Comments

• NotZed

  2010-09-20 13:20:10

  oh dear. Stay away from the anti-vaxxers. They have little grasp of the science that makes our modern society function.
  
  http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6651886#6659005
  
  I'd be wary of a site in general that has no names on it to start with (the truthabout... one).
  
  The anti-vaxxers are nuts, and add to that the puritan anti-sex fundies who have a thing against giving the HPV vaccine to girls and you've got a very nasty mix of misinformation and delusion.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-09-20 13:42:25

  This is why it's clearly presented as someone else's writeup. I think that the financial extortion from Big Pharma (patent monopolies) leads to an entanglement with conspiracy theories about the evils of those drugs. In other words, the high costs are criticised by criticising the drugs rather than the cartels which produce them.
  
  Nevertheless, what I keep stressing is that Gates is to be criticised for profiteering from vaccines (through investments); it's not that vaccination on its own is all evil. The same goes for contraception/population growth control (euphemism: "family planning").
  
  Personally, I agree with the Swedish Pirate Party on the subject of patents assigned to pharmaceuticals. We need to revisit the way these patents are granted to ensure that everyone who needs drugs which are cheap to manufacture gets them. Life-saving drugs must reach everyone who requires them. Privatisation of an industry which determines life and death (c/f "death panels") is as silly as privatising the prison system and to some extent the schooling system too, which is what Gates is trying to achieve on the face of it.
  
  Let's grant more lives, not more monopolies.

• twitter

  2010-09-21 03:21:40

  It would be wrong to dismiss concerns about vaccines based on what big phama has to say. The same companies did, after all, blunder the first polio vaccines so badly that live viruses killed many thousands immediately by polio and later by cancer. Today, the same industry is busy corrupting peer review journals and ruining the careers of doctors who oppose them on scientific grounds. Do we really need flu vaccines like the ones that France canceled when no real danger emerged? The merits of various vaccines is beyond the technical expertise of Techrights but the tactics used by big pharma are all too familiar to people who have studdied Microsoft. Just as SCO had fake signs to wave in front of reporters, phama will smear those who stand between them and profits. We should not condemn the efforts of those opponents without real technical expertise, especially when phama has been corrupting science itself.
  
  Truthout is a reputable site and democratic underground also breaks good stories. They may concentrate on different issues but they are dedicated to justice and opposed to the kind of corporate corruption Techrights is.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-09-21 04:30:39

  There is a danger in throwing all vaccine sceptics (or all vaccines collectively) into a single basket and use Jennifer McCarthy as a cartoon for all of them.
  
  By the way, the head of health at the Gates Foundation was investigated for bullying sceptics with legitimate credentials and concerns.
  
  Like I said, the image and the article above are not mine, but this was sent to me by someone whom I trust to some extent. I don't just post anything from any arbitrary quack of PR agents (in fact, a lot gets rejected on these grounds).

• NotZed

  2010-09-22 10:35:43

  The information was from the US centre for disease control, which is not 'big pharma'.
  
  The only reference I can find to problems with the polio virus was the following from an article (admittedly in wikipedia) about the guy who invented the first polio vaccine:
  
  The Cutter incident
  
  In 1955 Cutter Laboratories was one of several companies licensed by the United States government to produce Salk's polio vaccine. In what came to be known as the Cutter Incident, a production error caused some lots of the Cutter vaccine to be tainted with live polio virus. It was one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in U.S. history and caused several thousand children to be exposed to live polio virus, causing 56 cases of paralytic polio and 5 deaths.
  
  Note that 1. it was a mistake in production, 2. only 5 deaths not 'thousands', and 3. it was in 1955.
  
  I think you'll agree that science and evidence based medicine has progressed significantly since then too. Medicine is a hard science and although mistakes are made along the way it only ever improves on the whole.
  
  Although vaccines are safe (because of how they work), they are not 100% foolproof or side effect free, and the small number of problems are worth the massive gains to public health. Also with any large immunisation program a number of people will simply die shortly after it being administered since they were going to die anyway and it wasn't because of the vaccine. Polio was one of the huge success stories for what was a very very nasty disease.
  
  Much of the opposition to the HPV vaccine is simply xtian-fundie based. Because it is generally sexually transmitted those precious little fundies don't want their little Jane given an injection which might protect her from something `she shouldn't be doing anyway' ... it might encourage promiscuous activity you see. And I guess if she loses half her pelvis to cancer later in life I guess that was just God's will eh?
  
  This is an excellent summary of just how useful vaccines have been in the USA alone, they are really the major public health success story of the last century.
  
  http://www.quackwatch.com/03HealthPromotion/immu/immu00.html
  
  (despite 'big pharma' and the national socialist agenda of late, the USA still has a very strong public disease control system in place)