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Mandatory H1N1 Vaccine For NY Health Workers Suspended
lunatick writes "The controversial mandatory swine flu vaccine for health care workers in NY has been suspended. While the reason for the suspension was stated as a shortage of the vaccine, a connection was found showing state Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines, M.D. and/or his wife may directly profit from the sale of the vaccine. Within hours of that connection being questioned on a radio show and the podcast being distributed, the announcement was made suspending the order. The health care community of NYS is petitioning the State Attorney general to investigate the connection."
H1N1 may indeed be pandemic in NYS, but it's still not as prevalent as corruption.
I've read suggestions to make people (kids in particular) get vaccinations before but frankly I have never been comfortable with the concept. When you start telling people that they must put something foreign into their bodies at what point exactly does it stop?
Plus what happens if this vaccine turns out to have nasty side effects? Is the state who mandated it responsible or will they just wash their hands and say - "You had a choice!" That's what they tried to do after all the medication they made soliders take in the first gulf war turned out to have serious long term side effects.
Going into crazy paranoia zone here now, but how long until RFID chips (which have already been linked to cancer) will be mandatory for government employees for "security reasons?"
Isn't that sort of a defining aspect of a union?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So, the "scandal" here is that his wife works for Golman Sachs and that pharma stocks are overpriced? Somehow mandating that healthcare workers get vaccinated against a new flu is somehow a huge conspiracy to profit for them how? I recognize that the tin-foil-hat brigade has kicked onto high alert over H1N1 vaccination, but this is stupid. This is front page material how?
We've been seeing tons and tons of articles like this recently on slashdot. There's a consistent anti-vaccine slant on all of them. I'm guessing that there's some small group of antivaccine crazies who are active on the firehose, and they consistently vote up each other's stories.
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If you have direct patient contact, you should be doing all you can to keep your patients from getting more sick. That means getting your vaccines and getting tests for certain diseases. Or do you think TB testing shouldn't be mandatory for front-line hospital workers as they are now?
And if yes, then there is clear favouritism in giving limited supplies of a vaccine (currently enough to vaccinate around 10% of the population) to politicians first.
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I don't really see why you're conflating this with abortion, and then heaping the blame on liberals. It strikes me as very disingenuous to even compare the two things. You were vaccinated as an infant against diseases, do you also consider that to be a violation of your privacy rights? To me it doesn't seem like a bad idea to have health care workers, in a heavily populated city like New York, to be vaccinated against something they'll likely be exposed to.
To me this looks more like 'six degrees of separation' being made by a local right-wing radio station.
It's not difficult at all. A woman receiving an abortion isn't working at a hospital where her abortion can spread to people with weakened immune systems.
Vaccinating people who are working at hospitals, who can spread a virus to everyone they come in contact with as part of their job, isn't in the same league with abortion at all.
You're acting like these are forced vaccinations to the population, and they're not. It seems to me that this is a very common sense thing to do, to keep a virus from being spread in a hospital...
I appreciate the work you do but you're no where near qualified to give a definitive answer on the topic you're writing about.
In order to try to get you to refuse vaccination, the anti-vaccination propagandists will often try to convince you that vaccines are unsafe. They will tell you that vaccines cause debilitating disease and sickness. However, such claims ignore the medical literature, which says something quite different. Before I tell you how we know that vaccines are safe, let me spend a moment discussing what "safe" means in terms of medical science.
Would you consider taking a bath to be safe? Did you know that roughly 350 people die every year because of taking baths? If so many people die every year taking baths, why do we continue this "dangerous" practice? We continue it because it is significantly more dangerous to not take baths than to take baths. If you decide to stop taking baths due to the alarming statistic quoted above, you are opening yourself up to all kinds of diseases. Thus, even though it is possible for you to die taking a bath, the benefits of taking that bath far outweigh the risks. As a result, we continue to take baths, despite the fact that some people die from it every year.
That’s exactly the kind of reasoning used to determine what is medically safe. Virtually every medicine and activity comes with risks. Even vitamins can cause liver damage, bleeding problems, heart injury, and bone problems, especially when taken in high doses. Thus, no matter what you do, you take risks. The question when evaluating any medical procedure is simply this: Do you risk more by refusing the medical procedure than by accepting the procedure? In the case of vaccinations, the medical research is quite clear. You are significantly more at risk if you refuse the standard vaccinations than if you get them.
How can I state this so definitively? All you have to do is look at the data that has been collected on this point, and it is quite clear. First, we know that over the past several years, the vaccination rate has increased in the United States. During this same time period, children in the United States have become significantly more healthy.
Note from the graph on the left that as the vaccination rate went up, the general health of children also increased. Note even further that when the vaccination rate declined slightly from 1998- 2000, the general health of children declined slightly as well. Now look at the graph on the right. As the vaccination rate increased, the infant mortality rate, child mortality rate, and preadolescent mortality rate decreased. Note further that the most significant reductions in mortality rates occurred when the vaccination rate was increasing the fastest, and that as the vaccination rate dropped from 1998-2000, the decline in mortality rates leveled off substantially.
Now do these graphs prove that vaccines are safe? Of course not. There are many factors that contribute to health and mortality, and there is no way from this study to conclude whether the increase in vaccination rates actually caused the increase in children’s health and the decrease in mortality rates. However, this graph presents a huge problem to anyone who wants to claim that vaccines are dangerous. If vaccines are so dangerous, why are children becoming healthier while the vaccination rate is increasing?
Of course, the only way to make a strong scientific conclusion when it comes to medicine is to do controlled studies. Many such studies have been done, and the conclusions are that vaccinated children are healthier than non-vaccinated children. For example, one study looked at 496 vaccinated and unvaccinated children, comparing the health of the vaccinated children to that of the unvaccinated children. It found that children who received immunizations against diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, Hib, and polio within the first 3 months of life had fewer infections than those who did not. Surprisingly enough, even the rates of infections unrelated to the v