Heartening to see such insight here on Twitter. Thank you David standing up for the people who do so much good yet who are among the most hated in America. It’s a paradox that needs resolving. The problems can be fixed; let’s not lose sight of the net good… ie this!

Check out the AI podcast version of this article I published recently on how all of biomedical innovation stems from the mere 8% of our healthcare dollars that we spend on novel branded medicines. (Link to podcast towards top of the article)

RT @RepAuchincloss: I come from a family of doctors & cancer researchers. My district is full of medical professionals. RFK, Jr. is an anti…

@EStampler @SenateGOP Sadly not enough of it. He can do harm. I’m not worried about the long run because people will see diseases come back and will throw out anyone responsible and we’ll have a new generation confident in the value of vaccines. But it sucks to have to go through this.

@cl_groves @SenateGOP And viruses and bacteria

Love football, hate pharma? Only one saves lives. @G17Esiason talks about his @ESPN profile and lays out how the biopharma industry could take a page from the NFL by bringing Americans into the struggle of innovation. @PhRMA @IAmBiotech @NPLB_org

@goodstructure @WSJ Do viruses need more testing to prove how harmful they are? Vaccines are very rigorously studied, which is why we know they work really well and leave us way better off than going without. That data are abundantly in favor of vaccines.

Consider that there are tort reform laws that prevent lawsuits from grinding some industries into the ground. there are limits to what you can sue a doctor for... they have to deviate from standard of care... but if they don't deviate and you have a bad outcome, that's not malpractice. And there are plenty of businesses that don't exist because people don't want to take on liability... you don't know about those businesses because they don't exist. We just didn't want that outcome for the vaccine industry, which is why we created the vaccine fund to both pay out people who may have been harmed and limit the liability of the vaccine manufacturers. Note that these companies are accountable to the FDA for their products being safe and effective enough to market. No one gets a vaccine unless the FDA has blessed it.

but that's the thing. trust can't be a function of me doing work for you. the public has to figure out how it will come to terms with the fact that medicine and many issues are complex. either you trust in institutions like FDA and CDC or there's no hope. Because if I have to win one person at a time (or the few who ever get this deep into this thread) with the right few links to papers, then I won't make a difference. We can't even expect every doctor to reprove that vaccines are safe and effective to each one of their hundreds of patients. We have to do this at scale, which means having institutions do the work and put out guidelines. You can find what the CDC says about drugs on their website. Trust it or don't. Do the work or don't. Like I said above... diseases don't care what any of us believe. The vaccines are there to save lives and anyone who doesn't believe in them will simply be welcoming viruses and bacteria to do them harm. That tends to be a pretty good lesson for most people. That's why the doubts cast about on twitter don't reflect that fact that most americans ultimately follow through with vaccinating their children even in states where they don't have to.

Not layering on those vaccines would result in the pathogens each protects against coming back to plague our children. how would you even do a study to see if not vaccinating children against measles reduces the risk of multiple sclerosis? Shall we risk bringing back polio? So let’s think through whether a question is answerable before we insist that we can do it and make it gating to vaccinating our kids. Meanwhile, what we do know, is that immune reactions following each infection are way higher and more disruptive than vaccines themselves. Myocarditis risk after a COVID infection is much greater than after a vaccine. A vaccine doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to have zero side effects to be useful. It needs to be better than the alternative. And there’s an abundance of data showing that they are better than the alternative of not vaccinating. And anytime people think that’s an overstatement, they experiment with skipping vaccinations and we get yet more data showing why vaccines make sense.

This was done because there were TONS of frivolous lawsuits based on people blaming vaccines for everything and companies couldn’t handle the legal costs and risks of uninformed juries and said they wouldn’t bother developing vaccines unless this was handled by a common fund. So now a little bit of every vaccine dose’s cost is paid into a common fund so that a special court can decide who should be paid for a problem that might be related to vaccination.

@GrandpaSeth2 It’s all published. Just Google it.

The first vaccine of any kind is of course tested against placebo. And then when someone develops a better version, it’s tested versus the prior version because it’s now unethical to give placebo. No one should be misled into thinking any placebo on the market today hasn’t been proven to work better than nothing. it’s just that one doesn’t always do that directly versus placebo. Proof is built on a foundation of prior proofs that all began with a first version that beat placebo.

@matthewherper yes, that's a problem. mostly for those who decide to enroll themselves in that needless experiment though with some increased risk for even the vaccinated people around them.

Whatever one may think about the flaws of vaccines, the side-effects of viruses and bacteria that vaccines protect against are way worse. Pick or the other. You can't just say no to both pathogens and vaccines. The risks are vaccines known well enough for us to know they were and are still net beneficial. public has to decide WHO to trust... there's the FDA... CDC... But if someone doesn't want to trust anyone and uses any side-effect to justify denying themselves and their children vaccines, viruses will be all too happy to reassert themselves.

RT @rapport_bio: Our newest free online course, Biotech Unveiled, is now available! Especially if you're new to the industry, check it out…

Here’s the link.