Why don’t some parents believe the safety of vaccines?

As a medical student, I strongly support vaccination.  It works, it’s safe, and it doesn’t cause autism.  But I also understand why many parents don’t believe me and the medical community when we beg them to vaccinate their kids. Medicine has come a long way from “do no harm.”  Now we talk about risks and benefits: and none of our tests, medicines, or procedures are without risks.  Increasingly, pharmaceutical companies have been caught concealing those risks from doctors and the public. Around 2000, Merck (the manufacturer with a monopoly on the MMR vaccine that protects against measles) published a study called VIGOR which showed that their new drug called Vioxx effectively treated pain from arthritis.  But they concealed data from the medical community that showed that it also caused heart attacks.  Merck employees literally joked about destroying doctors who raised the alarms about the drug.  Some estimates put the number of lives shortened as high as 100,000.  They were caught and have paid almost $1 billion in fines so far. Was Merck just one bad actor?  In 2006, GlaxoSmithKline was found to have concealed data about Avandia, a diabetes drug.  An email was discovered stating: “Per Sr. Mgmt request, these data should not see the light of day to anyone outside of GSK.”  GlaxoSmithKline was fined $3 billion and is believed to have contributed to over 80,000 deaths. That’s not all.  Novartis was caught trying to...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Meds Pediatrics Source Type: blogs