Scare Tactics to Sell You on RSV Vaccine
Fear sells, they say, and that’s certainly the adage used by Big Pharma when it comes to vaccines. A perfect example of this was recently published by Vox.6 “New RSV Vaccines Are Coming. This Is Very, Very Good News,” the headline states. Why good news? Because RSV is a “baddie responsible for much of the mayhem” now seen in hospitals. Vox publishes classic fear porn:
“RSV generally causes cold symptoms but can also lead to severe lung inflammation or infection in very young and very old people. And it’s started off cold season with a bang:
As of October 22, babies under a year old were being hospitalized at rates six times higher than they were at the same point in 2019, and the overall hospitalization rate was seven times higher for people of all ages.
Every year, hundreds of children die of RSV, and tens of thousands more are hospitalized … RSV disease is one of the first pediatric illnesses that young pediatricians learn to fear, said [Amy] Edwards [a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Cleveland].
Babies with the infection have terrible coughs and make wheezing noises as they struggle to move air through their swollen airways. ‘Once you’ve seen it, it’s like you never forget it,’ she said …
In the US, the infection leads to about 58,000 hospitalizations and 100 to 300 deaths among young children each year, making it the country’s top cause of hospitalization in infants.
Although it’s a particularly risky infection for babies born prematurely and for those with lung problems or heart abnormalities, about 40 percent of American infants who died of RSV over the past few decades were otherwise healthy.
However bad RSV is in the United States, it’s worse globally. Every year, it causes an estimated 120,000 infant deaths worldwide … There is currently no approved antiviral treatment for RSV in either adults or children, and the one preventive option that currently exists is far from perfect …
Babies need something better — something affordable that can protect all infants, not just the highest-risk ones, from this seasonal scourge. Adults, too, need something to protect them from a virus that reliably causes an immense amount of disease — ideally, something that’s as good as a flu shot, or better.”
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