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.

Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python provides an illustrated compendium of tools and tactics for analyzing infectious diseases using cutting-edge computational methods. From simple S(E)IR models, and through time series analysis and geospatial models, this book is both a guided tour through the computational analysis of infectious diseases and a quick-reference manual. Chapters are accompanied by extensive practical examples in Python, illustrating applications from start to finish. This book is designed for researchers and practicing infectious disease forecasters, modelers, data scientists, and those who wish to learn more about analysis of infectious disease processes in the real world. Connects computational infectious disease analysis to state-of-the-art data science Conveys ideas on epidemiology and infectious disease modeling in a clear, accessible way Provides code examples to elucidate best practices

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.

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.

This two-volume set constitutes the revised selected papers of the 18th CCF Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, ChineseCSCW 2023 held in Harbin, China, in August 2023. The 54 full papers and 28 short papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 221 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Social Media and Online Communities; Collaborative Mechanisms, Models, Approaches, Algorithms and Systems; Crowd Intelligence and Crowd Cooperative Computing; Cooperative Evolutionary Computation and Human-like Intelligent Collaboration; Domain-Specific Collaborative Applications.

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.

Why is there such an active and ongoing resistance to mandatory vaccination? This book examines why vaccination as a public health measure continues to be highly controversial. Objections to mandatory vaccination are widespread in the world today. Rather than being a new development, such objections have existed since vaccinations were first introduced. This book provides complete coverage of the history and background of vaccination issues in the United States and around the world, along with a detailed examination of the issues related to the use of vaccination today, and supplies readers with the necessary information to consider if the potential benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks. Vaccination Controversies: A Reference Handbook overviews the scientific basis for and history of immunization as a method for protecting individuals against disease, along with a review of the social, political, and economic issues related to the use of immunization in both human and animal populations. The book debunks prevalent public health myths by clearly outlining the scientific consensus behind modern immunization regimes. Also included are profiles of important individuals and organizations within the history of vaccination, a chronology of important events, as well as pertinent reports, laws, and court decisions that give the reader a greater appreciation of the issues surrounding vaccination.