Let’s keep the conversation going!

I love that blogging allows people from all over to engage in difficult conversations. I received a great comment on the post Vaccine Inanity AGAIN that I want to share, and as I started replying to it, I realized that I had so much to say that it deserved its own post. Here’s the comment from Question Authority:

I’m sorry but thank you for being an experiment so I don’t have to. A close friend works for a pharmaceutical company and wouldn’t get the H1N1 shot because it hadn’t gone through the proper testing. It is about choice, take away our choice… what is there? Please don’t judge and bully people on the internet who make the informed decision not to vaccinate, the bottom line is NO ONE really knows. Google Glaxo Smith Klein. See how many lawsuits and how many billions of dollars they have had to pay out due to their faulty products. It is time for peace on the matter, respect each other’s choices. I clearly understand why you want to vaccinate in order to keep people safe, please understand that those who chose not to also do it for the same reasons. People who question vaccines have nothing to gain, drug companies have a lot to lose.

Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I have no objection to someone not getting the flu shot, or at least not as strong as my objection to someone not vaccinating their child, and I have no interest in bullying people for exercising their informed right to chose. What I absolutely object to is the spread of poor quality information that is designed to inflame people’s fears. That’s what my post was about.

As to the law suits that you mention – the legal system still is not good at interpreting scientific issues. In law the concepts of risk and uncertainty are central issues, just as in science, however, the two fields conceptualize them differently. A law suit will require a burden of proof that may be too high for science to achieve. In a criminal case, the burden of proof in the US and Canada is certainty beyond a reasonable doubt. There are precious few questions of science that can be answered this way, especially where new drugs are concerned. The result is that litigation is extremely expensive and quite often big companies will settle a question simply to avoid a lengthy court case, or simply not offer products that may expose them to the risk of litigation. For example, in Canada the anti-nausea medication diclectin is prescribed to women with severe morning sickness. As a mother who had severe morning sickness (I’d throw up 12-14 times a day if it weren’t diclectin) it really did save mine and a my daughter’s life. I did not make the decision to take this medication lightly, given the horrors that thalidomide caused. But the evidence for its safety was very good. However, in the United States, diclectin (there called bendectin) has not been available since 1983, because companies have stopped selling it to avoid lawsuits. As a result, women with severe morning sickness in the US have fewer options and are actually now prescribed a drug that’s less safe. Lawsuits still stir the pot in the vaccine-autism controversy: recently, an Italian family won their law suit against the Italian Health Ministry, saying that the MMR vaccine gave their son autism. However, there is still, despite years of investigation, NO credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. Using the legal system to decide issues of science has shown itself to be a minefield.

Finally, I don’t want to be a cheerleader for the pharmaceutical industry because they absolutely do have a profit motive driving their research which absolutely colours the validity of their results. There’s a great body of research that suggests that studies published by pharmaceutical companies are more likely to report positive results. What I find problematic is that the natural products or complementary medicine industry (and it IS an industry) are not at all held to the same standards, so I take exception to your statement that people who question vaccines have no ulterior motive. It sounds like your friend had some valid reasons for concern, and absolutely I would love it if the discussion of drug safety moved in this direction. Unfortunately, for people who market snake oil health remedies sowing distrust of mainstream medicine is good business. As a society, we desperately need to be able to talk about scientific issues, and we do not do this well. As long as we uncritically accept inflammatory garbage as evidence, we are not going to be able to come to reasoned conclusions on the most critical issues facing us – water security, health, and climate change, just to name a few.

So, let’s keep talking.