The CDC has multiple webpages detailing everything you could want to know for all the recommended vaccines, and surprise! All the side-effects for the normal vaccine schedules were either a result of the proper immune response (which unfortunately includes a possible high fever) or an allergic reaction to a vaccine…

It is exhausting to explain this shit to people properly except if they’re willing to engage in good faith. That situation isn’t as tiring, because they’re trying to understand what you’re saying. However, if they already think they’re right, you start on the defensive and invest a lot of emotional energy into…

I love Indiana Jones, don’t get me wrong, but “Temple of Doom” is not the hill to die on re:racism.

I know you’re probably trolling, but saline is salt water.

I know I’m being pedantic here, but you can have an autoimmune reaction develop for literally no reason, and surgery can provide the danger signals for the stimulation of adaptive immune cells. All that is required is for a T or B cell to have slipped the don’t-attack-oneself leash, end up seeing their cognate antigen…

Depends. I’m not an expert on breast implants or silicone, but I checked out what effect silicone can have related to the immune system. In mice and rats, it doesn’t seem to cause either elevated or specific immune responses by its presence.

Especially by the fearsome saline! So diabolical!

Saline is salt water, so if there is an issue with implants, it’s probably not due to content with that kind.

Like saline? Saline.

Japan also has a higher suicide rate than the US and a higher mortality rate in general. A higher rate of drug overdoses in the US likely due to oxycontin (as mentioned in that article) is a complicated statistic, just like the ones I cited for Japan. You have to take culture into account, as well as things like…

I don’t take any recreational drugs, but I disagree with your take here. Cocaine and morphine are amazing pain killers. Ritalin and Adderall are prescription medication. Hallucinogens are mostly harmless. Weed is being legalized for medical or even for recreational use all over the place.

Would there even be the genre of Rock and Roll? I mean, Keith Richards alone...

Mr. Brown, the Berlin patient, actually got graft versus host disease, which complicated the interpretation of what actually cured him. The scientific community tried to do just normal bone marrow transplants over the past decade or so to see if just a bone marrow transplant + medication could manage it, but it didn’t…

Magic Johnson takes antiretrovirals to prevent the progression of HIV disease to AIDS. He’s still infected, just like every other person who has HIV and takes antiretrovirals to keep their viral load down. His situation isn’t any different than that of people who were infected around the same time and were lucky…

Part of the problem is that you need CCR5 to be knocked out in a bone marrow that is the appropriate kind of match for the major histocompatibility class I genes (in humans, HLA-A, B, and C). Sometimes the bone marrow is intentionally slightly mismatched for a mild graft-vs-host effect to help get rid of leukemias.…

I have some issues with what this group did at the Whitney, even though I recognize that the Whitney is a institution that needs to be shaken up and increase diversity in all its forms. This group’s protest involved burned herbs to the point that the lobby was filled with smoke, meaning there was enough smoke to…

I figured the lower two were Oxford and Cambridge? That’s kind of how the universities look (walled cities). And the city at the top is not!London. You can even see not!Parliament.

Vaccines on the whole do not have harmful side-effects. There are very, very rarely complications such as a high fever or an allergic reaction (usually to vaccinations with an egg component). The only real difference between a vaccine and scraping your knee up badly or eating food to which the five second rule applies …

I looked at the actual scientific article, and while the percent of people who don’t think vaccines are safe just misses significant association with voting for populist politics, the associations between voting for populists and either disbelieving in vaccine efficacy or vaccine importance were solid (decent Rs & p…

It’s not a small risk. For most people, it’s an infinitesimal risk. There is no nuance to vaccination. If the individual is immunocompetent and not allergic to the components of the vaccine, then the individual should be vaccinated, child or adult.