Sometimes I amaze myself with my naivete about the healthcare system. I used to think the primary care physician at the HMO I once belonged to was most concerned that I receive the best possible treatment…until I requested being allowed to go outside the system for treatment I knew would be better than what the HMO offered. I was turned down because the HMO’s treatment was considered “adequate.”
Once I understood that the physician was at least as concerned with saving the HMO money as he was with my medical welfare, I felt like a jerk, but a dimmer switch in my brain slowly began turning on.
I’ve had the same feeling lately as I’ve attempted to understand the issue of vaccines, and the government’s increasingly aggressive efforts to force people to obtain them. I used to think, probably because of all the fear that surrounded me growing up with the threat of polio always hovering in the background, that vaccines represented the best of public health—made available to the great mass of people to prevent outbreaks of serious diseases, like polio, typhoid, and measles.
My naivete on this issue began to erode a few years ago, when a cousin’s young daughter was diagnosed with autism. After a huge amount of exploration and research, the parents, who are highly rational, educated, and thoughtful people, trusting of “the system,” concluded that it was the childhood vaccines administered to their daughter that triggered the autism.
Then, a friend who is a supervisor in a healthcare facility, earlier this year began complaining to me that the facility’s top guns were requiring, in ever-stronger language, that all employees be vaccinated with the new Tdap vaccine—for “tetanus, diptheria and pertussis.”
Since this friend refuses to be vaccinated because of her concerns about safety, she felt terribly awkward encouraging her subordinates to cooperate with the facility’s program.
At first, her superiors accepted her discomfort about promoting the new vaccine. But just a month ago, the word came from on high that she must inform her employees of the vaccine program and the facility’s recommendation that all employees be inoculated. Anyone who didn’t want to be vaccinated needed to fill in a form declining involvement in the program. This individual now feels terribly guilty, and angry, about her cooperation in getting the word out. She has even mulled quitting her job, but can’t do that so easily because she has a family to support.
Now today the lead article in The Wall Street Journal explains that the new vaccine against cervical cancer has many more problems than the manufacturer, Merck & Co., initially let on. For one thing, it may not offer all the protection Merck claims. For another, the FDA approved it even though it had been tested for safety “in only a few hundred 11 and 12-year-old girls.” And then there’s the question of whether it’s even needed, since cervical cancer “is a relatively rare disease in the U.S.” and has been contained via pap testing.
Merck has been heavily lobbying state legislatures around the country, and has 20 states considering making the vaccine mandatory, as Texas and Virginia have already done. Oh, by the way, the Texas governor’s former chief of staff is a Merck lobbyist.
Reality can be unpleasant medicine.
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