Replies

RE: “I feel very strongly”
And that dear freeper lady along with pharma-medi religious dogma that makes you emotionally incapable and tone deaf to consider failability of your field. Doubling vaccine dosages in infants since 1983 just “may” be the cause of quadrupling autism in male toddlers.

I’m sure many a “medical researchers” who “felt” they knew a lot about microbiology & biochemistry sure had a hard time coping with fact that their pharma-medi god deliberately rushed deadly medications to market and obfuscated inconvenient negative results, sacrificing payients on the altar of profits.

Your blind faith in insistently believing the pharma-medi syndicate is not only ill founded based on ethics findings below.
Big pharma-medi syndicate continues to needlessly kill people.

Vioxx, Fosamax, are just two BIG disasters that come to mind which provide ample reason to question the ethics of pharma-medi god you unquestionably bow before.

http://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/new-prescription-drugs-major-health-risk-few-offsetting-advantages

“New FDA policies to get more drugs reviewed faster so that they can reach patients sooner in fact mean that drugs are approved with less evidence of being safe or effective. A systematic study of shortened reviews found that each 10-month reduction results in an 18 percent increase in serious adverse reactions, an 11 percent increase in hospitalizations, and a 7.2 percent increase in deaths. The risk of serious adverse reactions occurring after approval increases from 1 in 5, to 1 in 3—a huge risk that nobody is telling the public about.

In response to drug disasters like Vioxx, which experts say caused about 120,000 traumatic cardiovascular events and 40,000 deaths, Congress and the FDA have set up monitoring and safety systems. But a review of results so far found little evidence they are identifying serious risks or altering prescribing practices.”

“In a recent decade, between 2002 and 2011, independent reviews by clinical expert teams in France, Canada, and the Netherlands have concluded that only 8 percent of 946 new products were clinically superior, down from 11 to 15 percent in previous decades (see Figure, below). Only 2 were breakthroughs and another 13 represented a real therapeutic advance.”

People enter my field because they feel strongly about human health--not because they are emotionally driven nitwits who couldn't logically think their way out of a cardboard box.

In order for something to cause something else, there has to be a clear mechanism. For example, measles causes brain damage because viruses enter brain cells. The infected brain cells no longer function as brain cells and the immune system kills them. The more brain cells that are destroyed in this manner, the more severely the brain is damaged. That is a mechanism. On the other hand, dead viruses injected into an arm muscle are nowhere near the brain, are incapable of entering cells, and are completely destroyed within a few days. There is no mechanism to tie them to any brain function. Imagining that vaccines are somehow capable of causing autism is like imagining that filling your car tires with air is somehow going to cause the air intake filter to become dirty.

This statement shows that you clearly have no clue about the medical research world or the regulatory process. First of all, researchers don't "feel" they know a lot about microbiology, biochemistry, immunology, chemistry, molecular biology, pharmacology, etc. They know their expertise, and they are very cognizant of the limits of their knowledge. Being a biochemist, I have a very good understanding of how the biomolecules that make up living organisms function, and how their functions are disrupted by pathogens. On the other hand, if you asked me about kidney function, I would have to consult the medical literature before giving you an answer.

The process to bring a drug from discovery stage to regulatory approval is very long and drawn out. Unlike in your fantasy world where it seems you imagine that each time a chemist mixes up a new compound, he then rushes off to the FDA to get permission to make it into pills and sell it, in the real world, chemists mix up hundreds of compounds that are then painstakingly screened before the most promising among them is selected for further testing. This discovery process takes years. Once the most promising drug candidates are selected, they undergo several more years of testing--first, on cells, then on animals, and only then on humans in phase 1 trials. Fewer than 1% of all prototype drugs (including vaccines) make it past phase 1 trials. In the rare cases where a drug prototype does not get nixed, the journey from discovery to regulatory approval can theoretically take ten years--but only if all the stars line up. In reality, the process takes 15 or 20 years (or more). Furthermore, a drug cannot be used in a specific group of people unless it has been tested in that group. So, for example, if a vaccine is tested in adults between ages 18 and 65, it can only be administered to that group, and not to anyone who is not within that age range. In addition, most countries have a requirement that drugs have to be tested on their own citizens before they will license those drugs for sale in their countries.

Anti-vax fearmongers like Barbara Loe Fisher and her ilk do not want people to be educated about the processes of FDA regulation, medical research, how drugs and vaccines work, etc. etc. Once again, try to apply some logical thought here. The anti-vax movement is a leftist idea. Radical leftists love for people to die--their ideal world does not contain humans. And they are trying to scare you into not protecting your children against diseases that are responsible for countless millions of deaths throughout history. Why on earth do you feel that they have your children's best interests at heart?