Like just about everyone else who replied, you completely missed the point. My objection is not to the vaccine itself, but the suggestion that we make it compulsory for everyone.
Do you suggest that government teams go around person to person and hold people down against a table and inject them against their will? I don't know about you, but frankly, that is worse than anything nature might throw my way, that is evil, pure and simple.
Thanks for making my point more explicit. Sadly, I think there are quite a few people who are totally comfortable with this as long as the target is a class of people they despise (religious conservatives, in this case; and yes, I'm aware that this class has no shortage of authoritarian fantasies of its own).
So I guess you're up for russian roulette for your child?
No, I would be perfectly comfortable with my child getting a Gardasil shot. I would also be totally comfortable telling my children "use condoms, don't have sex with anyone who doesn't use condoms, and make sure that your partners have had regular STD tests", followed by the customary slideshow of STD symptoms to reinforce the point. What I am not comfortable with is the idea of making Gardasil compulsory - are you going to start blocking kids from attending public school if they haven't been immunized against HPV? They're not going to catch it because someone sneezed in math class.
Or here's a more general objection: should adults also be required to be vaccinated against HPV? Because I'm doing a pretty good job of avoiding it already, albeit not really in the way I'd hoped.
This is why vaccines should be 100% mandatory unless there is a valid medical reason. I don't care what your religion, personal beliefs etc are. If you are going to live around other people you have to be vacinated.
I share this sentiment for easily communicated diseases (which is what I'm vaccinated against), but why should people be forced to take vaccines for diseases that are very easily avoided? I'm not going to lose sleep over sending my (hypothetical) child to a school where a bunch of children haven't taken Gardasil, as long as they've taken vaccines for anything they'd be likely to spew onto other children in the classroom.
If we lose 10% of all children to external causes, I think it would be better for humanity.
I'm guessing you either a) don't have children, or b) assume that it will be other people's kids who die, because yours are richer and/or genetically superior.
Which means if you refuse to get vaccinated and then help to spread disease you should be liable for that.
I think there's a bit of a difference between diseases that you can catch because someone else's third grader sneezed on yours, and diseases that are only transmitted through sexual contact.
Maybe you should avoid lines like "Go ask a lobby group and they will laugh at how naive you are" if you are worried about people insulting you on the Internet. Since you completely missed the point of my post, I think GP's accusation was fair.
Really? How many civil servants have you encountered who paid for their jobs, and when is the last time that you or anyone you know had to bribe a government official?
That's pretty much par for the course here in America too, comrade.
I'm guessing you don't know any Russians and haven't read very much about Russia. The kind of corruption the poster is talking about isn't the standard conflicts of interest present in the American military-industrial complex (and that of pretty much every advanced nation), it's more like where petty officials are stealing parts to resell on the black market, government jobs are purchased, and no deal gets made without money changing hands beneath the table. Not even the worst of the old-time big-city Democratic Party machines had corruption anywhere near this pervasive.
There are multiple companies working on this, at least one in the Bay Area (started by a former Stanford prof). I think it's a great idea, personally, but at least in the US there are far too many people who either oppose GMOs with a near-religious fervor, or oppose reducing their environmental impact with similar fervor, for this to be successful commercially in a domestic market.
The problem is that those same idiots have more politics power right now than any other time in the country's history.
See, the problem I'm seeing is that people just love to throw out assertions like this, but they have absolutely zero evidence to back it up. Have you actually read any history? Just to cherry-pick a few examples, during the 19th century, the American people elected a brutal ethnic cleanser as president, an entire region of the country fought a bloody war to protect their right to enslave part of their population, and the Reconstruction was aborted due to back-room Democratic politics, guaranteeing that the South was ruled by inbred morons for another hundred years. (And there was no shortage of loudmouthed sociopaths calling for massive immigration restriction.) All this was happening when there were substantially fewer voters, and, presumably, fewer idiots, yet the country (or parts thereof) made plenty of unconscionable, idiotic decisions (and never really quit).
If you really think this era is uniquely bad, I recommend the book "Nixonland", which will make you wonder how this country lasted beyond the 1970s. (Nixon was a symptom, not a cause.)
Science used to drive industry. Now that industry is trying to control science. Research used to be the domain of dedicated private researchers. Now pretty much all university and lab funding comes from corporations who don't care about the long term health of the country, only today's profits
Also wrong. I don't know what the situation is like in other fields, but in biomedical research the vast majority of the funding for academics comes from government agencies, and a large fraction of the remainder is supplied by non-profits like HHMI. There are certainly plenty of examples of corporate funding as well, but I haven't seen any evidence that they are greatly distorting the research that gets done. Of course the entire field is loaded with perverse incentives of varying severity, but show me a public spending program that isn't.
the reporter and the anchors were joking about how they not only not understood this, but they didn't understand physics at all. They were proud of their ignorance, laughing it up.
It's extremely difficult for a layperson to understand physics at that level. I have a PhD in biology and I don't understand most of modern physics either; I try not to be proud of my ignorance, but I do try to be completely honest about it. If I were trying to discuss it on a newscast I'm not sure what I could do other than try to lighten the mood.
Albert Einstein, Wernher Von Braun, Enrico Fermi, Alexander Graham Bell, Niels Bohr, Edward Teller and so many more. Many outsiders saw the US as the country to get science done...
Five of those men had very specific and (for all but Von Braun) similar political reasons for doing science in the US; I don't think we can draw any generalizations from that, other than the stupidity of alienating and harassing some of your greatest minds just because they belong to the wrong ethnic group.
I'm not sure why you think the last 15 years (why that cutoff?) has been so awful for American science in general; I worked in academic biomedical research for that entire period and I haven't observed any sudden drop in quality. The real big problem we have is that the amount of NIH funding was greatly increased for a while, increasing the supply of researchers, but then leveled off, so the competition for funding is much worse now. It's definitely discouraging and a big disincentive, but the funding and resources are still among the best in the world.
The science of earlier generations was weird as well. I think, that compared with the past, we live in a golden age of science.
Any time someone bewails the decline of American intellects, this is usually the correct response. At no point in history has the US or any other nation been populated by a majority of sober, thoughtful, rational individuals. There has always been a large population of idiots, and always will be. We only think it's worse now because mass media makes it much easier for idiots to be heard, and, as this is still a liberal democracy of sorts, even idiots are allowed to speak their mind and vote. (And I wouldn't have it any other way.) Oh, and of course thanks to science-informed advances in medicine and public health, these idiots now have a life expectancy roughly double what it was at the start of the 20th century, so they have more time to complain. At the same time, we (educated Americans) tend to be exposed primarily to domestic idiocy, so we don't have an opportunity to observe how stupid and irrational people in other countries are. I only ever meet exceptionally smart and motivated Indians, for example, but I've read enough about India to know that a large part of the country makes Appalachia look like Marin County.
In addition, in the last 50 years science has actually had a significant impact on public policy - so, naturally, there is a corporate-sponsored backlash against it that would have been unthinkable in less enlightened times. Many aspects of the popular backlash are related; the creationist movement is essentially reactionary and would not have existed before the courts started ruling that you can't use the public schools to teach religion (a use that had previously been relatively uncontroversial, since no one really gave a shit what the Jews thought and they certainly didn't care about the atheists).
Maybe this time the patent rights will be granted to competing entities, allowing for some competition. Since these are British researchers, we can so hope, they aren't quite as corrupted as our government funded research.
I'm not sure what this means - what is (somewhat euphemistically) termed "technology transfer" is standard practice in the UK just as in the US, although the actual laws are different of course. I've been in competition (some friendly, some not) with academically-based-or-derived groups based in Britain in multiple jobs over the last decade, and their licensing practices don't appear to be significantly different from a non-expert viewpoint (IANAL but I am a scientist, of sorts). I have yet to see any evidence that British researchers are any less "corrupt" than Americans either; they both are responding naturally to entirely legal financial incentives put in place by their governments and universities. Got a problem with it, change the law.
As far as competition is concerned, I'm pretty certain that two companies paying for non-exclusive licenses would bring in far less revenue for the inventors than one company buying an exclusive license.
The real humiliation wasn't the space race, it was losing their empire in 1989-1991. Most of the other European empires managed to get over the loss of their former colonies, but the Russians are still whining about it 25 years later, as if they had some sacred right to brutalize and exploit the Poles and Czechs (among many others). Ditto for China, which seems to be intent on claiming every territory that might have at one point been under Chinese rule as payback for its own supposed humiliation(s).
(To be fair, it's not like every superpower and ex-superpower in history hasn't had plenty of people who felt the same way, like the Americans who still think we could have won the war in Vietnam if only we'd been willing to take the gloves off, presumably by nuking Hanoi.)
Any blanket system that pretends to know what's safe and effective for all things of a class invariably fails with false negatives and false positives.
Placebo-controlled double-blinded trials are a fundamental concept of Western medicine and scientific investigation in general. Are you seriously arguing we should throw these out? I might as well go to a priest for my medical ailments - at least he isn't going to sell me something that might make me shit blood.
No, all of these companies started in Europe. Of course they've expanded massively and bought up companies in the US, some of them relatively large - Roche swallowed Genentech whole, which was already a large and well-established (and very profitable) business. But Roche itself is a Swiss company. The one trying to do tax inversion is Pfizer, which is indeed a US company (that tried and failed to buy AstraZeneca recently - I forget who they're trying this with now).
Incorrect. It's more like 25% at most, and the part that your tax dollars pay for is the research, not the development, which is typically paid for by the company.
Just off the top of my head, Bayer, Roche, Novartis, GSK, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-Aventis are all European companies. (They do also have US sites, of course.)
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Like just about everyone else who replied, you completely missed the point. My objection is not to the vaccine itself, but the suggestion that we make it compulsory for everyone.
Do you suggest that government teams go around person to person and hold people down against a table and inject them against their will? I don't know about you, but frankly, that is worse than anything nature might throw my way, that is evil, pure and simple.
Thanks for making my point more explicit. Sadly, I think there are quite a few people who are totally comfortable with this as long as the target is a class of people they despise (religious conservatives, in this case; and yes, I'm aware that this class has no shortage of authoritarian fantasies of its own).
Because children/teens/drunk people/adults always act reasonably.
So people should be forced to get a vaccination just in case they might be inclined to act irresponsibly?
So I guess you're up for russian roulette for your child?
No, I would be perfectly comfortable with my child getting a Gardasil shot. I would also be totally comfortable telling my children "use condoms, don't have sex with anyone who doesn't use condoms, and make sure that your partners have had regular STD tests", followed by the customary slideshow of STD symptoms to reinforce the point. What I am not comfortable with is the idea of making Gardasil compulsory - are you going to start blocking kids from attending public school if they haven't been immunized against HPV? They're not going to catch it because someone sneezed in math class.
Or here's a more general objection: should adults also be required to be vaccinated against HPV? Because I'm doing a pretty good job of avoiding it already, albeit not really in the way I'd hoped.
This is why vaccines should be 100% mandatory unless there is a valid medical reason. I don't care what your religion, personal beliefs etc are. If you are going to live around other people you have to be vacinated.
I share this sentiment for easily communicated diseases (which is what I'm vaccinated against), but why should people be forced to take vaccines for diseases that are very easily avoided? I'm not going to lose sleep over sending my (hypothetical) child to a school where a bunch of children haven't taken Gardasil, as long as they've taken vaccines for anything they'd be likely to spew onto other children in the classroom.
this one vaccine might cut cancer rates in our children
I'm confused, is HPV implicated in childhood cancers?
If we lose 10% of all children to external causes, I think it would be better for humanity.
I'm guessing you either a) don't have children, or b) assume that it will be other people's kids who die, because yours are richer and/or genetically superior.
Which means if you refuse to get vaccinated and then help to spread disease you should be liable for that.
I think there's a bit of a difference between diseases that you can catch because someone else's third grader sneezed on yours, and diseases that are only transmitted through sexual contact.
Maybe you should avoid lines like "Go ask a lobby group and they will laugh at how naive you are" if you are worried about people insulting you on the Internet. Since you completely missed the point of my post, I think GP's accusation was fair.
Somehow I doubt you'd complain if a story contained the (entirely justified) phrase "at the costs of George Bush's imperial adventures in Iraq".
it's like the situation we have here in America
Really? How many civil servants have you encountered who paid for their jobs, and when is the last time that you or anyone you know had to bribe a government official?
That's pretty much par for the course here in America too, comrade.
I'm guessing you don't know any Russians and haven't read very much about Russia. The kind of corruption the poster is talking about isn't the standard conflicts of interest present in the American military-industrial complex (and that of pretty much every advanced nation), it's more like where petty officials are stealing parts to resell on the black market, government jobs are purchased, and no deal gets made without money changing hands beneath the table. Not even the worst of the old-time big-city Democratic Party machines had corruption anywhere near this pervasive.
There are multiple companies working on this, at least one in the Bay Area (started by a former Stanford prof). I think it's a great idea, personally, but at least in the US there are far too many people who either oppose GMOs with a near-religious fervor, or oppose reducing their environmental impact with similar fervor, for this to be successful commercially in a domestic market.
The problem is that those same idiots have more politics power right now than any other time in the country's history.
See, the problem I'm seeing is that people just love to throw out assertions like this, but they have absolutely zero evidence to back it up. Have you actually read any history? Just to cherry-pick a few examples, during the 19th century, the American people elected a brutal ethnic cleanser as president, an entire region of the country fought a bloody war to protect their right to enslave part of their population, and the Reconstruction was aborted due to back-room Democratic politics, guaranteeing that the South was ruled by inbred morons for another hundred years. (And there was no shortage of loudmouthed sociopaths calling for massive immigration restriction.) All this was happening when there were substantially fewer voters, and, presumably, fewer idiots, yet the country (or parts thereof) made plenty of unconscionable, idiotic decisions (and never really quit).
If you really think this era is uniquely bad, I recommend the book "Nixonland", which will make you wonder how this country lasted beyond the 1970s. (Nixon was a symptom, not a cause.)
Science used to drive industry. Now that industry is trying to control science. Research used to be the domain of dedicated private researchers. Now pretty much all university and lab funding comes from corporations who don't care about the long term health of the country, only today's profits
Also wrong. I don't know what the situation is like in other fields, but in biomedical research the vast majority of the funding for academics comes from government agencies, and a large fraction of the remainder is supplied by non-profits like HHMI. There are certainly plenty of examples of corporate funding as well, but I haven't seen any evidence that they are greatly distorting the research that gets done. Of course the entire field is loaded with perverse incentives of varying severity, but show me a public spending program that isn't.
the reporter and the anchors were joking about how they not only not understood this, but they didn't understand physics at all. They were proud of their ignorance, laughing it up.
It's extremely difficult for a layperson to understand physics at that level. I have a PhD in biology and I don't understand most of modern physics either; I try not to be proud of my ignorance, but I do try to be completely honest about it. If I were trying to discuss it on a newscast I'm not sure what I could do other than try to lighten the mood.
Albert Einstein, Wernher Von Braun, Enrico Fermi, Alexander Graham Bell, Niels Bohr, Edward Teller and so many more. Many outsiders saw the US as the country to get science done...
Five of those men had very specific and (for all but Von Braun) similar political reasons for doing science in the US; I don't think we can draw any generalizations from that, other than the stupidity of alienating and harassing some of your greatest minds just because they belong to the wrong ethnic group.
I'm not sure why you think the last 15 years (why that cutoff?) has been so awful for American science in general; I worked in academic biomedical research for that entire period and I haven't observed any sudden drop in quality. The real big problem we have is that the amount of NIH funding was greatly increased for a while, increasing the supply of researchers, but then leveled off, so the competition for funding is much worse now. It's definitely discouraging and a big disincentive, but the funding and resources are still among the best in the world.
The science of earlier generations was weird as well. I think, that compared with the past, we live in a golden age of science.
Any time someone bewails the decline of American intellects, this is usually the correct response. At no point in history has the US or any other nation been populated by a majority of sober, thoughtful, rational individuals. There has always been a large population of idiots, and always will be. We only think it's worse now because mass media makes it much easier for idiots to be heard, and, as this is still a liberal democracy of sorts, even idiots are allowed to speak their mind and vote. (And I wouldn't have it any other way.) Oh, and of course thanks to science-informed advances in medicine and public health, these idiots now have a life expectancy roughly double what it was at the start of the 20th century, so they have more time to complain. At the same time, we (educated Americans) tend to be exposed primarily to domestic idiocy, so we don't have an opportunity to observe how stupid and irrational people in other countries are. I only ever meet exceptionally smart and motivated Indians, for example, but I've read enough about India to know that a large part of the country makes Appalachia look like Marin County.
In addition, in the last 50 years science has actually had a significant impact on public policy - so, naturally, there is a corporate-sponsored backlash against it that would have been unthinkable in less enlightened times. Many aspects of the popular backlash are related; the creationist movement is essentially reactionary and would not have existed before the courts started ruling that you can't use the public schools to teach religion (a use that had previously been relatively uncontroversial, since no one really gave a shit what the Jews thought and they certainly didn't care about the atheists).
A single corporation owning one of the most popular food products with no competition?
Only for twenty years, then there's nothing stopping banana producers from doing whatever they want.
Maybe this time the patent rights will be granted to competing entities, allowing for some competition. Since these are British researchers, we can so hope, they aren't quite as corrupted as our government funded research.
I'm not sure what this means - what is (somewhat euphemistically) termed "technology transfer" is standard practice in the UK just as in the US, although the actual laws are different of course. I've been in competition (some friendly, some not) with academically-based-or-derived groups based in Britain in multiple jobs over the last decade, and their licensing practices don't appear to be significantly different from a non-expert viewpoint (IANAL but I am a scientist, of sorts). I have yet to see any evidence that British researchers are any less "corrupt" than Americans either; they both are responding naturally to entirely legal financial incentives put in place by their governments and universities. Got a problem with it, change the law.
As far as competition is concerned, I'm pretty certain that two companies paying for non-exclusive licenses would bring in far less revenue for the inventors than one company buying an exclusive license.
Consider a little town in Texas who's name I cannot recall (talking population in the hundreds).
It was probably South Africa, although it wouldn't surprise me if there were multiple examples of this.
The real humiliation wasn't the space race, it was losing their empire in 1989-1991. Most of the other European empires managed to get over the loss of their former colonies, but the Russians are still whining about it 25 years later, as if they had some sacred right to brutalize and exploit the Poles and Czechs (among many others). Ditto for China, which seems to be intent on claiming every territory that might have at one point been under Chinese rule as payback for its own supposed humiliation(s).
(To be fair, it's not like every superpower and ex-superpower in history hasn't had plenty of people who felt the same way, like the Americans who still think we could have won the war in Vietnam if only we'd been willing to take the gloves off, presumably by nuking Hanoi.)
Any blanket system that pretends to know what's safe and effective for all things of a class invariably fails with false negatives and false positives.
Placebo-controlled double-blinded trials are a fundamental concept of Western medicine and scientific investigation in general. Are you seriously arguing we should throw these out? I might as well go to a priest for my medical ailments - at least he isn't going to sell me something that might make me shit blood.
No, all of these companies started in Europe. Of course they've expanded massively and bought up companies in the US, some of them relatively large - Roche swallowed Genentech whole, which was already a large and well-established (and very profitable) business. But Roche itself is a Swiss company. The one trying to do tax inversion is Pfizer, which is indeed a US company (that tried and failed to buy AstraZeneca recently - I forget who they're trying this with now).
Incorrect. It's more like 25% at most, and the part that your tax dollars pay for is the research, not the development, which is typically paid for by the company.
Just off the top of my head, Bayer, Roche, Novartis, GSK, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-Aventis are all European companies. (They do also have US sites, of course.)