Goodkate, of course we need pharma cos and the drugs they make ? as I pointed out, I take one every day. Just reacting to your suggestion that pharma cos 'want to make their drugs safer'. Probably overall they do but when it comes to specific drugs and specific groups of patients that ain't necessarily the case.
WRT innoculation, again, of course overall it is a good thing to protect children against diseases that can, in some cases, be very serious. But it is equally important to recognise that vaccines, like any other medicine, can do harm as well as good. There are people who have been damaged by vaccines in the past - that's why some vaccines have been withdrawn. These people exist ? it is a fact ? and they are a small minority who suffered for the public good. Immunisation involves a small risk of harm (which may be minimal and transient, like a fever, or more serious, as in the cases of people who are now adults and were injured by vaccines used in the past) to any individual v. a larger risk of harm from the disease you vaccinate against to the general population.
As with any other drug, we need real, hard, unbiased and appropriate research to show what risks exist - a few kids have a fever, fine, that's a risk most parents would consider is outweighed by protection against measles. A few kids might be at high risk of breathing difficulties from pertussis vaccine ? fine, let's use the evidence to show which kids are at risk here and make decisions based on their medical needs. And let's protect kids who can't be vaccinated by the rest of us, who can, getting our kids vaccinated.
But appropriate research means asking the right questions and designing studies that are methodolically sound to provide an answer to that question. The answer to the questions 'why did Andrew Wakefield find vaccine strain measles in the gut of a very small number of autisic children' and 'was this merely a coincidence, or actually cause and effect' will not be provided by epidemiological studies. Properly designed epidemiological studies do show that MMR is not killing or damaging thousands of children. That's reassuring. However, they do not answer the questions Wakefield raised about a very small number of autistic children.
Villifying researchers who dare to ask inconvenient questions is not going to improve our understanding of drug safety.
And misleading parents by spin isn't either - it just makes parents suspicious (eg the DoH claiming there's never been a programme of single vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella in this country. Do they think parents don't remember their own childhoods, FFS? I had single vaccines for measles and rubella and dh had them for measles and mumps (and caught mumps four times into the bargain). They only stopped using single measles vaccines in the late 90s, I saw the health service circular confirming the decision at the time! Lying about that doesn't encourage anyone to trust them.
Taking Wakefield's research seriously and designing independent, appropriate and well-conducted studies to test his findings is. Unfortunately that isn't quite what is happening.