|
September 8, 2025
I will never forget when as a young physician doing a volunteer year in Haiti seeing a mother with her six-month old baby. The baby’s muscles were totally rigid so that it was impossible for him to lie flat. His jaw was clamped shut and when he attempted to cry, an eerie humming emanated from his clenched lips. It was an obvious case of tetanus.
I placed an intravenous line in the child to hydrate him and a nasogastric tube in his stomach to feed him. I gave him antibiotics, but the tetanus immunoglobulin was not available. The baby died.
Horrors like this were not uncommon in Haiti where there was little vaccination. I saw many patients maimed by polio. Children frequently died from measles.
Any reader interested in what happens when there is a lack of vaccines can read Chapter 9 from my book, The Neglected and Abused: A Physician’s Year in Haiti, by clicking the below link. There is no charge.
https://www.joebentivegna.com/Haiti/tableofcontents.htm
No one in their right mind wants to see these tragedies reoccur in the United States. But it could happen as many supposed “experts” in public health have lost their credibility with many citizens. This culminated with the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., firing numerous public health officials.
A major incident causing public distrust occurred in 1980 when the prestigious medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, published a study that stated opioids were not addictive. This was pure idiocy. A drug company, Purdue Pharma, used this study to goad public health bureaucrats to ease up on the safeguards governing the prescription of these drugs. They then launched an army of opioid salespeople to seduce a class of greedy doctors to push these drugs on patients. The result, hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of addicts.
Corrupt judges looked the other way and allowed the owners of the Purdue Pharmacy to keep much of their ill-gotten gains. This is chronicled in the book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty and the Netflix movie, Painkiller, for any reader who desires more information.
But the real damage was done by government policy during the COVID epidemic. While data showed that the vaccines were lifesaving in certain groups such as the elderly, the diabetic, the immunocompromised and and the obese, the data supporting the COVID vaccine for children was dubious at best. But the vaccine was pushed on everybody. Now there is anecdotal evidence that heart problems and cancers increased in the younger population as a side effect of the vaccine. Nobody knows the truth because the drugs companies have not released the data yet. Plus, the fact that the CEO of Moderna, the manufacturer of the mRNA COVID vaccine, took home $400,000,000 increases skepticism as to whether this was just another corporate money grabbing scam.
These "experts" closed churches during the COVID epidemic while keeping strip clubs open. Maybe the “experts” thought the COVID virus was religious and would attend church but avoid strip clubs.
Furthermore, the government led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, decreed that masks and social distancing of six feet would prevent COVID’s spread. Later Fauci admitted that there was no evidence that this was true. Fauci even stated that taking the vaccine reduced COVID’s spread. This was nonsense. A vaccine does not prevent a patient from contracting or spreading a disease, it merely triggers a stronger immune response so that the patient has a mild case of the disease when infected. Every doctor knows this, and it is why Biden was forced to pardon Fauci from being accused of perjury.
But the political implications of this are devastating. Now many people who voted for Trump believe that all vaccines are a scam. Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has stated that vaccines in Florida are now voluntary. Obviously, Dr. Ladapo has never been to Haiti. Technically, this policy does not apply to measles, polio and tetanus vaccines, but it is unlikely that the average voter knows or understands this.
 |
A reasonable compromise would be to review the latter recommendations for childhood vaccination. For example, infants are now given the Hepatitis B vaccine. But Hepatitis B is a disease that is either sexually transmitted or contracted from IV drug use. This combined with the fact that it is only effective for seven to eight years means it is not necessary in infants unless the mother is infected.
But public officials like Kennedy and Ladopa must take care in their actions and words. Vaccines have saved millions upon millions of lives and publicly challenging their efficacy could result in disastrous cases, such as the poor baby I tried to save in Haiti.
Contact Dr. Bentivegna at [email protected]
Follow on Twitter (X) @joebentivegnamd
Comment below but please keep comments civil.
Dr. Bentivegna gives anyone the right to publish or print this article.
| ||||||||||
