Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA. With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..

As for your scary-sounding list, yes, it's a list of possible adverse effects that a person may experience - but it is not an indication of likelihood. No medication is without risk, but in general, people take the medication because the benefits outweigh the risks by a significant margin.

To put it in a grossly exaggerated, probably flawed slashdot-style analogy, the documented possible side effects of flying in a plane are motion sickness, legionnaire's disease, food poisoning, lice infestation, mental anguish, deep vein thrombosis, alcohol abuse, insomnia, halitosis, delayed departure, poverty, or becoming part of a suicide mission that turns your plane into a bomb. But more likely than any of those you'll get to your destination with very little lasting impact on your personal health or safety - as long as you remember that stupid 4-1-1 rule.

I'm glad to know your mom went through medical school and saw this influence first-hand and not just through drug rep lunches at the office.

Oh wait, she didn't? Sorry. My bad.

It is true that the flu mist is an attenuated vaccine. But it is also NOT given to all healthcare workers.

The major medical center with which I am most familiar is giving flu vaccine injections (NOT flu mist) to caregivers who work in the clinics with severely immuno-compromised patients - hematology/oncology, bone marrow transplant, critical care, etc. Flu mist is given to those who either have little patient contact (IT employees, maintenance, lab researchers, etc.) or who work with otherwise healthy patients (psychiatry, community clinics, etc.)

I also understand that this is the standard procedure for most medical facilities, from small private practices to major medical centers.

Of course not. By all means, we should use what we need to get us through to the move away from a finite fuel source.

Bad analogy. Paper is essentially renewable, and producing it is, all things considered, probably as energy intensive as producing the electricity that keeps that digital "stuff" flipping its ones and zeros.

Producing fuel from burning dead dino juice is less expensive than, say, farming algae to burn it, but only for the short term. In the long term, dino juice goes away and we get the gnashing of teeth that comes with $23 gallons of gas, the realization that our entire economy is based on cheap dino juice, and utter amazement that we don't have an alternative energy source in place.

Agreed :)

You haven't met my father-in-law.

The latter. Remember, in the 80s we had fairly fuel-efficient cars as a direct result of the oil crises in the 70s, in sharp contrast to the gas guzzlers from the 60s and 70s. But once fuel went back to being cheap, in the popular view there was no reason NOT to build big cars on truck frames that got gas mileage in the mid- and low-teens. There was no regard for change in demand that might come from other corners of the world, and certainly very little thought put towards what would happen if/when oil started to get too expensive.

It's that mistake I don't care to repeat.