Seperate Fact From Fiction For Fun And Profit!!

I got this email today from my dad:

Why is our vaccine made in the UK and not the US?

The major pharmaceutical companies in the US provided almost 90% of the nations flu vaccine at one time. They did this despite a very low profit margin for the product. Basically, they were doing us a favor. In the late 80's a man from North Carolina who had received the vaccine got the flu. The strain he caught was one of the strains in that years vaccine made by a US company. What did he do? He sued and he won. He was awarded almost $5 million! After that case was appealed and lost, most US pharmaceutical companies stopped making the vaccine. The liability out weighed the profit margin. Since UK and Canadian laws prohibit such frivolous law suits UK and Canadian companies began selling the vaccine in the US.

By the way...the lawyer that represented the man in the flu shot law suit was a young ambulance chaser by the name of John Edwards.

I don't know about you, but I tend to check these things out before I accept them. There are lots of rumors out there and the idea is to confuse the people and get ideas into their heads that are hard to get out later. This is most effective once people can't remember where they heard something. So, I love debunking things and I thought I should share two of my favorite sites for doing that: Current Netlore - Internet hoaxes, email rumors, urban legends and Truth Or Fiction - email reality check - verify rumors

The next best technique for finding information about a email is to clip an exemplary sentence out of it and paste it into a Google search with quotes around it. Most debunking articles include the text of the offending email. So, if you copied, "strain he caught was one of the strains in that years vaccine" into the search field you'd get several hits... many of them spreading the rumor intact but a few will be more thoughtful in their analysis.