Portside

These laws explicitly remove patient protections. Doctors recommending right-to-try can’t be sued for malpractice or disciplined by their state medical boards, seemingly no matter how inappropriate or incompetently executed such a request might be. Nor can drug manufacturers be sued. Basically, these laws tell terminally ill patients: Good luck. You’re on your own.

Measles, like polio and smallpox, is a horrible disease - it's still a major killer of young children in the developing world. The creation of a vaccine was widely welcomed. Measles is so contagious that it is used as the indicator disease to show deficits in immunization coverage of all vaccine-preventable diseases-which means the problem goes well beyond measles. We are now seeing outbreaks of whooping cough in the US, mumps in Britain and tuberculosis more widely.