Wonder if this kid has autism… https://youtu.be/-8zI5MHTuF4
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The way this debate is framed, you’re either an anti-vaxxer, or you’re a true believer. Only an antivaxxer would have a problem with this video, because parents can’t be trusted to want the best protection for their children. It would be inconvenient to space these shots out. Also it would be prohibitively expensive, especially so under for-profit health care.
This is the cheapest, most convenient way to administer vaccines. When in history has the cheapest, most convenient way to do something not also been the safest?
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So, if we’re talking about the makers of the drugs, money is not interesting. The drugs are a loss leader, that just doesn’t matter.
If we’re talking about a few mustache twirling, evil researchers, then the money trail is the story. Because it’s their terrible record for falsehood we should be paying attention to, not big pharma.
If this were the 50s, I’d expect them to be accused of membership in the communist party. A smear campaign uses a very specific kind of language, you might look it that someday, too.
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We have data. “Too many too soon” has been tested already and shown to be an untrue hypothesis. The nice thing about the scientific method is that it can test factual claims and falsify them. “Too many too soon” happens to be false.
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So not only has he evolved into an absolutely terrible actor, he’s also turned into a terrible human being.
######(still haven’t forgiven him for making Stardust even worse than it already was)
edit - saw the later post. So he’s now just a terrible actor again. 
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Interestingly, if I spend any time trying to research this, I can find dozens of supposedly solid sources saying completely different things from each other. One branch of the government says pharma profits are skyrocketing, another shows them plummeting, yet another shows that patent law is apparently murder, another that big pharma is going to have to shut down from the losses it takes on vaccination, it goes on and on, with very persuasive text and charts and graphs galore that seem to “prove” whatever is the initial thesis of the presenter.
But these three things I know for certain: the people who own drug vendors are richer every year, the drug vendors bribe physicians to prescribe specific compounds, and the majority of medical innovation happens outside the private sector, typically in taxpayer-sponsored universities. Everything else seems to be impossible to verify from where I’m sitting.
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I don’t think anyone’s really said that “big pharma is going to have to shut down from the losses it takes on vaccination.” They do make small profits. It’s just that those profits are a tiny drop in a vast bucket, while their other revenue sources are often from pill-pushing meds with marginal benefit and other very questionable practices. I don’t praise big pharma, they’re a pile of profit-hungry, morally compromised corporations with far less interest in public health than their bottom line, but I do think it’s better to point out wrongs that can be clearly illustrated, rather than inventing conspiracy theories about vaccines being pushed for gross profits where there’s no data to back it up and a lot of data that shows otherwise.
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This is very true. One of my best friends is a licensed pharmacist (though she’s not currently practicing, she could be however if she wanted to, she just hates the business), which in my mind means she’s less biased than many (she has the knowledge, but isn’t directly affiliated with the business). She’s flat-out said there are drugs sold by pharma companies that are pretty much useless and possibly even harmful (cholesterol drugs anyone?), but vaccines would definitely not be put on that list.
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Big Pharma makes a lot of money. They point to the enormous amount of money spent on developing new drugs, and say that’s why they need to charge so much. Yet they spend three times as much on drug promotion efforts as they do an drug development.
With public opinion stacked against them in so many different arenas of medicine, it’s got to be a comfort to them that on this one issue, they have found exactly the right nerve to hit. “Wrong people cause disease”. It’s as genius a campaign as the “Death Tax” idea, (getting millions of people hostile to a law that actually impacted only 12 families)
The hate-mongering here would look racist as hell if it were directed at non-white people. But because “SCIENCE”, it’s suddenly okay to be a total dickhead to people you’ve never met.
So the question of how to prove vaccines are as safe as it’s claimed, is a strictly science and engineering kind of issue, but how to feel about people who don’t believe as you do, is pure politics. If there were as much concern for gun fatalities, or car fatalities, as there is here for whooping cough victims, we’d start seeing some real change happening.
I think a better model for understanding this debate, can be found in the neuroscience of smugness:
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Do you realize none of those are contradicting one another in any sort of way?
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“pharma profits are skyrocketing” generally off of drugs which require repeated and regular use, off of drugs with “cosmetic effects” such as growing hair and ED, and rebranding semi-useful over the counter remedies. None of which is related to vaccination.
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“yet another shows that patent law is apparently murder” Indeed they are since synthesizing knockoffs and generics take a major revenue stream from big Pharma. Although true it does not affect #1
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"another that big pharma is going to have to shut down from the losses it takes on vaccination"
The whole notion of big pharma profiting from vaccinations is laughable since they are only taken once or twice in a customer’s lifetime. Most times governments have to subsidize research on vaccines because of their low profit margins.
One thing I know for certain, the “Big Pharma profit” argument against vaccination is half-baked, infantile and bereft of facts. The biggest proponents of vaccination are not pharmaceutical manufacturers but civil servants, epidemiologists, and health care professionals.
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Misinformed people making poor health choices in mass have an effect on public health and are causing the return of some diseases that previously were managed, effects which aren’t exclusive to those who’ve opted out of vaccination by choice.
Seeing people stating the truth might feel bad to the people making poor choices, but pussy-footing around the truth to protect misinformed people’s feelings at the expense of the public health including the health of those who are informed but either got an ineffective vaccination or have other legitimate health reasons for not being vaccinated isn’t a reasonable response.
The goal of most who are pointing out the effects of the poor choices of others who are harming the public isn’t to feel good slagging others who are misinformed, it’s a (probably vain) effort to deal with their misinformed views that are harming the public and try to change their minds about the objectively false views they’re holding that are harming people.
There smugness coming from both sides of the discussion, but that’s just a standard byproduct of people disagreeing.
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