One Man’s Poison Is Another Man’s Cure

Foundation for Economic Education ^ | Monday, August 18, 2025 | Arthur Diamond

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Free citizens take risks for better health.

Tim Friede let venomous snakes bite him roughly 200 times, suffering anaphylactic shocks, and spending four days hospitalized in a coma. But this wasn’t a suicide attempt. He was seeking immunity to all snake venom, so that his blood could be used to create a universal antitoxin. The Centivax startup reports promising results from an early version of an antitoxin based on Friede’s blood.

The FDA does not ban people from letting snakes bite them, so Friede had the freedom to be bitten. His choice was focused on the greater good, as was Jonas Salk’s choice to test his polio vaccine on himself and his family, and as was the choice of over 38,000 volunteers who signed up for Covid “human challenge trials,” which would have involved taking an experimental vaccine and then being deliberately exposed to Covid. If such trials had been allowed, we could have had safe and effective vaccines much sooner, saving many lives.

Covid was costly in many ways, but one good to come from it is an energized health freedom movement. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., exercised health freedom when he opted for stem cell therapy for the spasmodic dysphonia that makes his voice sound raspy. He found a Chicago stem cell doctor who had set up a satellite office in Antigua to avoid American regulations. Kennedy had the funds to go to Antigua and is happy with the treatment he received. Now he wants the less-wealthy in America also to be free to choose experimental therapies.

Berkeley evolutionary biologist and geneticist Noah Whiteman claims that at least 40% of today’s drugs—including, for example, aspirin—originated from traditional medicine, which would imply that they were first discovered long before the FDA existed. Aspirin was derived from the white willow...

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TOPICS: Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS:

[Nateman]

It takes over a billion dollars to get a new drug to market in America. If a drug works fine overseas regulations should be by passed if new drugs work on people outside the country.

[SpirituTuo]

Certara is speeding up trials and reducing new drug costs significantly. Hopefully, their work and that of other companies will speed the process and reduce the costs further.

[9YearLurker]

Hadn’t heard that RFK story.