Consumer Health Digest, Issue #25-01

January 5, 2025
  • Louisiana public health workers forbidden to promote vaccines.
  • COVID treatment questioner appointed as Louisiana surgeon seneral.
  • Biomedical scientist lambastes EWG as anti-science organization..
  • Investigators spotlight increased demand and harmful impact of exorcisms.

Louisiana public health workers forbidden to promote vaccines. A new Louisiana Department of Health policy forbids the agency’s workers from advertising or otherwise promoting COVID-19, influenza or mpox vaccines. Health Department staff members were told they could not put up signs at the department’s clinics to indicate that COVID, flu, or mpox vaccines were available on site. The policy conflicts with established practice in public health agencies elsewhere. [Westwood R. Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots. NPR Morning Edition, Dec 20, 2024] According to a department statement shared with NPR:

  • the department has been “reevaluating both the state’s public health priorities as well as our messaging around vaccine promotion, especially for COVID-19 and influenza”
  • the ban is a shift “away from one-size-fits-all paternalistic guidance” to a stance in which “immunization for any vaccine, along with practices like mask wearing and social distancing, are an individual’s personal choice”
  • “the flu vaccine does not prevent one from getting the influenza virus [This contradicts an information page provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which states the vaccine reduces the risk of getting the flu.]

Critics of the new policy interviewed by NPR included:

  • Kimberly Hood, who led the Office of Public Health from 2021 to 2022;
  • Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
  • Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, who said the new policy was “akin to malpractice”
  • Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University;
  • Joseph Bocchini, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who serves as the president of the Louisiana chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics; and
  • James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

COVID treatment questioner appointed as Louisiana surgeon general. Early in 2024, Republican Jeff Landry took office as Louisiana’s governor after serving eight years as the state’s attorney general. In 2024, Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature passed five bills—all signed by Governor Landry—and two resolutions aimed at loosening vaccine requirements, limiting the power of public health authorities, and sowing doubt about vaccine safety.

Landry also appointed Dr. Ralph Abraham, a family medicine doctor, to be the state’s surgeon general, a position that co-leads the Department of Health, and appointed Dr. Wyche Coleman, an ophthalmologist, to serve as deputy surgeon general.

Abraham, a rural doctor and former veterinarian, told legislators that had he led the state’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, he would have done “just about everything” differently. He told legislators masking does not work, called six-foot social distancing rules “ridiculous,” and said he did not recommend vaccines to his patients. While he highlighted the Hippocratic Oath maxim, “First, do no harm,” he also said another principle should guide public-health policy: “When in doubt, choose freedom.”

Biomedical scientist lambastes EWG as anti-science organization. Biomedical scientist Andrea Love, PhD, has harshly criticized the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an organization founded in 1993 by Ken Cook and Richard Wiles that claims to “advocate for public health.” She notes EWG:

  • exploits health anxiety, low science literacy, and chemophobia
  • routinely makes claims that directly oppose information from credible scientific and regulatory agencies
  • influences misguided policies and laws through its EWG Action Fund
  • scares people away from perfectly safe, nutritious, and affordable produce with its annual “Dirty Dozen” list of 12 conventionally grown fruits and vegetables that “contain the highest levels of pesticide residues”

She concludes:

EWG creates unfounded fear about conventional food, manmade and synthetic substances, and demonstrably safe products. Their fear-laden claims of chemicals, whether food ingredients, pesticides, herbicides, etc., are exaggerated far beyond what these trace levels of substances would ever pose to the public. They promote the notion that chemicals are “toxic” without any context about dosage, exposure, or mechanism of action.

[Love, A. The Environmental Working Group is an anti-science activist organization. Immunologic, Oct 2, 2024]

Investigators spotlight increased demand and harmful impact of exorcisms. A recent column in Skeptical Inquirer by two investigators of paranormal claims notes:

  • Despite a marked increase in the number of priests trained as exorcists available in the United States, alleged victims of attack from the Devil have found insufficient numbers available and have been seeking amateur exorcists who have not been screened as required by the Catholic church.
  • Over 1,000 cases of people harmed by exorcisms have been documented according to the website What’s the harm? (Note: This is not a secure link.)
  • Harm may result from “direct actions taken to drive out the evil spirit or the lack of action taken to intervene in the case of a medical emergency.”
  • While exorcisms performed with clerical oversight have resulted in injury and death, “amateur exorcists are answerable to no one and nothing except their own judgement or whatever they may believe is the divine will.”

[Sword A, Biddle K. Demonic dilletantes, the dangers of detectives-turned-demonologists. Skeptical Inquirer, Dec 17, 2024]

Consumer Health Digest is a free weekly e-mail newsletter edited by William M. London, Ed.D., M.P.H., with help from Stephen Barrett, M.D. It summarizes scientific reports; legislative developments; enforcement actions; other news items; Web site evaluations; recommended and nonrecommended books; research tips; and other information relevant to consumer protection and consumer decision-making. The Digest’s primary focus is on health, but occasionally it includes non-health scams and practical tips. Items posted to this archive may be updated when relevant information becomes available. To subscribe, click here.


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