The problem with vaccines
Merck recalls childhood vaccine to prevent meningitis
I have a problem with vaccines. I don’t know how safe they are anymore. Do you? We all know how greedy these companies can be. Especially under this administration that has bent over backwards for Drug Companies. So when you see all these drugs rushed through the FDA then recalled later you have to ask yourself how safe are these vaccines? Do we really believe that the tests they go through aren’t biased? I don’t. Call me a skeptic.
You know damn well that a company like Merck knows it can it hit the mother load if they can get a drug to become a vaccine that the government requires all kids to get. Next thing you know an unsafe drug is being recalled and for the past how many years our children have been forced to take something that isn’t safe because of greed and incompetance (mostly greed). Don’t even get me started on the Flu Vaccine, that Donald Rumsfield made about 10 million dollars on two years ago and continues to make millions from b/c the company that produces the drug he has a few hundred thousand shares of and was an executive of.
So next time you see some whacko not wanting their kid to have a shot b/c of religious reasons. They may be crazy for it, but at least their kid may actually be safer than yours.
But hey the invisible hand will take care of all of this right? After a few kids die of course, but that is natural and the way the market should work.
Tags: Astra Zeneca, Merck, Politics
The problem is actually worse than you make here, dv.
Remember the military forcing everyone to take the anthrax vaccine a few years back even though we had internal US Army and USAF studies that, given the number of people we were innoculating we would statistically have several hundred severe reactions, and in several hundred severe reactions we would have a good statistical chance of some deaths. They did a cost/benefit analysis and decided it was worth it to sacrifice a few of us against an attack that was always low odds at best. (It was sort of a bad bonus that we discovered that contractors had given us several bad batches.)
My point is that I don’t necessarily trust the government (Army LSD experiments, Tuskegee syphillis experiment, etc) any more than I trust the big corporations.
This is not a market problem–it’s a judicial or legal one. There have to be stiff civil penalties for a “bad batch” rate above the accepted norm (I don’t know what it is, but I know CDCP sets one), and criminal penalties for deaths or severe injury from a reaction to a bad batch (as opposed to a statistical reaction to a particular vaccine that is perfectly fine).
There also have to be penalties of the same sort for government testors who slip up and allow bad batches past.
This illustrates the problem with tort reform. There is no cost factor to insure you test the product and it is safe…..
If I stand to lose more by putting a drug on the market, than I would my not……I won’t put the unsafe drug on the market.
Without the threat of lawsuits, I have no incentive NOT to put the potentially harmful drug on the market.
good points by the both of you. Especially the tort reform