Ed Eichhorn and I hadn’t planned on publishing back-to-back issues of the Three Minute ReadTM to begin 2024, but the news from Florida and Texas on vaccines and EMTALA made my blood boil. I was seeing visions of George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (no surprise, both are banned in many Florida school districts).
Against the recommendations of federal health agencies, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo has called for a “halt in the use of Covid-19 mRNA vaccines” based on his concerns about “nucleic acid contaminants” in the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, and the “unique risks posed by DNA integration.” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said that it was implausible “that the minute amounts of small DNA fragments present could find their way into the nucleus of these cells.” Appointed surgeon general in 2021 by Gov. Ron DeSantis, Dr. Ladapo has since increasingly aligned himself with anti-vaccine claims that the shots cause serious harm, ignoring the 20 years of basic research behind their development.
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to University of Pennsylvania scientists Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for their relentless research to find a specific chemical modification to mRNA synthesized in the lab before injecting it into cells that avoided provoking an immune response. The Nobel Prize panel noted that their discovery “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system and contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”
Florida’s Covid vaccination rates remain among the lowest in the US.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) was enacted in 1986 after Dallas-area for-profit hospital EDs performed “wallet biopsies” to identify uninsured patients before dumping them on Parkland Medical Center. EMTALA requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing care regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. After SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade, HHS issued guidance in July 2022 that instructed hospitals that federal law requires doctors to perform abortions, even in states where it is banned, if they believe it is “the stabilizing treatment necessary” to protect the health of the mother in an emergency medical situation.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Attorney General sued to overrule the guidance and the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided with the state: “EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child especially when EMTALA imposes equal stabilization obligations. We therefore decline to expand the scope of EMTALA.”
healingamericanhealthcare.org 