Polio
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All posts tagged: Polio
We are one step from eradicating polio. Britain must not walk away
We will regret it if we let a generation of progress, and the chance to end this disease forever, slip away Source link
Del Bigtree Wants His Kids to Get Polio
Over coffee at a Starbucks just outside Austin, Texas, Del Bigtree told me he wants his teenage son to catch polio. Measles, too. He’s considered driving his unvaccinated family to South Carolina, which is in the midst of a historic outbreak, so that they can all be exposed. He prefers pertussis—whooping cough—to the pertussis vaccine, which he later described to me as a “crime against children.” It’s not the diseases that Americans should be afraid of, Bigtree insists: It’s the shots that stop them. Spreading that message is Bigtree’s lifework. He produced Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, a 2016 documentary that helped mainstream the modern anti-vaccine movement by alleging—spuriously—that the CDC suppressed evidence of vaccine harms. His weekly internet show, The HighWire With Del Bigtree, mostly targets the pharmaceutical industry and has helped raise millions for his nonprofit, the Informed Consent Action Network, which files lawsuits to overturn school vaccine mandates around the country. He’s been a close adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and served as communications director for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential …
Polio Was That Bad – The Atlantic
In the United States, polio is a memory, and a fading one at that. The last major outbreak here happened in 1952; the virus was declared eliminated in 1979. With all of that behind us, you can see how someone—say, Kirk Milhoan, the chair of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee—might wonder whether giving the polio vaccine to American kids still makes sense. “We need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now,” Milhoan said on the podcast Why Should I Trust You? last week. To be fair, Milhoan didn’t endorse yanking the polio vaccine from the CDC’s childhood-immunization schedule, as other vaccines were earlier this month. But he didn’t rule it out. And right now, when it comes to vaccines in America, anything seems possible. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, and with the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee stacked with his allies, every inoculation—no matter how well studied or successful—seems to be under new scrutiny, and at least potentially …
The catch-22 in the global battle to eradicate polio
In the developed world, where it is relatively easy to achieve high vaccination rates and where sanitation is good, the risks of using the live oral vaccine outweigh the benefits. Britain, the US, and most of Europe now rely exclusively on an “inactivated” polio vaccine, a jab which contains a dead version of the virus and is delivered by injection. The injection is highly effective at protecting individuals from paralysis but it does not prevent the virus from replicating in the intestines and spreading silently to others. It means that people vaccinated with the inactivated jab can still silently carry the virus and infect others who are not vaccinated. The inactivated injections are also far more expensive, costing roughly $3 per dose, and require trained health workers, sterile equipment, and cold-chain storage. Experts say that as long as wild or vaccine-derived poliovirus exists, it can be reintroduced into polio-free areas through international travel or population movement and so it is critical that vaccine rates across the globe are kept up. Were they to slip, polio …