An article in the news regarding vaccinations reminded me of a conversation I had over the past weekend regarding the safety of vaccinations.
My friend mentioned that Robert DeNiro offered $100,000 for anyone who could prove vaccinations were safe. A quick internet search showed it was a little more nuanced than that. It was in regards to thiomersal, a mercury based antiseptic and anti fungal agent.(Wikipedia) which some people show an allergic reaction to. If you look at the CDC information for vaccines you can see they acknowledge the risks association with vaccines. In some cases people can die, however it is very rare, literally 1 in a million. So in Canada, 35 to 40 people will die from vaccinations.
At this point most articles regarding the risk will talk about how many times you are more likely to die in a car accident or a plane crash. However people drive everyday so to be comparable you would need to add up all the people in all the cars in the country and then divide by the number of auto-deaths. However I think that misses the point which is why should you risk it, or more importantly should you risk your child’s long term well being?
I have several friends who are wary of “big-pharma” and instead subscribe to a more “natural” approach to health care. Which I suppose is fine, however I find it illogical. If big pharma is just trying to make money, and oregano oil actually worked, don’t you think big pharma would have cornered the market on it? When someone suggests these alternative methods I usually respond with something about swinging salt crystals around my head. To quote Tim Minchin, “You know what we call alternative medicines that work? Medicine.”
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that the pharmaceutical industry is not fraught with problems. I just thing it has more to do with things like copy-right law and business than any desire to be nefarious.
I really like Ben Goldacre’s presentations especially his first TED talk on bad science. I think it illustrates how complicated science and research actually is, and how the media skews the results to be easy to consume.
And the same is the true with alternative medicine. How do we know oregano oil actually works? (Sorry, anecdotal evidence does not count.) What has the sample size? Was it a double-blind study? Was the study replicated.
However, I think it goes somewhat deeper than this. While Dr. Goldacre says we should publish all trials, he disregards the ramifications for corporations should they do so. Falling stock prices and difficulty to secure funding being the top of the list. It would be like asking you to send out an email to the whole company every time you made a mistake at work. not gonna happen.
Corporations exist for one reason, to make money. Full stop. So how do we set up a system that allows for corporations to do research and development that doesn’t penalize them when they make a mistake.