{"id":89907,"date":"2025-10-31T04:31:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T09:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89907"},"modified":"2025-10-31T05:50:36","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T10:50:36","slug":"its-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89907","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s SCIENCE!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>SCENE:\u00a0 Avery LIBRELLE is riding a recumbent bike through the Minneapolis skyway when Mitch BERG happens across the path.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>LIBRELLE: Merg!<\/p>\n<p>BERG:\u00a0 Er, hey, Avery.\u00a0 What are doing riding a bike through the skyway&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>LIBRELLE: Shut up.\u00a0 \u00a0Do you remember these?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">You don&#39;t know anyone who needed this to breathe<br><br>Because of vaccines <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/cJdYmqHmIC\">pic.twitter.com\/cJdYmqHmIC<\/a><\/p>&mdash; Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DrNeilStone\/status\/1965036435452592224?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 8, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>BERG:&nbsp; They were a little before my time, but I know what they are&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>LIBRELLE:&nbsp; You have never seen one&nbsp;<em>because VACCINES!&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/em>But&nbsp;<em>your party&nbsp;<\/em>wants to&nbsp;<em>abolish&nbsp;<\/em>vaccines!<\/p>\n<p>BERG:&nbsp; First, no we don&#8217;t.&nbsp; Second, I&#8217;m not an anti-vaxxer.&nbsp; But the vaccines we take for granted today &#8211; Measles, Rubella, Mumps and all of those &#8211; had <em>years<\/em> of testing before the public got anywhere near them.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t trust the first round of Covid vaccines, because there&#8217;s no way the pharmaceutical industry can produce something that complicated, that fast, without some teething problems.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>LIBRELLE:&nbsp; Hah.&nbsp; You might as well be a faith-healer!&nbsp;<em>Trust the experts<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>BERG:&nbsp; I mean, I <a href=\"_wp_link_placeholder\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">mentioned testing, right<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Paul Offit, paediatrician and prominent advocate of vaccination, sets the `Cutter incident&#8217; in the context of the struggle of medical science against polio and other infectious diseases over the course of the 20th century. He reminds us that, within a decade of Karl Landsteiner&#8217;s identification of the polio virus in 1908, an epidemic in New York killed 2400 people (mostly children) and left thousands more with a life-long disability. In the 1950s, summer outbreaks in the USA caused tens of thousands of cases, leaving hundreds paralysed or dead. `Second only to the atomic bomb&#8217;, polio was `the thing that Americans feared the most&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(<em>But LIBRELLE\u00a0<\/em>has already cycled away, looking for underutilized recycling bins).<\/p>\n<p><em>And SCENE.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You don&#8217;t DARE defy The Science (TM), do you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89907"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90013,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89907\/revisions\/90013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}