Jefferey Jaxen
As parents and concerned citizens rallied in Sacramento to oppose Senate Bill 277, the Senate Health Committee advanced the bill with a 6 to 2 vote. In what the Sergeant at Arms described as “The biggest turnout I’ve seen in 15 years,” the signed bill now faces further challenges on the way to law.
In California, where solutions appear to always remove rights from the citizen and replace them with control, hope for individual freedoms is getting hard to come by. While the state grapples with laughable solutions put forward by Gov. Jerry Brown to end a drought, parents now face the real possibility of forced vaccination for their children attending public school.
During the hearing, many of the six senators who voted in favor of the bill used their time to voice pro-vaccine talking points. Yet, not before the Health Committee sat through almost two hours of parents and children giving their individual testimonies on record in opposition.
Jefferey Jaxen
A monumental ethical issue is hovering over the entire medical establishment in the United States that threatens its integrity and trust. The human element is being removed from the equation,replaced by computers to give us our options, and legislation to remove our choice. Somewhere in the shuffle, the individual’s informed consent was broken down, lost in the paperwork, and made irrelevant.
Informed consent is the process by which the treating health care provider discloses appropriate information to their patient so that the patient may make a voluntary choice to accept or refuse treatment. It originates from the legal and ethical right that the patient has to direct what happens to their body, and from the ethical duty of the physician to involve the patient in their health care. Concerning the current hot button area of vaccination in the United States, the patient is not given proper informed consent of side effects or the actual vaccine inserts to look at prior to injection. If they did receive the insert, they would quickly see the repeated words "there have been no controlled trials" and "safety and effectiveness have not been established."
Jefferey Jaxen
IBM, whose stock price has sunk to its lowest in four years, has recently “announced a $1 billion investment to establish the new Watson Group.” IBM’s Watson computer processes large amounts of your information to make a better decision for you. Watson is now embedded in the Department of Veterans Affairs Data Center in Austin, Texas to “advise doctors on treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder.” According to their press release, the technology will “transform decision making,” or said in a different way, if you are a Veteran in need of care, IBM’s Watson will soon make the decision about your health care for you.
Big Data Used Against You
IBM’s Watson can “understand and respond to Big Data.” This is a catch-all phrase that encompasses medical literature, clinical data, personal electronic records, and doctors' personal comments on patients.
