Okay, so here’s my pitch on how potential donors can support programs at The University of Iowa. Today the One Day for Iowa fund drive kicks off, and it ends at 11:59 PM today on March 26, 2025.
I got a soft spot in my heart for The University of Iowa College of Medicine and University of Iowa Health Care (UIHC), even though my undergraduate Bachelor’s degree was from Iowa State University.
You can find in the UIHC Medical Museum a description of the historical development of the medical school. Following the Flexner Report in 1909 which found fault with all U.S. medical schools including Iowa’s, there was a drive to avoid “inbreeding,” meaning hiring of one’s own graduates. Nowadays, there are legislative efforts to keep as many as we can of Iowa’s best and brightest.
The University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was recently recognized by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) as one of only two such units in the U.S. having the highest levels of neonatal care.
It reminds me of the Iowa Hawkeye football games where, at the end of the first quarter, all the players and football fans wave from the field to the pediatric patients and their families watching the game from UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital. It’s called the Wave, one of the best traditions in college sports.
Well, the AAP waves to Stead Family Children’s Hospital NICU.
I just read Dr. H. Steven Moffic’s post on Psychiatric Times, “The Space Station as a Model for Intercultural Cooperation.” I also read the blog of another psychiatric I consider a colleague and friend, Dr. George Dawson, MD, and it’s sort of in the oppositive vein, being about the recent snafu of some Republican Minnesota legislators deciding to submit a bill to the legislature mansplaining Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) to the Democrats why TDS needs to become a law. It’s going over like a lead space station.
Incidentally, one legislature activity tracking website (Bill Track 50) has an Artificial Intelligence (AI) summary of the bill which says in part, “…the bill appears to be satirical or politically motivated…”
And the Minnesota Senate Minority Leader, Mark T. Johnson, said the bill was “a little bit tongue in cheek,” and possibly unintentionally joked that “Senate Republicans have always supported mental health funding…” while also calling attention to problems that the two political parties have cooperating with each other (story source WCCO News Minnesota, “Minnesota bill to define “Trump derangement syndrome” as mental illness provokes backlash” by Eric Henderson, Caroline Cummings; accessed March 18, 2025). Obviously these two pieces present opposites when it comes to collaboration.
The other issue pertinent to my post today has been the recent tariff and trade war going on between Canada and America, which is all about competition rather than cooperation.
Therefore, I did a web search for any Red Green Show episodes that demonstrated cooperation as a theme. In fact, the usual AI guidance (which I never ask for) pointed out that The Red Green Show didn’t present episodes about cooperation per se, but satirized the topic. For once, I had to agree with AI for the most part.
On the other hand, I did find a Red Green Show episode called “Twinning” that actually seemed to involve collaboration between Canada and Iowa, if you can imagine that nowadays. Back in the year 2000, The Red Green Show sponsored a survey of all 50 states in America, offering an opportunity for persons from an American city to twin with persons from Canada, I think it was Ontario. This meant that Americans would visit Canada and Canadians would visit America. I may not have the exact details right, but the idea of cross-cultural collaboration and getting to know each other was the main idea.
The whole state of Iowa endorsed the twinning offer with The Red Green Show, which of course, represented Canada. At the time, the Iowa Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network was supporting the Red Green Show.
I never knew about that when it happened in 2000, probably because I was pretty busy working as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist here in Iowa City, Iowa. Anyway, the “Twinning” episode was one of the funniest I’ve seen. You know, identical twins are not exactly identical in every way.
I’ll bet a lot of people are like me and would like more peace and quiet from government. There’s a crisis every day. There’s even some Minnesota Republicans who want to get a bill through the state legislature defining Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) as a new mental illness, applicable only to Democrats. Given the intensely adversarial atmosphere among most politicians, this has made things even more noisy amongst lawmakers.
Because of this highly charged atmosphere which seems to get worse by the hour, I thought it might be instructive to suggest everyone eat some fruit and watch the Red Green Show episode “Good Government.”
Things are much quieter where Red Green lives. Although Jerome, the elected representative of the district, has supposedly been working hard for his constituents for 9 years, it turns out that, in fact, he has been dead for the last 8 years. Things must be pretty quiet in government there because nobody seems to have noticed.
How Red Green and his henchman, I mean co-conspirator, I mean his fellow constituent, address this problem does not involve high drama, although the question of legality does arise—which is hardly a problem provided you ignore the law.
I guess that’s pretty much what happens in real life.
I just discovered the news item about 5 Minnesota Senate Republicans who introduced a bill this month seeking to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) as a mental illness. This is not a new idea, I think, and it targets Democrats as having the syndrome. There’s a big Wikipedia article about the history of the origin of it.
It reminded me of a Dr. Henry Nasrallah’s editorials about “neuropolitics” a term he used in an effort to understand how much politics can affect the human brain. He published a series of 3 articles in the journal Current Psychiatry. The one published in the October 2018 issue is entitled “Neuropolitics in the age of extremism: Brain regions involved in hatred.”
Dr. Nasrallah is a neuropsychiatrist who has an entertaining and thought-provoking writing style. I met him briefly when I was interviewing for psychiatry residency at the University of Cincinnati.
The political situation now is difficult and it makes me wonder even more if there is a problem with the human brain when it comes to politics.
This week was what the Iowa Legislature calls funnel week. Today determined what bills stay alive and which one die.
The bills opposing vaccines died for this legislative session:
“mRNA vaccines: Senate File 360 proposed a ban on health care providers administering gene-based vaccines, like the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. Under the proposal, health care providers who administered vaccines that use nucleic acids like messenger RNA (mRNA) would face punishments of a misdemeanor charge and a fine of $500 for each violation.”
“Vaccine manufacturer immunity: House File 712 proposed requiring vaccine manufacturers waive their immunity from lawsuits over injuries that result from a “design defect” in a vaccine in order to distribute or administer the vaccine in Iowa. Under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, there is a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program providing no-fault compensation to individuals and families injured by childhood vaccines. While supporters of the bill said the current compensation program has problems, medical practitioners and advocates said allowing for lawsuits to be filed against manufacturers would prevent vaccines from being available in Iowa.”
Story published in Iowa Capital Dispatch, “Funnel week 2025: What bills are alive, dead at Iowa Statehouse after first deadline” by Robin Opsahl. March 7, 2025.
Beats me. Sorry, just kidding. I’m just a little bleary from looking at the web sites about the definition of “design defect” related to vaccines as it applies to the Iowa bill to make vaccine manufacturers waive their immunity from lawsuits about vaccine related injuries.
I am sympathetic to anyone who in fact has suffered a vaccine related injury.
That term “design defect” has been bugging me for days now and I just found out that this has been the subject of states vs federal legal wrangling for years. I’m not up to explaining all the legalese but there is a really tangled trail of cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania roughly around 15 years ago that ultimately led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision saying, essentially, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the federal Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of the 1980s preempts all state level vaccine design defect claims.
I think that explains why the Iowa bill says that vaccine manufacturers have to waive their immunity from suits if they want Iowans to get their vaccines.
I can hear the groans and shouts of dissent even as I write this. Hey, you can’t make this up. Talk to your legislator or lawyer about it.
I’m not sure why Iowa would want to repeat the grind that Georgia and Pennsylvania went through which led to the conclusion that you can file vaccine design defect claims at the state level and not have to repeat history which would likely lead to any decisions made there being reversed in federal court.
And I’m not sure why any vaccine manufacturer would want to fight that battle in Iowa either. They might just steer around us and take their vaccines elsewhere.
Vaccines aren’t perfect. They are neither 100% safe nor 100% effective. However, I support having vaccines available to help keep us healthy and the right to choose getting a vaccine. That’s why I don’t support a bill that I believe would make them less accessible.
This is a follow up to yesterday’s post about the Iowa legislature’s proposition of a new law that would essentially ban mRNA vaccines in Iowa. I don’t understand the numbers and codes on the new sections, but the new one proposes that manufacturers of vaccines would have to waive immunity from lawsuits arising from “a design defect of the vaccine.”
I’m not sure if that’s addition to being charged with a simple misdemeanor, subject to a $500 fine for administering the vaccine. I oppose this one too because I think it would essentially make vaccines difficult to access and harder to persuade new medical staff to come to Iowa.
There’s going to be a meeting about the bill at 4:30 PM CST. I can’t remember if it’s at the state house or at the Exile Brewing Co. for sandwiches and Ruthie’s beer.
In any case, the comment section is overwhelmingly in opposition to the bill. I saw several comments mentioning that we already have the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVIP), which is designed to field requests for compensation to those who believe they’ve been injured by certain vaccines. I had not heard of it before. It’s administered by the federal government, Health Resources & Services Administration, which is under the Health and Human Resources department.
There is a nice easy to read summary about the complicated story of vaccine safety and liability at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia website. It was reviewed by Dr. Paul A. Offit, MD last year. He attends meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although I think he missed the one last month about the flu vaccine because it was cancelled.
If I see anything earth shaking about the meeting this afternoon on HF712, I’ll make an addendum to this post.
Sena just alerted me to a bill in the Iowa legislature right now that proposes mRNA vaccines (like the Covid vaccine for example) be banned in Iowa. Part of it says that any person who provides or administers such a vaccine would be guilty of a simple misdemeanor and subject to a $500 fine. I do not support it although I also support the right of others to disagree.
The bill advanced out of subcommittee yesterday and I’m not sure how although, admittedly, I don’t know what exactly that means about its chance of being ultimately passed into law. There were hundreds of comments against it. It moves for further consideration to the Iowa Senate Health and Human Services Committee according to a story in the Daily Iowan.
This sent me to the web to find out what other silly laws Iowa has passed. A few of them are below:
“Any person who attempts to pass off margarine, oleo, or oleomargarine as real butter is guilty of a simple misdemeanor in Iowa. This one originated in 1943, but is still in force today.”
“In Marshalltown, horses are forbidden to eat fire hydrants.”
“It is illegal for a mustached man to kiss a woman in public.”
All of the above are on this Iowa State University web page.
The measles outbreak is big in the news and the issue of the role of Vitamin A in measles reminded me of something I saw back in the 1970s. I was working as a drafter and survey crew assistant for WHKS & Co (consulting engineers in Mason City, Iowa) at the time. As I was working on a drawing, a co-worker walked by my desk and I noticed her skin was the color of a carrot. She was orange. She explained that she and her husband had been taking high doses of beta-carotene, which is a precursor for Vitamin A. She and her husband both worked at WHKS & Co but I think he was home sick that day, from taking too much beta carotene.
So that segues into what I found out about the connection between measles and Vitamin A. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a web page on it and cites references for the role of Vitamin A. Vitamin A does not prevent measles. But in children who are severely ill and hospitalized from measles and under a physician’s supervision, age-specific doses of Vitamin A can be given for a limited period of time.
There are two references for the administration of Vitamin A in the context of kids with measles, available through weblinks from the CDC. One of them is the World Health Organization (WHO), which recommends Vitamin A for vitamin deficient children and because measles infection by itself can cause acute Vitamin A deficiency, resulting in xerophthalmia (severe dry eyes). This can lead to blindness.
Usually this is more of a problem in developing countries, but the WHO recommends it even for children in the US.
The other reference is Red Book. This is not the magazine for American women looking for tips on beauty. The Red Book is from the American Academy of Pediatrics and it notes the WHO recommendation to administer Vitamin A to patients “…regardless of their country of residence.”
The caveat is that you can get either not enough or too much of a good thing. Beta-carotene is a precursor to Vitamin A. Vitamin A toxicity is bad.
And you could avoid all this because there is an effective vaccine for measles. Don’t take my word for it. Talk to your pediatrician.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 