Dear Editor:
I have previously written about the major role vaccines play in preventing the diseases that they are specifically targeted for. However, ongoing research is showing that the benefits of various vaccines may go much further than preventing only the diseases that they were designed to prevent. For example:
A University of Texas study has shown that adults over age 65 who receive the annual high-dose influenza vaccine demonstrate a 55 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that influenza vaccines reduced major cardiac events by 36 percent overall and 55 percent in patients with recent acute coronary events.
A study in Nature reported that the shingles vaccine reduced the risk of developing dementia.
A study conducted by the CDC and reported in the Journal of Pediatrics has shown that annual influenza vaccinations for children six months or older reduced hospitalizations and medical visits by 66 percent. The report stated, “Even moderate vaccine effectiveness is translating to a meaningful reduction in flu hospitalizations, emergency department, and doctor visits for children.” Unfortunately, less than half of the eligible children received the influenza vaccine between 2021 and 2024. There were 280 flu-related deaths in children during the 2024-2025 influenza season according to the study. While the flu vaccine may not have prevented influenza disease, it has shown to be highly effective in preventing secondary infections such as pneumonia and other serious complications in children who were immunized.
While there requires much more research involving the benefits of vaccines to prevent more than their initial target, initial results show great promise. Over the coming years we will learn much more about how various vaccines may play a much larger role in preventing diseases and disabilities far beyond what they were initially designed for. For now, the message is that seniors should take advantage of all the vaccines available to them. The benefits may go far beyond preventing or reducing the effects of a single disease.
Rich DiPentima, RN, MPH
Portsmouth, N.H.
Rich:
We had heard that the shingles vaccine delivered that surprising side benefit. We had not heard about the high-dose flu vaccine’s similar effect. Is there any way these might be engineered to create a retroactive effect?
Asking for a president.
The Editor
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Trump Has a Beef with Jesus
To the Editor:
Pope Leo XIV succinctly summed up Donald Trump’s disgusting existence the other day with a three word phrase: “darkness and filth.”
The darkness and filth of Donald Trump’s demagoguery is recognized for the obvious evil that it is by the people of this world and by the vast majority of American voters, which spells certain doom for the sacrilegious Republican Party at the ballot box in November, 2026. Good riddance, GOP. Get the federal prison cells ready for these plutocratic pedophiles.
Perhaps demented Donald (AKA “Jesus Trump” or “Doctor Christ”) can explain to the Christian contingent of the American public, which is the vast majority, why demonic Donald (who wouldn’t know what the Holy Bible was even if you hit him over his empty orange head with it) insists upon a daily feud with Pope Leo.
I feel quite confident in predicting our first American Pope will win the ongoing argument with Trump, just like Democrats will win this year’s midterm election in a massive landslide of historically impressive proportions.
Jake Pickering
Arcata, Calif.
Jake:
Someone, we can’t recall who, recently made the astute comment that this isn’t a fight between Trump and the Pope. Trump is fighting Jesus, the Pope is just quoting him.
The Editor
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What Military Spending Costs Us
To the Editor:
The United States has the most expensive military in the world, yet we haven’t won a major war in ages. If we were winning in Iran the President would not be begging for help. Funneling trillions of dollars into the military comes with a cost.
To see that cost, look at Europe. Europe chooses to fund peace before war. In the European Union four weeks paid vacation is standard. Parents have up to a combined 240 days of paid maternity and paternity leave. They have free or affordable day care. People live years longer than Americans because healthcare is a right. People do not go bankrupt because of medical debt.
It will get worse for Americans in six or seven years. This is when the Social Security Trust Fund runs out of money and payments could be cut by 20 percent. Medicare’s fund is expected to run out around the same time and Congress ignores the problem because they do not want to tell the voters who will bear the pain to fix the problem.
Not all the costs can be attributed to military spending. Since President Reagan, the GOP has used tax cuts for the rich to create massive deficits which they then use to say we need to cut funds for the poor and middle class. To paraphrase former presidential candidate Ross Perot, that giant sucking sound you hear is the rich taking jobs and wealth from the middle class.
Walter Hamilton
Portsmouth N.H.
Walter:
“If we were winning in Iran… .” We’ll start winning in Iran when pigs fly. Thanks to our Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Bone Spur, the only government on earth crazier than ours now has the power to throttle the global economy at will. You make a larger point, though, and rightly so.
Back when Portsmouth was still Strawbery Banke, a British political theorist named Thomas Hobbes described humankind’s natural state of being as “war of all against all.” An ordinary person could expect his or her life to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The only proof against this hellish existence was a powerful central authority. A king, for instance.
Luckily, since then, humankind has been blessed by an innovation he never imagined: capitalism.
The merely filthy rich have re-branded themselves as “Job Creators.” Thanks to their benevolence—about which we have been relentlessly propagandized, said brainwashing having been subsidized by the sweat of our own brows—the King has been superseded by the Invisible, God-Like Hand of the Sacred Market. Now, within the confines of that market, we compete savagely against each other, as atomized individuals, under our own individual brands. Welcome to the Thunderdome.
In 1944, after decades of study, a guy named Karl Polanyi exposed the myth of the inevitable, naturally-occurring market in a book titled, The Great Transformation. People were exchanging goods and services for millennia, over vast distances, before a bunch of greedy bastards figured out how to rig the system and bring the rest of us to heel. Polanyi’s book is widely regarded as well-grounded and authoritative, but it has failed to draw much attention from our corporate media. Meanwhile, everybody knows the name of that whack job Ayn Rand… wonder why that is?
The Editor
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A Mistake of Colossal Proportions
To the editor:
Although Donald Trump has demonstrated little competency at governing during his second term, there is one thing that he has been very good at—generating a kaleidoscopic series of chaotic remarks, videos and actions that tumble willy-nilly across various media, leaving observers scrambling from one messy event to another with little time for analysis. The consequences of his impetuous war with Iran, however, may be too large for him to escape accountability.
Trump, in complicity with Netanyahu, clearly believed that a massive, concerted military assault on Iran that decapitated several layers of Iranian command structure would be the “kill shot” that would topple the radical Iranian regime. He seriously miscalculated, underestimating Iran’s tenacity and missile and drone strength. He did not consider the likelihood that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz when faced with an existential threat. This miscalculation provided Iran a huge strategic advantage—the control over approximately 20 percent of global oil and natural gas supply provided by the Gulf nations.
Short-term effects have been clear and immediate. In the U.S., gasoline prices quickly reached an average of $4.14 per gallon, a jump of approximately 40 percent. Diesel and jet fuel approximately doubled. Some Asian countries, the most dependent on Gulf oil, have experienced shortages and rationing. Global agriculture, heavily reliant on petroleum products for fertilizers, planting, harvesting and transportation of its crops to market, saw its operating costs skyrocket. The restriction of Gulf oil will inevitably result in increased food costs in the fall. The impact of rising crude oil will not only affect energy costs. Many industries use petroleum products as inputs (e.g. pharmaceuticals, plastics, rubber). The oil that flows through Hormuz is part of a complex network of supply chains that sustain global manufacturing. Several industries will experience a rise in costs as the availability of a major input is restricted. The overall result will be increased inflation across the economy, added to the inflation already caused by Trump’s tariffs. As producer costs increase and demand decreases, companies will reduce employment. The 70’s specter of stagflation will again haunt policymakers. The longer that the strait is closed, the more severe the economic disruption.
The economic costs of the war are far-reaching and will persist for months or years. Yet, the most damaging outcomes of the Iran War may be to America’s reputation and the re-ordering of global power relationships. American presidents have often been referred to as “the leaders of the free world.” It would be laughable to give that title to Trump. As part of his America First policy, he has bullied and extorted American allies around the globe. He has abused NATO allies threatening to withdraw from the alliance and menacing Denmark with the threat to invade Greenland. His “reciprocal” tariffs are no more than an effort to extort trading partners. Now, he has peremptorily started a war with Iran without consulting allies and without any understanding of the knock-on effects of his decision. The ultimate irony of his hubristic war is that the main beneficiaries will be Russia and China. Russia will profit from the rising price of oil while China will continue to strengthen its relationships with the Global South, BRICS and former U.S. trading partners who believe they can no longer trust in the good intentions of a Trump-led America. The predatory American president is overseeing the formation of new alliances and trading partnerships, not to make “America Great Again” but to make America alone.
Robert D. Russell, PhD
Harrisburg, Pa.
Robert:
Iran certainly belongs near the top of the list of Dolt’s #47’s Most Colossal Screw-Ups, and you’ve done an excellent job, as always, of examining the ramifications. Less directly, but ultimately perhaps as damaging, his chaotic misrule is bound to have dire consequences for the environment: accelerating global warming, releasing toxins, etc.
The Editor
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Gov. Ayotte Mistaken About Nuclear Power
To the Editor:
Governor Ayotte is advocating for more nuclear power in New Hampshire, suggesting that doing so would lower electricity rates. However, customers pay bills not rates. According to the governor, nuclear power would: lower electricity rates, provide more “clean & green, carbon-free” energy, and help our state become energy independent. Unfortunately, the governor is misinformed.
The electricity bills customers receive have two parts: the energy supply cost, and the delivery cost associated with transmission and distribution. By statute, New Hampshire utilities sell the energy supply with no profit, their profit comes from the distribution of electricity through poles and wires. Supply costs for fossil fuels (gas and oil) are highly volatile based on seasons, global supply, and political instability (e.g., during a war). However, the delivery costs continue to increase substantially.
New Hampshire’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) allows utilities a rate of return of close to 8 percent when they build and install infrastructure (often more than is needed). Don Kreis, the Consumer Advocate at the PUC, has highlighted that this rate of return, in such a low business risk, is too high by a few percent.
To lower customer bills, we must procure lower-priced energy supplies, and reduce delivery costs. Additional nuclear power in our state will not reduce electricity rates, because of how electricity prices are set. The daily price is determined by the Independent Systems Operator – New England (ISO) based on daily offerings it receives from suppliers, including Seabrook, the final price that all suppliers receive is the highest price for that day. Even if Seabrook were to offer its energy at 1 cent per kWh to N.H. utilities, it would still receive that highest price payment, which is what customers would pay. Modular nuclear plants would not change that even if they could be sited here at a reasonable cost. The Seabrook nuclear plant is currently not contributing to lowering utility bills.
Nuclear plants are regulated and permitted by federal agencies. Even if the governor could attract builders of smaller modular reactors (SMRs), we would discover that they would cost at least twice the original estimate, take 10 or more years to complete and not reduce our growing carbon emissions and climate impacts. (see R.Rosner, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December, 2025, for details). Nuclear power is not a renewable energy source and its fuel costs will likely increase with greater demand and the “boutique” fuel needs of SMR’s designs. While nuclear electricity generation does not emit greenhouse gases directly, it is neither “green” nor “clean” because the mining, processing, and manufacturing of enriched uranium fuel rods requires considerable carbon-emitting energy and creates a significant amount of waste (much of it radioactive). In addition, environmental impacts and routine plant operations emit radioactive elements that have been recently found—in an extensive Harvard medical study in Massachusetts (see Alwadi et al., Environmental Health, (2025) 24:92)—to be associated with increases in several types of cancer among nearby residents. Finally, spent fuel disposal still presents serious obstacles.
In addition, such plants also pose a national security risk associated with nuclear weapons (guards armed with automatic weapons patrol the Seabrook campus). While some advanced SMRs will be significantly safer, the energy may not cost less per kWh, because smaller units cost more to build per MW capacity. But we do not really know because none have been sited yet. Additionally, history of past nuclear accidents shows that they were mainly caused by human error and not technology failures (R.Rosner, etc.).
Finally, even if we find a community willing to host small nuclear reactors, such plants are unlikely to be sited in New Hampshire within the next 10 years, and would not drive down electricity prices.
Politicians are being misinformed by the nuclear industry. But if the Governor really wants to drive down consumer electricity and energy costs and create more “energy independence,” she has a number of home grown options: (1) accelerate energy efficiency efforts, (2) increase support for proven and cheaper renewable energy sources such as solar, offshore-wind, hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass, (which have low or zero fuel costs and cost less to build) and (3) support utility-scale battery storage. Why would we Granite Staters want to gamble on more nuclear power?
Dr. Peter Somssich, is a physicist with 40 years of experience, and former N.H. State Representative, on the Science Technology & Energy committee.
Doug Bogen, is executive director of Seacoast Anti-Pollution League based in Exeter, with an M.S. in Science and Environmental Education.
Roger Stephenson, prior to retiring, served as the regional director for advocacy with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He holds an honorary degree from UNH for his decades of work for conservation and environmental protection.
Peter, Doug, and Roger:
It seems the Governor failed to learn an important lesson during her senior year in high school.
In February, 1986, the Department of Energy [DOE] said it was thinking about burying 73,000 tons of highly-radioactive spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear power plants in a big hunk of granite in southwestern New Hampshire. Specifically, the DOE was interested in in a big hunk of granite called the Cardigan Pluton, located approximately where Cheshire, Sullivan, Hillsborough, and Merrimack counties meet—about an hour’s drive northwest of Nashua High School.
Viewed from Washington, D.C., the area probably looked uninhabited. To several tens of thousands of residents, it looked more like home. As with most people of modest means, their whole net worth was tied up in their homes. The market value of those homes was suddenly unknown. To put it in the vernacular, they were some pissed. An epic battle ensued. The people won. The plan was shelved.
The fuel rods remain—as do all the spent commercial fuel rods created since the 1950s. We remember those days. Electricity would be “too cheap to meter,” they said. But, what about the radioactive waste? “Nothing to worry about. We’ll deal with that later.”
Has anyone asked Ayotte where she plans to put her nuke waste?
The Editor
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Look Out! Here Come Them Chickens!
To the Editor:
U.S. officials and much of the media emphasize the Islamic Republic’s brutal repression of its own citizens, including the killing of large numbers of protesters, while rarely acknowledging Washington’s role in enabling similar abuses in Iran’s past.
Twenty-five years of horrific human rights abuses under the Shah of Iran, a close U.S. ally installed in a 1953 CIA-backed coup, have largely escaped scrutiny. The Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, was created with help from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad.
Human rights organization Amnesty International’s 1974/75 Annual Report asserts: “The Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief.”
Time magazine’s August 15, 1976 cover story, “Torture as Policy: The Network of Evil,” documented the widespread use of torture by governments in order to suppress dissent. The article noted that the worst violators may have been Chile and Iran, where torture had become institutionalized by their police forces. Chile’s brutal military dictator General Augusto Pinochet was another U.S. ally whom the CIA helped bring into power in 1973.
The Time article further reported that Iran’s torture techniques included electric shock, rape, beatings, and helmets designed to amplify victims’ screams.
In his 1982 book, The Real Terror Network, Edward S. Herman writes: “In each country, a web of myths evolves that allows the loyal citizenry to feel good about their nation, that depicts its people as generous, progressive and decent to a fault in its international behavior.”
This tendency to sanitize history isn’t confined to the Cold War era.
The Trump administration’s efforts to recast national history, pressuring museums and parks over slavery, Native American dispossession and other “disparaging” material is another example of trying to control the story a nation tells about itself.
Brenda Hafera, a scholar at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, leads the organization’s review of historical sites. In a March 2026 PBS NewsHour segment on divisions over U.S. history ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, she stated:
“I think any truthful commemoration of the American story will be celebratory, because that’s accurate, because this is a good country that has contributed a lot and has moved towards human freedom.”
Yet U.S. support for the Shah helped sustain a regime that denied political freedom to Iranians.
Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, ends with a chapter titled “The Great Forgetting.” Hochschild writes:
“And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.”
Hochschild’s warning is fitting. What nations choose to forget affects how power is exercised in the present. For the world’s dispossessed, there are memories no empire can erase.
Terry Hansen
Grafton, Wisconsin
Terry:
Thanks—we’ve been meaning to howl about this for a long time.
Our suicidal relationship with Iran is a quintessential example of a phenomenon the political scientist Chalmers Johnson called “blowback.” In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the repentant Cold Warrior wrote, “The concept ‘blowback’ does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes—as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001—the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”
The Editor