OK, so I have a12 year old daughter.
Speaking from first hand experience, my daughter received this shot in grade six (last school year). There were no adverse effects. But as a parent, it is still a scary situation that we put our lives and the lives of our children at risk to medications we don’t know anything about.

Sure, some medications can be a good thing. But it seems odd to me that a vaccination can cause so many problems and cause such an uproar. There is quite a lot of negative media out there for this drug, as well as the fact that they want to make this drug mandatory for all kids, and they are considering prescribing it for all boys as well. - That right there puts up red flags for me.

Big Pharma companies are always looking for the new “New Drug” to sell us. They don’t stay in business unless they keep us buying their products. And with the monies involved in these drugs, I don’t put it past them to fake results, skew data, lie or deflect negative publicity. I also don’t put it past them to create the illnesses that ail us, just so they can sell us the fix. (not that I'm saying that's what they've done here).

Kerry Mullis (http://www.karymullis.com/)said it best in his book, that we always take what we are given, always thinking someone is out there looking out for us, but there isn’t! Big companies only look out for themselves. The only one that can look out for you, is you! – So be aware…

If we don’t stop and question what is being shoved down our throats, then who is going to? I’m not flat out accusing anyone of anything specific, but don’t just think that if a government agency has passed it, that it is safe.

Kids should not be getting sick and dying because of this drug – but they are.
Not all of them, it’s a small percentage, but in my mind and the minds of many others and in the minds of those who have been effected, it is still too many. You can’t think, “Oh, that’s OK, we can kill off a few kids and make a bunch more suffer – it’s for the greater good”. Because that’s NOT OK in my books.

Medical Care Confusion

by

Thomas Sowell


Is there a coherent argument for government-controlled medical care or are slogans and hysteria considered sufficient?
We hear endlessly about how many Americans don't have health insurance. But, if we stop and think-- which politicians hope we never do-- that raises the question as to why that calls for government-controlled medical care.
A bigger question is whether medical care will be better or worse after the government takes it over. There are many available facts relevant to those crucial questions but remarkably little interest in those facts.

There are facts about the massive government-run medical programs already in existence in the United States-- Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' hospitals-- as well as government-run medical systems in other countries.
None of the people who are trying to rush government-run medical care through Congress before we have time to think about it are pointing to Medicare, Medicaid or veterans' hospitals as shining examples of how wonderful we can expect government medical care to be when it becomes "universal."
As for those uninsured Americans we keep hearing about, there is remarkably little interest in why they don't have insurance. It cannot be poverty, for the poor can automatically get Medicaid.
In fact, we already know that there are people with substantial incomes who choose to spend those incomes on other things, especially if they are young and in good health. If necessary, they can always go to a hospital emergency room and receive treatment there, whether or not they have insurance.
Here, the advocates of government-run medical care say that we all end up paying, one way or another, for the free medical care that hospitals are forced by law to provide in their emergency rooms. But unless you think that any situation you don't like is a reason to give politicians a blank check for "change," the relevant question becomes whether the alternative is either less expensive or of better quality. Nothing is cheaper just because part of the price is paid in higher taxes.
Such questions seldom get asked, much less answered. We are like someone being rushed by a used car dealer to sign on the dotted line. But getting stuck with a car that is a lemon is nothing compared to signing away your right to decide what medical care you or your loved ones will get in life and death situations.
Politicians can throw rhetoric around about "bringing down the cost of health care" or they can even throw numbers around. But the numbers that politicians are throwing around don't match the numbers that the Congressional Budget Office finds when it analyzes the hard data.
An old advertising slogan said, "Progress is our most important product." With politicians, confusion is their most important product. They confuse bringing down the price of medical care with bringing down the cost. And they confuse medical care with health care.
Nothing is easier than for governments to impose price controls. They have been doing this, off an on, for thousands of years-- repeatedly resulting in (1) shortages, (2) quality deterioration and (3) black markets. Why would anyone want any of those things when it comes to medical care?
Refusing to pay the costs is not the same as bringing down the cost. That is why price controls create these problems. When developing a new pharmaceutical drug costs roughly a billion dollars, you are either going to pay the billion dollars or cause people to stop spending a billion dollars to develop new drugs.
The confusion of "health care" with medical care is the crucial confusion. Years ago, a study showed that Mormons live a decade longer than other Americans. Are doctors who treat Mormons so much better than the doctors who treat the rest of us? Or do Mormons avoid doing a lot of things that shorten people's lives?
The point is that health care is largely in your hands. Medical care is in the hands of doctors. Things that depend on what doctors do-- cancer survival rates, for example-- are already better here than in countries with government-run medical systems. But, if political rhetoric prevails, we may yet sell our birthright and not even get the mess of pottage.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Please stop highlighting the Canadian system, a country of 33 million talking smack about a country of 300 million. Any innovations in medicine up there? How about new drugs? We've got more illegal invaders than Canada has citizens.


Most of the major advances in sports medicine started in Canada, until the surgeon and his team of doctors in London(ont), got a better offer to goto the US. They wouldn't build him a new wing in the hospital. Most of the advances in diabetes come from Canada, we're world leaders in nanomedicine, and regenerative pathogen adaptive type treatments. Most of the big stuff dealing with hyperbaric medicine have come from here. Since I'm too lazy to look beyond what I know, you can do the hard work.

I've got one, when Americans stop coming to Canada for treatment illegally. I'll give a damn about your 'illegal immigrant' problem. You're bleeding border cities dry.

Please stop highlighting the Canadian system, a country of 33 million talking smack about a country of 300 million. Any innovations in medicine up there? How about new drugs? We've got more illegal invaders than Canada has citizens.

No e-meter here...the scientologists are exactly the sort of moronic loons that one would have to be to take any of Hubbard's stupid crap as truth. Amazingly, he's even better at creating a completely unbelievable religion than he was at creating truly awful science fiction. Frankly, I didn't think that was possible.

My disgust with the state of mental-health professions (and professionals) stems from a far more personal set of encounters, seeing as I helped check my wife into the hospital yet again, Monday. They'll mumble their magic incantations, and toss a few darts at the medication chart to pick out a new drug cocktail, and hope it has some beneficial result (and not -too- many nasty permanent side effects). I'll believe they have something approaching a science when I can have my wife diagnosed by four different doctors and get any two of them to agree. Three out of four would leave me ecstatic. As it is, four doctors will (and have) give us five different diagnoses...

Did you know that electroshock therapy is still a common treatment? Fucking barbarians is what they are.

>> ^Kalle:
>> ^Trancecoach:
Two American industries are far too lucrative for far too many people to significantly change any time soon:
1) The Healthcare industry.
2) The Prison system.
(& don't get me started on education!)

3)cough couch the military industrial complex cough .....



Don't forget the United States Customary Units system! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!

Curiously, I've heard the argument that places such as EU manage to get such a cheap deal on drugs is because the pharmaceutical companies are trying to enter those markets. However, the US can't negotiate the same deal, because a lot of R&D is conducted in the states, and they have to charge a premium to make up for their costs. That means that lowering the price of drugs in the US will not make it cost beneficial to conduct drug research, and the companies will simply exit, meaning no new drugs. What do you guys think?

I doubt this will hold up in court, but it is interesting to look into what can and cannot be patented.

For instance, if you modify an organism genetically to create one that does not exist in nature then you can patent it. Also, if you develop a method for extracting and purifying a compound from a plant for a new medication then you can patent that drug.

Genes are different though. You can't patent the human heart or brain (I think), but here we're talking about extracting and cleaning up a portion of the human genome for use in testing new drugs, among other things.

I don't think people should be able to patent parts of the genome, but I don't know enough about the entire process to form an educated opinion. I look forward to seeing how litigation over this practice will turn out.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'new drugs, attack, bacteria, illness' to 'new drugs, attack, bacteria, illness, bacterial esperanto, standing o' - edited by calvados

If I understand her correctly the new drug doesn't kill the bacteria but instead blocks the receptor whereby they all agree to attack you simultaneously.

So, wouldn't you need to keep taking the drug forever? If you stop blocking the receptor then the bacteria can agree to attack you again.

Am I missing something?

I want a new drug
Sex is for making babies
I think im pregnant


A Remixed Haiku.

there's hope yet?

>> ^StukaFox:
Welcome to ALL your food if the Republicans had their way with the FDA. Remember: Industry is the best police of industry!


Although I'm Libertarian and support a modest FDA, arguing about their role right now is like complaining about a leaky roof during a flood. So with that out of the way, I'll point out that the consumer's best friend is always going to be a solid court system. Even the most staunch capitalists aren't in favor of anarchy, protecting rights, upholding contracts, and offering recourse is essential, and I'm not sure China has that. Just recently, some guy here sold peanuts he knew were contaminated, and the socialists came out of the woodwork to claim that this is what capitalists are incentivized to do, make profits. Meanwhile, the company is about to be sued into oblivion, it has already filed for bankruptcy. If he was a good capitalist, he would have done what was profitable, and selling poisoned peanuts was the least profitable decision he could have made under this system. No system, it turns out, can prevent people from being idiots.

Still, the socialists argue that there is a way to protect everyone from idiots: by charging each family $1,000 a day to appoint one government inspector per peanut, and then $1,000 more to hire watchdogs for those inspectors, and so forth. Similarly, a socialist would probably approve regulation that locked us all in our basements to reduce the murder and fraud rate to 0. That's just an extreme example of how socialists fundamentally cannot understand that saving a few human lives simply is not worth incurring a greater, but non-fatal aggregate cost. In this case: the freedom to interact with other human beings. In the food case, the cost of the food itself. How much money should we take from people to ensure the safety of their food.

I think my biggest criticism of the FDA is that any agency which purports to protect you with its powers is subject to corruption. The FDA colludes with businesses all the time to look the other way on things, sort of like how impotent the SEC became (and to what degree were people less skeptical thinking that they were protecting them?). They allow things that have been banned in other countries for years: water fluoridation, bovine growth hormones in milk, nitrates in meat.... they were paid off in the 80s by artificial sweetener interests (billion dollar industry) to ban stevia, a natural patent-less sugar substitute that is far safer. And maybe the most dangerous of all, they have the power to ban promising new drugs they deem "unsafe" or "experimintal." Doesn't matter if you're dying of cancer and have nothing to lose, they won't let you choose.

OK, So who gets the royalty credit for this one?
Huey Louis sued Ray Parker Jr. for plagiarism and won. (copied "I want a new drug).

So do the royalties (assuming they even make any money on this), go to Huey Louis and the News or RayParker Jr?

>> ^MarineGunrock:
A specialized balloon? Seriously? It's a fucking punching balloon, you moron.


He's actually correct. The balloon may not be manufactured specifically for nitrous, but its properties make it much easier to use with nitrous than standard party balloons (higher volume, thicker walls, etc.).

... and besides that, a punching balloon would still be a "specialized" balloon even if it weren't used for this. =)

>> ^imstellar28:
Prior to FDA regulation, the average time to market of a drug was 18 months and the average cost was $500,000. 10 years later, the average time to market was 8 years and the average cost was $8,000,000. If you would like to see what your life would be like without the FDA, take the cost of your last prescription drug and divide it by 100. Your $30 a month birth control would be $0.30. Your $50 antibiotics would be $0.50. Your grandmothers $1000 heart medicine would be $10.
Yes, the FDA has prevented some dangerous drugs to market, but how many life-saving drugs could have been made available to dying patients if they were released 6.5 year sooner? How many tens of thousands of lives were lost waiting for drugs to be approved? You don't hear about their class action lawsuits because they are all ghosts.


I'm pretty certain most people would say that paying 100x the price for the drug is worth preventing the taking of a human life. If I (or my grandmother) has to pay $990 to relatively ensure that someone else--or even my grandmother herself--doesn't drop dead from taking the drug, we can both live with that cost. By the way, most of my grandmother's drugs are covered by Medicaid/Medicare which also ensures that she never pays that $990 but a minor co-payment instead.

You'd have to be pretty inhuman to bitch about how expensive drugs are and how much better off we'd be if we'd just led people die from the experimental drugs and figure out which ones are safe that way.

As far as drugs that are slow to get to market go, if you really want to try experimental drugs that badly you can go sign up for the clinical trials. But a lot of people wouldn't take the risk even if given the chance to participate. The number of willing risk-takers is probably much lower than "tens of thousands." Except for people with the most dire terminal illnesses, waiting a few years to make sure the drug is safe isn't going to hurt anybody.

And by the way, do you know what the failure rate in drug testing is? According to an article I read about a Japanese company developing new drugs here in the U.S., a new drug has maybe a 1 in 10,000 chance to make it to human trials and a close to 1 in 1,000,000 chance of getting through the human trials without unacceptable side effects being discovered (or the trials showing the drug doesn't actually work as advertised). I'd much rather have the FDA keeping those 999,999 potential dangerous/useless drugs off the market than having to have me or my doctor pick through all those choices whenever I get sick.

>> ^shuac:
Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far much more bitter, cynical sense of humour.


Hey, why is there plastic everywhere in here?