Forcing Vaccination on Every Child Undermines Civil Liberties

Forcing Vaccination on Every Child Undermines Civil Liberties

The author's son Chris, at two years old in the summer of 1980, before his 4th DPT shot.

(Courtesy Fisher)


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Barbara Loe Fisher
Author and human rights activist Barbara Loe Fisher is co-founder and president of the non-profit National Vaccine Information Center established in 1982 to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education. She is co-author of the 1985 book DPT: A Shot in the Dark, author of A Guide to Reforming Vaccine Policy and Law, founder and executive editor of the online journal newspaper, The Vaccine Reaction, and a video blog commentator on NVIC.org. She helped secure safety provisions in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and has testified in Congress and state legislatures. She served on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee; Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Forum; the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee and Vaccine Policy Analysis Collaborative. She has discussed vaccine science, policy and law on CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, NPR and in USA Today, Washington Post, New York Times and many public forums.
A new oral vaccine could prevent urinary tract infections for years

Urinary tract infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year.

Getty Images

Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.

But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.

MILESTONE: Doctors have transplanted a pig organ into a human for the first time in history

A surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital prepares a pig organ for transplant.

Michelle Rose/Massachusetts General Hospital

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital made history last week when they successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human patient for the first time ever.

The recipient was a 62-year-old man named Richard Slayman who had been living with end-stage kidney disease caused by diabetes. While Slayman had received a kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor, his diabetes ultimately caused the kidney to fail less than five years after the transplant. Slayman had undergone dialysis ever since—a procedure that uses an artificial kidney to remove waste products from a person’s blood when the kidneys are unable to—but the dialysis frequently caused blood clots and other complications that landed him in the hospital multiple times.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.