Tag: vaccines

Facebook Bans Ads Questioning Safety Of COVID-19 Vaccines

The company has also launched salvos against QAnon and election-related misinformation, while taking an aggressive approach toward political advertising, and political content in general.

And as global authorities struggle to convince the public that an eventual COVID-19 vaccine will be safe to take despite the expedited approval process, Facebook has decided to give them a hand by banning all content encouraging users to refuse to take a vaccine. It laid out the new global policy in a blog post published Tuesday.

“Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we’ll reject it,” the company’s Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin and Director of Product Management Rob Leathern said in a blog post Tuesday.

Facebook will draw the line at allowing users who advocate against “mandatory vaccination,” which the company said was a legitimate political position (not an argument made in “bad faith” that some on the left insist), to post as normal. They cited an example of a state lawmaker from Virginia who posted “STOP FORCED CORONAVIRUS VACCINATIONS”.

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Bill Gates says life will return to normal only after SECOND generation of Covid vaccines rolled out and virus eliminated globally

Technology tycoon Bill Gates said life can get back to normal only when a second generation of Covid-19 vaccines is widely available and the virus is eradicated worldwide – a higher bar than was set for any disease in history.

“The only way we’ll get completely back to normal is by having, maybe not the first generation of vaccines, but eventually a vaccine that is super-effective, and that a lot of the people take, and that we get the disease eliminated on a global basis,” Gates said Sunday in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press program. “That is where we can finally start taking all the problems that have been created — in education, mental health — and start to build back in a positive way.”

According to that standard, Americans might need to live for years, or for life, under social-distancing guidelines and other Covid-19 restrictions. It’s certainly gloomier than the assessment Gates gave in a Fox interview last month, when he said progress on vaccines might make it possible for a return to normalcy in the US by the summer of 2021. He said he expects several of the first generation of vaccines to get emergency approval by early next year.

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Scientists say fetal tissue remains essential for vaccines and developing treatments

Anti-abortion activists set off the uproar by releasing undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials that raised questions of whether the organization was profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. Planned Parenthood has denied making any profit and said it charges fees solely to cover its costs.

University laboratories that buy such cells strongly defend their research, saying tissue that would otherwise be thrown out has played a vital role in lifesaving medical advances and holds great potential for further breakthroughs.

Fetal cells are considered ideal because they divide rapidly, adapt to new environments easily and are less susceptible to rejection than adult cells when transplanted.

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‘Twindemic’ test: Massachusetts, many colleges mandate winter flu shots

Protesters have swarmed downtown Boston and the state Capitol in the seven weeks since Republican Gov. Charlie Baker issued the first-of-its-kind requirement for students from preschool through college.As the Massachusetts mandate plays out, other states have weighed similar requirements while colleges throughout the country pile on their own orders to prevent flu patients from clogging doctors offices and emergency rooms alongside people infected with coronavirus this winter.

State laws across the country already require various vaccines for students and health care workers, while allowing a host of exemptions. Governments still have broad authority to implement new flu shot orders, potentially paving the way for mandatory inoculation against the coronavirus in a country where vaccine skepticismis spreading and President Donald Trump has resisted many public health protocols during the pandemic.

“This is a brave new experiment by the state of Massachusetts,” said Lawrence Gostin, who heads a university-based center on health law that serves as an official collaborating institute with the World Health Organization. “If it turns out to be a wholesale success, that should influence other states to go a similar route, not just with flu but with other vaccines. But if it causes a backlash and only marginal benefit, states might be hesitant to adopt that model in the future.”

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Vaccine suppliers given indemnity for ‘inevitable’ side effects

The Morrison government has given the suppliers of two COVID-19 vaccines indemnity against liability for rare side effects that experts say are “inevitable” when a vaccine is rolled out.

But the government will not set up a statutory compensation scheme, which the president of the Australian Medical Association, Omar Khorshid, said meant Australians who suffered “extremely rare” side effects from the vaccines would face a tough battle to seek compensation.

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