Do kids need COVID shots? It's a difficult question to answer, but incendiary commentary has unnecessarily muddied the issue. Let's take a look at what we know so far.
vaccine
Vaccination status on dating sites has become an issue as more people have been immunized. Some online daters are concerned about the disease while others worry about privacy issues if the dating app is linked to government databases. Should people simply be counted on to tell the truth about their vaccination status? Having dwelled for far too long in that gruesome world that's an easy one: hell, no. Too many lies and too many liars.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a favorite tool of skeptics aiming to spread immunization fears. As it turns out, VAERS has actually helped ensure the safety of FDA-approved shots.
To speed COVID vaccine uptake and bring the pandemic to an end, some commentators are calling on the government to mandate immunization as a condition for participating in society. This may seem like a reasonable policy, but there's compelling evidence that it could backfire.
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.
What happens to the global economy if the medicine ends up harming those it is meant to cure?
Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin's propaganda machine are working in overdrive.
Somewhere along the way, our achievable goal of "flattening the curve" for COVID-19 has mutated into "finding a cure," which is perhaps an impossible one. Public health and economic policy must be based on reality, not starry-eyed wish-making. Otherwise, people's lives and livelihoods are in grave danger.
A lot of time in MBA school is spent on defining and discussing corporate social responsibility (CSR), giving back to the community, local or global. The recent concerns about the Wuhan Coronavirus, now re-labeled Covid-19, like the concern about Zika, Ebola, and SARS has lead to frantic calls to Big Pharma to provide a vaccine. Sanofi Pasteur has now partnered with our US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, BARDA, a part of Health and Human Services, to develop a vaccine. But that decision was also accompanied by other members of Big Pharma saying that they were not pursuing a vaccine. Do these large corporations have a broader social responsibility to create these vaccines?
Vaxart Inc., a San Francisco based vaccine biotech, just announced that it will begin dosing subjects in a Phase 1b study company's bivalent oral experimental vaccines against norovirus -- the cause of the so-called "stomach flu." Everyone should wish them well.
Do you want grandma to keep baking cookies? Well, she won't anymore if she dies from the flu. So go get your shot when the next flu season rolls around in October.
Due to rampant false claims, could moratoriums on medical searches by social media companies actually free up time in an office visit. And also, lessen health care burdens?