1. Vaccinations are expensive. Wouldn't you rather have no measles than measles? And how much would you pay for that? I'd say the vaccinations are worth the price we pay. Before coming to Indonesia I got a physical and some vaccinations. The physical wasn't too expensive but the vaccinations were over 600 bucks. But who's to say they haven't already saved me from coming down with something? I dunno. What I DO know is there is a lot of suspicious behaviour involved in this very public "debate" we have going on right now. And if there is one inalienable fact I have learned from life it's this: where there is money to be made, there is suspicious behaviour. In general I'm talking about lying, cheating, stealing, you know, the Greed triplets, but in the case of vaccinations I'm talking about other behaviour too. For instance, I can't be the only person who has noticed how all vaccinations have now been grouped into one category so no longer can a person have a problem with one of them without being accused of having a problem with them all. You don't like the sistotalcrunella vaccine? GET THEE BEHIND ME, ANTIVAXER!!! It's an old, old schoolyard argument ploy that makes legitimate beefs about questionable, new, not fully tested vaccines bayud... mmkay, while making people who have never heard of sistotalcrunella, can't pronounce it, don't even know it's a made up word, defend it like hissing, spitting, cornered wolverines.
Big pharma is guilty of a lot of suspicious behaviour. They've been tried, found guilty and fined for misinforming people who take their drugs. The motive was money, so the punishment was fines, sometimes in the billions of dollars. Companies like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline are examples of huge companies that have been busted and fined for huge amounts. Here's an article with more detail. The following is a list of misconduct filed against the pharmaceutical giant Merck by some former employees turned whistleblowers: "failed to disclose that its mumps vaccine was not as effective as Merck represented, (ii) used improper testing techniques, (iii) manipulated testing methodology, (iv) abandoned undesirable test results, (v) falsified test data, (vi) failed to adequately investigate and report the diminished efficacy of its mumps vaccine, (vii) falsely verified that each manufacturing lot of mumps vaccine would be as effective as identified in the labeling, (viii) falsely certified the accuracy of applications filed with the FDA, (ix) falsely certified compliance with the terms of the CDC purchase contract, (x) engaged in the fraud and concealment describe herein for the purpose of illegally monopolizing the U.S. market for mumps vaccine, (xi) mislabeled, misbranded, and falsely certified its mumps vaccine, and (xii) engaged in the other acts described herein to conceal the diminished efficacy of the vaccine the government was purchasing."
If you will just look at X for a moment. Money. That's what it comes down to. And how can you blame pharmaceutical companies for doing what is encouraged, nay DEMANDED in all industry nowadays? Because we are shooting their product into our veins? Well then maybe we shouldn't have drug companies in charge of manufacturing these multi-billion dollar products. We should let the government take care of vaccinations because we all know the government will handle things more ethically and efficiently don't we? (DANGER: Sarcasm meter in the red. DANGER)
So you see the problem. On the one hand measles, mumps, rubella, polio, all kinds of diseases have been successfully suppressed by widespread vaccination. It works! On the other hand, Big Pharma lies. It's absurd to ask anyone to believe that "THIS time they're not lying even though they've lied almost every time in the past, made billions of dollars from it, haven't listed the ingredients on the syrum in that syringe the nurse is brandishing... Come on, coward, spike up! Or are you an ANTIVAXER?"
I recently started watching a TV show I've never seen before: "The West Wing." I don't know how I could have neglected such a good show for so long. Maybe my hatred of politics. Anyway, I've watched three episodes and in the second episode, (I think it was), POTUS gets a flu shot. He asks the doctor, "What is that?" The doctor says, "It's a flu shot." The President replies, "I don't need a flu shot." Then the most widespread and compelling argument for the flu shot I've heard so far is employed by the President's doctor, "You DO need a flu shot!" and he jabs him in the arm. "How do I know this isn't the start of a military coup?" asks the Prez. Well? Who's right, the doctor or the President? We're just supposed to put our complete trust in doctors? Like they never lie and are never bought by pharmaceutical companies? It's an awful lot to ask the average person to do. Although we do it safely a lot, who knows what is in that needle THIS time?
2. Vaccines are patented. I think of Jonas Salk who made the selfless gesture to all of mankind of NOT patenting his Polio vaccine. In an interview with Edward R. Murrow he famously asked, "Would you patent the sun?" Well knowledge can be a big bummer sometimes! It turns out that Salk may not be such a wonderful human being. The patent on his Polio vaccine actually was attempted unsuccessfully, but pretend I didn't say that, let's consider him a hero and his heroic statement for a while, shall we? Would this be a solution?
An awful lot of the problems with medicine are created by companies racing for patents. They are more likely to see the drugs as fully researched and safe if there is a rival company testing a similar drug and nearing a patent for it. NO! Would I suggest that scientists are sometimes influenced by money? Well, no, I'd say they, unfortunately, are almost ALWAYS influenced by money. Patent or perish. No matter how hard you try to preach ethics in science, there are grants available to people who work fast.
According to Howard K. Schachman, science has gone from "Publish or Perish" to "Patent and Prosper." Here is a very long but enlightening article written by a person who is an authority in the area. He goes through his extensive career in science and outlines the ways that money has changed the way scientific study is approached. Like I have often bemoaned here on my blog, Schachman also believes that scientists nowadays steer clear of looking into topics that have not been shown preference by science, (i.e. have not received funding for research), in the past. Therefore science has stagnated into a discipline in which a few areas are exhaustively over-researched and potentially ground-breaking areas are neglected due to lack of funding. Like the Aether and Matrix of Matter, (see previous post).
Since every aspiring scientist knows what's hot and what's not it has become such a cinch to write papers that the peer reviewers are being bombarded. This leads to the inevitable shortcuts such as giving more consideration to things like where the paper was published, the past publications and citations of the author, even the weight of the paper, rather than the content. To give some idea of how illegitimate the peer review process in science has become consider the gibberish generating program named SCIgen. This computer program has actually had 120 papers consisting of total gibberish PUBLISHED by peer reviewed scientific journals. In relevance the pseudo scientist under whose name these papers were submitted, Ike Antkare, was ranked number 21 by Google Scholar. Albert Einstein is ranked number 36.
So in 1980, based on a ludicrous cattle farming analogy in the paper, "The Tragedy of the Commons," by Garrett Hardin, the Bayh-Doyle Act was passed allowing patenting of medicines. Ostensibly when cattle are allowed to graze anywhere they want, the grass in their area will eventually be overgrazed. Ignoring the practice employed by even the most inept of cattle farmers of sectioning off land to allow for grass to grow in one area while another is grazed, Garrett Hardin extrapolated this weak analogy of bovine behaviour to humans and came up with the mantra of, "What was available to all was available to none." Along with being a justification for a helluva lot of greed, this lead to the commercialization of research and patenting. There is absolutely no application of this farming analogy to drug research and production. If the drug business were left open to all, would the supply of drugs just get used up? It's obscenely flawed logic but capitalism and greed don't usually depend on solid logic. Nor do the lawmakers who were no doubt influenced by lobbyists with fat wallets. Sausage and laws: two thing you don't want to know how they're made. THIS was in the West Wing too!
At any rate, share the profits of your newly developed drugs with the researchers and you have just compromised the standards and ethics of the entire process. This is what we have today. Numerous conflicts of interest have arisen when universities and drug researchers literally become too invested in their research. And the "Tragedy of the Anticommons" has also come into being. In raising the question whether patents can deter innovation, Heller and Eisenberg refer to the “Tragedy of the Anticommons” when “a proliferation of intellectual property rights upstream may be stifling life-saving innovations downstream in the course of research and product development.” Like so many things in our world, medical science has been diminished by the introduction of corporate thinking. Is it any wonder people, including antivaxers, don't trust anyone in the medical profession to be pumping anything into their bodies?
3. Vaccines fail. People who've been vaccinated against something get that thing. A lot. For example the flu shots every year have to include 2 or 3 strains of the flu that are most likely to be the big ones. Sometimes a new strain is dominant and the flu shot guessers didn't include it in the shots for that flu season so there's a huge flu epidemic. It happens. How often? You can find pretty believable people who would go from 0 all the way to 100%. It's absolutely mind blowing how there are completely contradictory speeches and papers by knowledgeable people constantly popping up. Who the hell are we supposed to believe??? I am inclined to say, "Follow the money," and it would seem the vaxers have more of that to gain here, but I'm just not sure. Apparently, as the Merck stats show, there's a lot of money to be made from class action lawsuits against drug companies too. Depending on the day, I can surf the internet and see the points of vaxers and say, "Look, you can't deny that a short time ago millions of people were contracting measles every year and thousands were coming down with complications like brain swelling that actually killed them. Then after measles vaccinations maybe 100 people got them and none died. This is awfully compelling evidence that we should all vax! No?"
The very next day I can listen to a talk by some medical doctor about how new, not fully tested vaccinations are being released and pushed by drug companies onto the public who are no more than human guinea pigs. And formaldehyde, aluminum, mercury, all kinds of crap in vaccinations is bad for us. Compelling evidence for the antivaxers. No?
But scroll up, waaaay up. This is only because of the phenomenon I talked about at the very outset of this post. The old, old, schoolyard argument ploy. Measles and flu vaccinations are not the same. Diptheria and smallpox vaccines are not the same. Ebola and sistotalcrunella vaccines are not the same. DUMMY! Give your head a shake! Why would any clear-headed person get all riled up at the behest of people who were grouping any two, or any others, together? It's just lazy logic! The truth of this whole controversy would probably be easily arrived at if not for the strong emotions and downright name calling, threatening, life-or-death allegiances people have wrongfully established with one side or the other. So that when the truth finally comes out, these people who have totally committed are either going to feel like dipshits or do the human thing: keep on fighting even though they KNOW they're wrong. I'm not convinced that this is not the case already. Either way if you are against all vaccinations, you're probably wrong and if you are FOR all vaccinations, you're probably wrong. What's wrong with weighing them all individually on their merits? Like logical people! "I don't like Oreos." "Cookie hater!" "I love Chips Ahoy!" "Yeah I like all cookies too." HOW STUPID ARE WE???
That said, I'm inclined to believe the medical doctors I've seen talking about how bypassing your natural immune system, which is what vaccines do, is gonna hurt in the long run. I have searched and searched for doctors who are defending vaccinations but they are much harder to find. This is simply because vaccinations have been removed from the curriculum. Just another thing that the chosen direction of science has bypassed. And there is likely a reason for it. My guess is the multi-billion dollar industry that vaccinations represent is something science wants to keep the youngsters, (and oldsters), motivated.
Oh I get my vaccinations for polio and measles and rubella, (which I think is German Measles although it doesn't sound like a German word. Sounds Italian. Like a pasta. Rubella con funghilli. (Rubella with mushroooms)) I'm not sure about the con. Does that mean with? I digress. But I'm still more than a little skeptical about some other vaccinations that people are pressuring other people into taking. I certainly don't think anything but an exhaustively tested and safe vaxination should be mandatory! I really don't think I'm expressing that Earth-shattering a point of view here either. But I have two distinct advantages over people who are witnessing the hostility between vaxers and antivaxers right now. 1. I have no wife, no kids, no church, no clubs, no boss, no responsibilities that make me afraid to express my balls out, actual opinion! I'm the least subjective person you're likely to ever meet! Right now anyway. 2. I have a TON of free time on my hands which I have been using to research all kinds of little topics such as this to make my blog more interesting for the 3 people who read it. 3. As mentioned in 1. I am objective and if you find any flaws in this reason PLEASE let me know! I just might change my mind and/or write another blog post outlining it.
So there you have it. As I said at the beginning, this is not written in defence of either side of the vaccine argument, but it is, hopefully, a call to reason for both sides. I don't think either side is right. But both have good points so they're not wrong either. This should not be so hard to reconcile given the many MANY vaccines there are out there. My final word is, think a little more reasonably, BOTH sides, and maybe we'll get this thing figured out.
For what it's worth, in episode 10, (I think), of The West Wing, the President gets the flu.
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