vaping was banned and bogus medical marijuana laws passed.
There aren't many things today that unite both sides of the political aisle, but leave it to some environmental activists to achieve the impossible. There's bipartisan opposition to a proposed Colorado law that would severely curtail fracking in the state.
Jurors in California awarded $289 million to a man who claimed that his cancer was due to Monsanto’s herbicide glyphosate – even though that's biologically impossible. Even the judge acknowledged that there was no evidence of harm. Yet trial lawyers manipulated a jury’s emotions and the public’s misunderstanding of science to score another jackpot verdict.
Europeans, who overwhelmingly claim to accept the science consensus on climate change, deny a far stronger consensus on biotechnology and believe GMOs are a crime against nature because a gene has been precisely modified by scientists.