If i have to say one things and one thing only, please, for the love of God do not reject vaccinations, make sure you are vaccinated.
The regulation and approval process for drugs is *extremely rigorous*.
I am a pharmacology major, especially interested in drug development. Do you know how much it costs to make a single drug, from discovery, to testing, to finally making it? 1.4 billion dollars, on average. For one single drug.
It takes 12-15 years on average as well from when a drug is first discovered to when (and if) it is administered to the general population.
Out of the cycle of discovery, clinical trials and testing, approval and production and finally manufacturing, the longest and most expensive stage by far is clinical trials. It costs roughly $970 million dollars to run clinical trials and test the drug to make sure it is safe, this takes about 9 years.
The approval process almost everything you else you touch is far less stringent than the protocols for developing new drugs. Your food goes through a hell of a lot less screening and you consume it on a daily basis.
Its expensive partially because of the nature of the process but most drugs they discover and try never make it to market. They either don’t work well enough or are even more slightly unsafe than is warranted for the type of condition they treat. They need to absorb this cost into the things they actually do sell to make all that lost money back.
Vaccinations are essential. They really are.
In cases like the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine, it’s been a long time since anyone alive today has had to deal with these diseases, precisely because of vaccination. They are horrible diseases and spread rapidly. We have some people (i've seen noted cases in the UK) where people have decided not to vaccinate their children (for reasons that escape me) and we're now seeing the emergence of widespread community cases of measles mumps and rubella on a fairly big scale for the first time in decades. I understand it can sometimes seem a little scary and its been awhile since a lot of the disease we vaccinate have touched anyone we know personally but getting vaccinated is essential, not only to your health but to protect everyone else in society and in the community as a whole.
For gardisil, if you read the wikipedia page on it, you'll find this: "An update on adverse events was published by the
Journal of the American Medical Association and looked at data from the
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), covering 12,424 reported adverse events after about 23 million doses of vaccine between June 2006 and December 2008.
[42][43] Most adverse effects were minor and not greater than background rates compared with other vaccines, the exception being higher rates for
syncope and venous thromboembolic events.
[43]"
13,000 cases out of a total of 23 000 000 doses. A lot of these cases haven't been conclusively linked to the vaccine either. People sometimes get sick, it just happens they had the vaccine that day too but it doesn't necessarily link them. Its a fact of life people also die sometimes. When i was in highschool, one of the students showed up to school that morning, played basketball with his friends afterschool, went home and sadly, wasn't alive by the next morning. People just die sometimes. Of course parents want answers but just because your child had the vaccine in the past couple weeks, it doesn't mean the vaccine caused it. It would be foolish to blame the tragic death of this student on basketball for example.
It's just a fact that some people die and considering how many people have got this vaccine, some deaths are bound to coincide with getting the vaccine. 12,424 adverse reactions most were minor(pain/swelling at injection site/headaches), out of 23 million doses is nothing at all alarming compared to the benefit a vaccine provides as a whole.