Public health officials state that vaccines are safe and effective, but the truth is far more complicated. Vaccination is a serious medical intervention that always carries the potential to injure and cause death as well as to prevent disease. Coercive vaccination policies deprive people of free and informed consent—the hallmark of ethical medicine. Americans are increasingly concerned about vaccine safety and the right to make individual, informed choices together with their healthcare practitioners. Vaccine Epidemic focuses on the searing debate surrounding individual and parental vaccination choice in the United States. Habakus, Holland, and Rosenberg edit and introduce a diverse array of interrelated topics concerning the explosive vaccine controversy, including the ethics of vaccination mandates, corrupting conflicts of interest in the national vaccine program, and personal narratives of parents, children, and soldiers who have suffered vaccine injury. Newly updated with additional chapters focusing on institutional scientific misconduct, mandates for healthcare workers, concerns about HPV vaccine development, and the story behind the Supreme Court’s recent vaccine decision, Vaccine Epidemic remains the essential handbook for the vaccination choice movement and required reading for all people contemplating vaccination for themselves and their children.

Touching on a range of disease, from leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) to COVID-19, Preventing the Next Pandemic has always been a timely goal, but it will be even more important in a COVID and post-COVID world.

With contributions from an international team of leading researchers, the book pulls together updated research results in the area of HIV/AIDS modeling to provide readers with the latest information in the field. Topics covered include: AIDS epidemic models; vaccine models; models for HIV/cell dynamics and interactions; cellular kinetics; viral dynamics with antiviral treatments; modeling of drug resistance and quasispecies.Extensive deterministic models, statistical models, stochastic models and state space models on treating AIDS patients with anti-retroviral drugs are provided, as well as an in-depth discussion of these models. The book also contains updated reviews on mathematical models for assessing effects of AIDS vaccines, statistical methods for analyzing clinical trial data on AIDS vaccines, and overviews of models and statistical methods for assessing drug resistance of HIV to anti-retroviral drugs. Some important statistical methods specific to the intervention and prevention of HIV epidemic are also discussed.This will be a useful reference source for graduate students and researchers in biomathematics and biostatistics, as well as for HIV/AIDS epidemiologists and clinical investigators learning quantitative methods to study AIDS epidemics and HIV infection.

Most parents would never consider dispensing deadly addictive street drugs to their children but if a trusted physician writes a prescription for an FDA-approved schedule 2 medication for their two-year old based on some questionable mental health screening, those unwary parents do not question or object. Despite side effect warnings, regularly revealed during TV ads, parents frequently fail to take those warnings seriously, perhaps presuming that the side effects are happenstance or rarely occur. Over the decades, because organized psychiatry, represented by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), convened numerous consensus panels that designed hundreds of non-biologically-based disorders for its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) especially suitable for the pill-for-every-ill pharmaceutical industry that conceivably already had many profitable solutions for the disorders, in the pre-production process. The consequences have been disastrous with no discernable end in sight some people taking prescription drugs or withdrawing from them have perpetrated school, mall and public shootings. That is in addition to thousands of suicides that the public never hears about, unless the victim is a well-known public figure like Robin Williams. Just the military-related suicide rate is 8,000 per year untold numbers of these are the result of the psych drug cocktails doled out by psychiatrists working for the VA. The government is big pharmas largest customer. In addition to the homicides and suicides, irreversible brain damage results from drug remedies to temporary problems that might have been easily resolved through compassionate interaction and talk therapy. Despite the claims that drugs were not a factor in the Sandy Hook mass murders, certain circumstances provide a different picture. Adam Lanza, always a unique individual, changed from being a geeky, weird kid to being a mass murderer, not of people his own age, but of beautiful, vulnerable children feeling secure in their classrooms in a sleepy bedroom community in Connecticut.

The success of the polio vaccine was a remarkable breakthrough for medical science, effectively eradicating a dreaded childhood disease. It was also the largest medical experiment to use American schoolchildren. Richard J. Altenbaugh examines an uneasy conundrum in the history of vaccination: even as vaccines greatly mitigate the harm that infectious disease causes children, the process of developing these vaccines put children at great risk as research subjects. In the first half of the twentieth century, in the face of widespread resistance to vaccines, public health officials gradually medicalized American culture through mass media, public health campaigns, and the public education system. Schools supplied tens of thousands of young human subjects to researchers, school buildings became the main dispensaries of the polio antigen, and the mass immunization campaign that followed changed American public health policy in profound ways. Tapping links between bioethics, education, public health, and medical research, this book raises fundamental questions about child welfare and the tension between private and public responsibility that still fuel anxieties around vaccination today.

Parents in the US and other societies are increasingly refusing to vaccinate their children, even though popular anti-vaccine myths – e.g. ‘vaccines cause autism’ – have been debunked. This book explains the epistemic and moral failures that lead some parents to refuse to vaccinate their children. First, some parents have good reasons not to defer to the expertise of physicians, and to rely instead upon their own judgments about how to care for their children. Unfortunately, epistemic self-reliance systematically distorts beliefs in areas of inquiry in which expertise is required (like vaccine immunology). Second, vaccine refusers and mainstream medical authorities are often committed to different values surrounding health and safety. For example, while vaccine advocates stress that vaccines have low rates of serious complications, vaccine refusers often resist vaccination because it is ‘unnatural’ and because they view vaccine-preventable diseases as a ‘natural’ part of childhood. Finally, parents who refuse vaccines rightly resist the utilitarian moral arguments – ‘for the greater good’ – that vaccine advocates sometimes make. Unfortunately, vaccine refusers also sometimes embrace a pernicious hyper-individualism that sanctions free-riding on herd immunity and that cultivates indifference to the interpersonal and social harms that unvaccinated persons may cause.

This is a pioneering work on the emerging field of artificial immune systems-highly distributed systems based on the principles of the natural system. Like artificial neural networks, artificial immune systems can learn new information and recall previously learned information. This book provides an overview of artificial immune systems, explaining its applications in areas such as immunological memory, anomaly detection algorithms, and modeling the effects of prior infection on vaccine efficacy.