Brownstone Journal

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Daily readings from Brownstone Institute authors, contributors, and researchers on public health, philosophy, science, and economics.

  1. 6h ago

    Flu Vaccine Studies: Pseudo-Randomized or Untrustworthy Results? Preamble The VISION Network Observational Studies Versus Randomized Trials Drowning in Numbers The First Two Seasons Two Estimates from One Season The Last Two Seasons What Have We Learned

    By Eyal Shahar at Brownstone dot org. The validity of a study, or a series of studies, may be questioned by several methods, one of which is identifying unexpected results. Consider the following example, which I used to teach in an introductory epidemiology course. Having yellow-stained fingers is associated with lung cancer, but we know that the association does not reflect causality. Yellow-stained fingers do not cause lung cancer. Rather, the association is explained by smoking — a confounder — a cause of both yellow fingers and lung cancer. Suppose a group of researchers reported that the association in question was not removed after adjustment for smoking status. Obviously, something is wrong, either in the data or in the way it was analyzed. Regardless of the reason, we will not trust any inference from that study, including the estimated effect of smoking. It is equivalent to rejecting a witness's entire testimony after detecting a single relevant lie. That's an analogy, of course, not a claim about intentional lying by the researchers. Each year the CDC reports estimates of the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the previous season. These estimates are derived from a version of the case-control study that is called the test-negative design. Both cases and controls are selected from people who sought care for respiratory symptoms (outpatient setting) or were hospitalized (inpatient setting). Cases tested positive for the flu; controls tested negative. Since the Covid pandemic, the largest source of data has been a CDC-associated network called VISION. It is described on the CDC website: Reports from the VISION network are observational studies; they are not randomized trials. People do not flip a coin to decide whether to get the annual flu shot. Those who get the shot differ from those who do not on many attributes, some of which are measured and others are not. Some of these attributes also affect the clinical outcome (i.e., confounders). It is well known that vaccinated people are healthier on average than their unvaccinated counterparts. That's the healthy vaccinee effect, which leads to confounding bias. At least part of the association between vaccination and a clinical outcome is not causality. Since the estimated effectiveness is exaggerated, it is called positive confounding. Some of the confounding, though not all, may be removed by matching or by statistical adjustment. For example, if the unadjusted association shows an odds ratio of 0.5 (vaccine effectiveness of 50%), the adjusted odds ratio might be only 0.75 (25% effectiveness). That's not the case in randomized trials. In large enough trials, randomization results in a similar distribution of every baseline variable in the two (or more) arms of the trial. Therefore, the two groups — say, vaccine recipients and placebo recipients — are called "exchangeable." They are similar in every respect except the randomized treatment. There is no need for any adjustment, and adjustment should not change the estimated effect. The take-home message is this. In observational research of vaccine effectiveness, we expect smaller effectiveness after adjustment. If the association is largely unchanged, something must have been wrong, or a miracle happened (pseudo-randomization to vaccination status). Miracles don't happen often, however. A study of vaccine effectiveness typically contains hundreds of numbers, and the VISION reports are no exception. Although more information is preferred, it also makes it more difficult to identify questionable results. The difficulty is compounded if we try to examine a series of studies, say, over the years and search for patterns in the data. Referring to the witness analogy, it is equivalent to identifying a lie in a long testimony that contains many details. Unlike a testimony, however, there is a solution, which I used to teach: reduction. Focus on a narrow set of results about which you have clear expectations; that is, you ha...

  2. 1d ago

    VSD Is the Vault with the Secrets

    By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. Those who are confident about the safety of vaccines have before them an easy route to shore up public confidence and completely shut down the anti-vaxx movement. They could open the data to what's called the Vaccine Safety Datalink or VSD. Right now and for the past quarter century, access is severely restricted to only a handful of people at the CDC and the employees of the National Center for Health Statistics Research Data Center, which has the impossible acronym NCHSRDC, in Hyattsville, Maryland. No one can buy the database or access, not the public, not researchers at NIH, not statisticians at universities nor medical doctors at hospitals. Cries for Help Injury and Death Buried in V-Safe Data Parts I & II · React19 Buy on Amazon VSD is one of several systems designed to monitor safety. The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) is the portal through which doctors and citizens report injuries. The records of injury here from the Covid shot have broken all records for previous records by a thousand times over. Another system is the v-Safe system that allowed shot recipients to report before it was shut down. The result was more than 7 million records. Brownstone has published a 1,048-page book of the free-text fields that the CDC would only cough up under court order. The result is the book set Cries for Help. But those who continue to say that the shots are safe dismiss both systems as mere anecdotal lacking in a rigorous system of establishing scientific causality. They say that the only real way to know traces to VSD, a program established in 2002 in cooperation with many health-core providers. Here and only here will you find the data you need. Sounds great, so let's have a look! Not so fast. There is an obstacle course, Nothing says "Trust the science" like a mountain of bureaucratic paperwork to get to existing evidence. There will be no fishing exhibitions, the CDC declares. You have to send a proper proposal with the title, your name plus two because only three people get the workstation. Then you write a summary of what you want: background, why this matters for public health, your actual hypothesis, and a methodology that is not just the abstract of someone else's paper. Define the population, years, study type, variables, confounders, and exactly how you plan to analyze it. Next comes a gauntlet of reviews. NCHSRDC checks if your proposal is complete, if the data even exist, if they have the staff, or if letting you near it risks spilling state secrets.Then you need a permission slip from an Institutional Review Board, send them the letter and final protocol, and remember that approval doesn't let you start digging in. You are already hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars deep. Everyone then has to sign the "I Won't Leak the Data and I'll Behave" forms and the confidentiality affidavit. Only then does NCHS actually build or format your dataset. After that you get access under all the rules, procedures, and fees. You must be there in person. No electronics are allowed in: no cameras, no cell phones, nothing. Hence, as you can see, the science is settled even before the evidence is examined. In reality, no outside researcher has made it through this process for more than twenty years. Many have tried, hundreds of attempts, but they have never amounted to anything. A father-and-son pair of researchers once got through early on (Mark and David Geier) but their work was smeared even before it appeared. In effect, the VSD is among the most secretive services in the entire government, comparable to Fort Knox, the Federal Reserve, and the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency. It's the real Puzzle Palace. And remember that we are not talking about national security here. We are talking about products injected into the bodies of 99% of the public. In some states, you cannot exercise full citizenship rights as an unvaccinated human. I spent a...

  3. 2d ago

    The Fauci Diaries: Three Volumes, Fully Indexed

    By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org. For more than two decades, Anthony Fauci kept a private diary. It was discovered by the new administration more than two years after Fauci had resigned. The contents were treated as private. In fact, the diaries were a public record because he wrote them on government computers with the assistance of staff of the National Institutes of Health. To be sure, Fauci never intended them to be seen in this form. They were notes toward an autobiography. He left a copy behind because of public-records preservation requirements. Once they had been discovered, they went through various channels and finally landed in the offices of Senator Rand Paul, who in 2026 released them in four separate installments. These documents are brought together here for the first time in a single chronological edition, in three volumes. Volume I covers 2001 through 2014, the years in which Fauci, as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became the federal government's leading voice on infectious disease. It opens with his own history of the AIDS epidemic and moves through the anthrax attacks of 2001, the creation of PEPFAR under President George W. Bush, the H5N1 bird flu scare and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and the 2014 Ebola outbreak, including the cases treated in the United States. Throughout are his dealings with presidents, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and the press. Volume II covers 2015 through 2020. It begins with the aftermath of Ebola and the Zika outbreak and follows the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration. In 2020 the diary becomes a near-daily record of the Covid-19 pandemic: the White House Coronavirus Task Force, his work alongside Deborah Birx, Robert Redfield, and Francis Collins, the fights over shutdowns and treatments, the early questions about Wuhan, his constant media appearances, and the threats that brought him a security detail. Volume III covers January 2021 through December 17, 2022, shortly before Fauci left government. As Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, he records the vaccine rollout, the Delta and Omicron waves, boosters and mandates, the arrival of Paxlovid, and his clashes with Senator Paul over gain-of-function research and the origins of the virus, along with his view of his critics and his preparations to step down. Fauci's entries are reproduced as written and uncorrected; material written by others has been omitted. What remains is his own account of his work, his schemes and worries, his excuses and fears, his contacts and psychological state, and the identities of many people around him, recorded as events unfolded. They are now available for purchase in softcover or digital editions. You can also download them in PDF here and share them widely.

  4. 3d ago

    VAERS and VSAFE: The "Worst Case Scenario" Twice Two Systems, Two Contracts The Dates in One Place The Contract Blows through the Worst Case Scenario in the First Week Where the Money Went The Rulebook What the Public Heard The Phone Line Who Is Account

    By Leland Lehrman at Brownstone dot org. Files that were removed from the internet are in the evidence pack. The scale of the violation is hard to imagine, I know. After the dazed feeling wears off, let's get busy. I also want to thank Dr. Clayton Baker, who was the first to bring my attention to the role of Tom Shimabukuro in covering up vaccine safety signals for over ten years. Incredibly, he is still at the CDC, serving as the deputy director of the Influenza Division in their National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). The following research brief benefited from various digital research assistants, and I have not edited the language yet. But the information cannot wait. Read and share with friends and family. It's not over yet. The United States began vaccinating against Covid-19 on 14 December 2020. Two CDC programs were designed and paid to catch any harm that clinical trials had missed. VAERS takes reports from doctors, patients and manufacturers. V-safe sends vaccinated people text messages asking how they feel. Here we follow the paper trail of those two systems from the Christmas 2020 rollout into 2022. The bottom line: The government's "worst case" for amount of Covid vaccine injury reports assumed 1,000 reports a day. For fourteen months it was double that. For some of those months, it was triple. The document that matters most is a monthly report from the contractor that runs VAERS for the CDC, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). It covers December 2020 and went to the CDC's contracting officer's representative on 16 January 2021, with CDC program staff and an FDA reviewer copied. Its first page carries a chart. A red line marks 1,000 reports a day, which the government's own planning called the "worst case." The reports crossed that line on 21 December, the winter solstice, in the first week of the rollout. They dipped under it for three days around Christmas. From 26 December they stayed over it. The contractor told the CDC. that it was "unable to meet processing and other timeframes (data processing, telephone inquiries, clinical inquiries, etc.)" (GDIT report, PDF p. 8). All this while they were telling everyone everything was ok. And the report numbers did not come back down. From 4 January 2021 to 31 January 2022, only nine ordinary weekdays dropped under 1,000, and the lowest was 790. In February 2022 the typical weekday finally fell under it. The contract had called 1,000 a day a peak "not expected to reflect sustained activity." It lasted 14 months. The busiest single day was Sunday 22 August 2021, with 14,593 reports, almost all of them carrying a manufacturer's report number (public VAERS data, counted for this brief). All that time the public heard something else. Eighteen days after that Sunday, on 9 September 2021, President Joe Biden went on television. "What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We've made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient. The vaccine has FDA approval. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing." (Biden, 9 September 2021) He called the speech "a new plan to require more Americans to be vaccinated, to combat those blocking public health." The plan required vaccination of 17 million health care workers in facilities that take Medicare and Medicaid, all executive-branch federal employees and federal contractors, and, through a Labor Department rule, vaccination or weekly testing for every employer with 100 or more employees, over 80 million workers. The word he used for the vaccines was "safe." In VAERS, the month of the speech brought 47,172 reports, 953 of them reporting a death and 4,897 a hospitalization. It was not the worst month. April 2021 had brought 103,637 Covid-19 reports, 1,486 reporting a death and 6,800 a hospitalization, the worst month of the year on every count, more...

  5. 4d ago

    Why Weren't We Warned? A Long Time Coming for Warning About What's Happening in Plain Sight Emma: A Real-Life Situation Antidepressants and Sexual Dysfunction: Why Weren't We Told? Consider the Math

    By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org. In my day, being young was dominated by three basics: sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Boy, that world has changed. Seems like our kids aren't having much sex these days. Drugs? Yes, mostly of the prescribed type. And rock 'n' roll? Well, not much anymore, as the listening tastes of today's youth center on hip-hop and AI-enhanced electronic pop that hardly passes for music nowadays. But it is the lack of sex that seems to be most concerning. Apparently, the fact that young people aren't having much sex today is being captured in surveys from around the world. This is proving to be worrisome not simply as a cultural artifact, but because the lack of sex is resulting in plunging birth rates, causing fertility in nearly every OECD country to drop to historic lows. The lack of sex is not only shrinking populations, but also causing huge demographic changes as countries turn older. What exactly is going on? Those who study the sexual habits of young people generally point to three key reasons: There's the unaffordability of housing, which makes younger people live at home longer (not exactly conducive to lots of sex). There's the lack of booze—the social lubricant that used to be a precursor to most intimacy—and apparently kids aren't as drinking much today as we used to. Then there's the third one: youth mental health issues, which are exacerbated by too much screen time, isolation, and loneliness. Seems like kids aren't dating much these days, at least not in person. Probably spending so much time with your face buried in your phone will leave you less interested and less competent in successfully hooking up with a real person you would otherwise want to shag. I would add a fourth reason, and one that is slowly gaining attention in medical circles. Several commonly prescribed drugs, particularly antidepressants, are causing sexual dysfunction in youth. The most surprising aspect of this is that sometimes the sexual dysfunction is permanent and continues after the person stops taking the drug, a phenomenon well enough documented to have its own name, PSSD (Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction). SSRI antidepressants, such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, among others, as well as drugs for acne (isotretinoin) and baldness (finasteride) are at the top of the list of treatments capable of causing serious and sometimes long-term sexual dysfunction, described as numb genitalia, inability to orgasm, emotional blunting, and so on. The proportion of our youth taking antidepressants—despite warnings against using these drugs in young people—grew enormously during and after Covid. The medical journal Pediatrics reported that in the US monthly antidepressant dispensing rates to ages 12–25 increased 66.3% from January 2016 to December 2022 (from ~2,576 to ~4,285 per 100,000 people). The number of individuals in this age group with more than one dispensed antidepressant rose 46.1%. More recent data from the CDC shows that about 19.3% of adults in the US currently "take medication for their mental health," which would mostly be SSRI antidepressants. All of this poses the question: Is the rate of SSRI prescribing affecting sexual activity across a broad spectrum of people in America today? It was 23 years ago (2003) that the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the UK issued its first warning that SSRIs increased suicide and self-harm risks in young people, even though they knew of this problem for a long time. The US FDA followed with its own black box warning in 2004, later extended through age 24. The UK's 2003 warning was likewise limited to young people, until this month. Fast forward to now, the MHRA issued warnings this month about suicidal thoughts and behaviours associated with SSRIs in patients of all ages—not just those under 25—as covered by the US black box warning—as well as warnings about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. Shockingly, the US FDA has yet to require a specific warning ...

  6. 5d ago

    Blood Clots and the Death of Common Sense An Old Problem with a Modern Twist The Pulmonary Embolism We Must Not Miss When a Diagnostic Test Becomes a Screening Test The Fear of Being Wrong The Patient Pays for Our Uncertainty The Algorithm Is Not the Ph

    By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. A couple of days ago I was on national TV being asked the usual round of questions about an NFL player who'd apparently developed blood clots. How can a young, fit athlete get a pulmonary embolism (PE)? What are the symptoms? Can you fly with a clot? Could it have been picked up earlier? All perfectly sensible questions, especially for a young athlete, who faces far more scrutiny than an ordinary patient would. Within the hour, the story was all over TV station websites. . Obviously, he's got the country's attention. I've spent much of my career answering requests like this type. After doing emergency, pulmonary, and critical care for so long, you'd think you'd know everything about thromboembolic disease by now, and I really don't find anything too surprising in that field anymore. I've seen PE kill patients who were absolutely stable just minutes before. I've also seen patients who were absolutely convinced they had a nasty clot, despite their presentation being very different. Both experiences have shaped how I think about the disease and reinforced that medicine needs the human element, something no machine, test, or algorithm can ever provide: Judgment. The more I thought about that interview, the more I realized it wasn't really about a footballer or pulmonary embolism. It was an interview about where modern medicine has gone. We have such wonderful diagnostic tools now, and at the same time we have created a situation where doctors are increasingly unwilling to use their own clinical judgment without some form of technological validation. We can now pick up abnormalities that would have been completely invisible a generation ago, yet we can find ourselves in a position where we're not sure whether that abnormality is of any significance. We're absolutely superb at detecting disease, and we're surprised by how uncertain we can be about when to stop looking. At one time, a doctor's most important tool was his own mind. That's still true today, though I'm not sure we believe it anymore. About 180 years ago, Virchow examined the mechanisms of thrombosis and pulmonary arterial obstruction. His 1846 work and the papers collected in 1856 formed the pathological basis of what we now call thromboembolic disease [1,2]. Every medical student has heard of him at some stage, invariably in the context of the classic triad of venous stasis, endothelial injury, and hypercoagulability. The triad as we know it wasn't actually Virchow's. Historians have examined how later interpretations and reassemblies of his original observations produced the concept that now bears his name [3]. The historical detail is of course interesting, but the real issue is the physiology. Clots form because the biological milieu is pro-thrombotic. Flow may be slow. The vascular endothelium may be damaged or activated. The coagulation system may shift to a pro-thrombotic state. All of these can happen in isolation or in combination, and their relative importance varies from patient to patient. A post op patient who is bedbound is not in the same physiological situation as a young athlete who has had an injury. A patient with active cancer is not in the same situation as a patient who has simply spent several hours sitting on an aircraft. They may all go on to have a venous thromboembolism (VTE), but the circumstances in which it occurs and the risks involved will be very different. That's why you can't just see a symptom and order a test. You have to understand the patient, the patient's situation, and the biology behind it. A swollen leg could be venous thrombosis, chronic venous insufficiency, a drug effect, trauma, inflammation, or a hundred other things. Shortness of breath could be a pulmonary embolism; it could be cardiac disease, it could be a pulmonary infection, it could be obstructive airways, it could be anemia, or it could be anxiety. The presence of a symptom is the first thing you consider in the diagnostic...

  7. 6d ago

    Equity with Accountability in Pandemic Preparedness A Diagnosis without an Institutional Test The UN Declaration: Agreement by Accumulation Equity Is Not the Delivery of the Same Commodity Preparedness Has Beneficiaries Even When No Pandemic Occurs A Mo

    By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org. Before asking how power in global health should be rebalanced, reformers must confront a prior question: have existing policies and practices created a growing dependency on donor countries and international organisations? In many low-resourced countries, earmarked finance, externally selected priorities, imported program designs, a growing non-state and donor-dependent workforce, and donor reporting requirements have weakened the link between national choices and national accountability. If that dependency has hollowed out or undermined sovereign responsibility, the answer cannot be another layer of international coordination. The architecture must instead return responsibility for health outcomes to those directly invested in population health, particularly national governments. The World Health Organization's (WHO's) mandates, functions, resources, and authority should progressively contract where functions can be performed effectively closer to affected populations, as countries recover the capacity and express accountability to make their own choices (IHRP, 2026a, 2026b). The Right to Health Sovereignty Policy Report International Health Reform Project · Brownstone Institute Buy on Amazon Sovereignty here does not mean isolation; it means that international cooperation should support governments that remain politically and financially accountable for decisions made in their name. Recent proposals for reforming pandemic governance begin from a familiar diagnosis. The global health system is fragmented, public trust has deteriorated, poorer countries exercise too little influence, and inequality magnifies the damage caused by outbreaks (Lal et al., 2026; Cullinan, 2026). Much of this is true. Yet the remedies advanced in a new Nature Health commentary and in the draft United Nations Political Declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR) do not follow from that diagnosis. They largely reaffirm the institutions, financing models, and biomedical priorities that drove the loss of trust in the first place (Brown, Bate, and Bell, 2026). The contradiction is stark. Global health leaders condemn inequality while supporting a preparedness architecture that can transfer scarce public resources from low- and middle-income countries towards international organisations, development-finance intermediaries, consultants, surveillance contractors, universities, and pharmaceutical manufacturers concentrated in wealthier states. They call for power to be 'rebalanced,' but offer few realistic and enforceable means by which powerful institutions would surrender authority rather than serve their own interests (Lal et al., 2026). They conflate access to centrally selected commodities with health equity—the equivalent opportunity to live a healthy and fulfilling life (Brown, Bate, and Bell, 2026). Above all, they avoid the transparency regarding evidence and error that restoring trust requires. Trust was lost for a reason. Repeating the policies underlying that loss will not restore it. The WHO does not ordinarily possess formal power to order national lockdowns, vaccination mandates, or other domestic measures. Its practical influence is nonetheless considerable. Emergency declarations, technical standards, model laws, procurement arrangements, donor conditions, and reputational pressure can narrow the choices available to governments, particularly those dependent on external finance and expertise. The relevant sovereignty question is therefore not whether the WHO can legally command a state, but whether the surrounding institutional system makes departure from its preferred policies politically or financially bearable. Lal and colleagues' Nature Health commentary, 'Reforming global health for an age of mistrust, fragmentation and overlapping crises,' identifies three desired transformations: rebalancing power, reinforcing systems, and restoring trust. It recognises that the Lusa...

  8. Oct 29

    The Medical and Ethical Atrocity of "Perioperative Vaccination" The Clinical Hazards of "Perioperative Vaccination" The Ethical Atrocity of "Perioperative Vaccination" "Perioperative Vaccination" Must Be Stopped

    By Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone dot org. I once met the surgeon general. He offered me a cigarette. –Rodney Dangerfield Whenever I suspect that my beloved profession has finally reached rock bottom in its utter subservience to the vaccine-industrial complex, I stand corrected by the report of some new-world-record, bathyspheric descent into depravity that some new group of physicians has managed to achieve. Independent journalist Jon Fleetwood reports that some of the largest and best-known pediatric hospitals in the United States are vaccinating thousands of children while under anesthesia for surgical procedures. The Medical Masquerade A Physician Exposes the Deceptions of Covid Clayton J. Baker, MD · Brownstone Institute Buy on Amazon Children's Hospital of Philadelphia – widely and unironically known as "CHOP" – has reportedly instituted a program called "Close Your Eyes, We'll Immunize." It involves administering flu shots to children while they are anesthetized in the operating room. Reportedly, over 2,000 children have been vaccinated for influenza while under anesthesia for surgery at CHOP. Furthermore, those responsible at CHOP are reportedly considering adding mRNA-based Covid-19 and RSV shots to the mix. Fleetwood reports that another major American pediatric center, Children's Hospital of Colorado (less graphically abbreviated as "CHCO") has even outperformed CHOP in this outrage, having reportedly vaccinated over 18,000 children while under anesthesia for surgery. Two pediatric anesthesiologists, Caroline A. Pasquariello of CHOP and Kim M. Strupp of CHCO, even published a "how to" article for replication of this program in the American Academy of Pediatrics' AAP News. Both clinically and ethically, "Close Your Eyes, We'll Immunize" constitutes gross medical malpractice. Clinically, it adds entirely unnecessary and avoidable risks to the surgical care of children. Ethically, it commits numerous violations that once again demonstrate the moral degeneracy of the entire vaccine enterprise, and of the pediatric establishment, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which seemingly serves the vaccine-industrial complex exclusively, and at the expense of our children. Surgery and anesthesia are both inherently dangerous. The threats of airway compromise, cardiovascular failure, adverse reactions to anesthesia, infections, hemorrhage, and other complications are well known to every anesthesiologist, scrub nurse, and surgeon. Such concerns keep the good ones awake at night. This is why, under proper practice, every effort is made in the perioperative period (the time immediately before, during, and after surgery) to minimize risk to the patient. This is why they shave and sterilize your skin before making the incision, why they don't let you eat after midnight the night before, why they ask you so many questions preoperatively (including about allergies), and why they monitor your vital signs so closely. That is why they postpone the surgery if you arrive with a fever on the day of the procedure. The last thing any competent and caring surgeon, scrub nurse, or anesthesiologist wants during surgery is a wild card in play. Any unnecessary risk factor that can cause harm to the patient or create confusion during the perioperative period is forbidden. Unless, apparently, it's a vaccine, and you're an anesthesiologist at CHOP or CHCO. How can vaccinating a child in the operating room cause harm perioperatively? Let us count the ways. Postoperative fevers are a universally acknowledged problem in surgery. They can signal a dangerous infection, internal bleeding, a drug or anesthesia reaction, and more. They often require extensive evaluation to identify and treat the cause, and can extend hospital stays significantly. The workup alone for a postoperative fever can be expensive, invasive, and harmful in itself. Vaccines frequently cause fevers, especially in children. According to one study, 8-10% of children receivi...

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About

Daily readings from Brownstone Institute authors, contributors, and researchers on public health, philosophy, science, and economics.

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  • Creator
    Brownstone Institute
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Brownstone Journal

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