I don't intend this a negative, but this statement explains your bias.
As a scientist, then, you know the difficulty in performing studies including establishment of control groups, comparison baselines, identifying correlation vs. causation, taking account all the factors that need to be considered to arrive at high confidence conclusions.
Questions need to be answered such as are study participants providing accurate information, keeping to the rules of the study, and how many ways you can ask a question to get a valid piece of information, let alone maintaining the integrity of daily lab practices.
Results are leveraged and extrapolated across larger groups based on the principals of statistics.
That's tough work. A drug makes it to production, are manufacturing controls, stable ingredient potency, and purity maintained, etc.- the details are endless.
So, how many times has a study been completed, and the team realizes they should have put more weight on the control of X, or that Y should have been broken out from Z. But the funding is out, you've made progress, but there's always more questions.
Keep in mind that the anti-vax movement is fundamentally leftist.
As the worn out saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Don't expect me to be able to explain the reasoning of leftists, I'm still waiting on an explaination of what occupy wall street was all about, what the problem is, and what solution is needed to resolve it. Ask any of the protesters, you'll get answers inconstant with the next activist.
Most of the occupy movement are on the left. Conservatives have the same concerns for the most part about the economy, and can point to the true cause and solutions in line with the principles of free enterprise and the Republic.
Is it really about anti-vax, or a rebellion because something just isn't right, and they feel fear? Are vaccinations another agent orange where the truth is well known decades later. Maybe they or their family, their baby, had bad experiences. Maybe they woke up to realize that doctors are often fat and keel over dead early, or they at one time promoted cigarettes on television. Actors, real doctors, they're all the same to the left.
I can tell you this, there are plenty of holistic doctors who left AMA practices, they left the medicine machine. They weren't able to do what they sacrificed for to become a doctor, and that is to help individuals. There's a multitude of such doctors, and even AMA doctors that refuse inoculation for their kids.
They are exercising their choice, as do individuals whom take ownership of their own health. The opposition is to government mandated vaccinations, not a blanket anti-vac position. To conservatives, one size does not fit all, we are people not a herd of animals.
It's a dangerous path when the good of the many overrides the free will of the individual. Government mandated vaccinations are inconsistent with our free will and free market competition.
Freedom isn't pretty sometimes, it isn't orderly and neat always, sometimes it takes messy blood and guts to maintain it.
Government cannot solve all of our problems, like the billions spent on the war on poverty, you can't force fix the human condition.
I hardly consider basing an opinion on the results of the most up-to-date high quality research a "bias."
As a scientist, then, you know the difficulty in performing studies including establishment of control groups, comparison baselines, identifying correlation vs. causation, taking account all the factors that need to be considered to arrive at high confidence conclusions. [Remaining paragraphs in the same vein omitted.]
That reminds me of some of the material that anti-science advocates (including but not limited to anti-vax kooks) post on their sites. The implication is supposed to be that the subject is just so complicated, and that scientists routinely overlook important factors that really should be considered before anyone can say a particular drug is safe.
Let me clarify that by "drug", I also include vaccines because they are a type of drug and undergo the same clinical trial process as any other drug.
The reality, however, is that a statement trying to list everything that scientists must consider (while implying that they routinely overlook items) is terribly naive. The reality of basic research, and then of clinical trials through the various phases and then after the drug has been approved is a heck of a lot more complicated than you seem to realize. This is why clinical trials require the work of a lot of people from many different specialties, because they each bring an expertise to the table so that together, they build a holistic picture of the problem being studied. You seem to be under the impression that drugs are approved with only a few inadequate tests to support approval--but in reality, it takes many clinical studies over the course of several years to build a good statistical foundation for drug approval. The first set of human studies, phase 1, involves dozens to a couple of hundred subjects. These are safety studies, done on just a few subjects. If the drug passes phase 1, it moves on to phase 2, the dose-finding phase. This may involve several hundred patients. The last phase, phase 3, is the study of how well the drug works. This typically involves a few thousand to over 10,000 patients, and requires careful record keeping and heavy-duty statistical analysis of the results.
I'm not even talking about study design (which has to be specific to the drug being tested), the ethical considerations of a study, or the involvement of the FDA at each step. These are complicated topics, and it would take a lot of time and space to discuss each one in any kind of detail.
Suffice it to say that the reason it takes 10-15 years (or longer) and $1 billion dollars (or more) to bring a drug from early development to approval is because the clinical trial process is so complicated. The FDA will not approve a drug unless a company has extensive safety and efficacy data to support its claim that its drug should be approved, and a company that cannot satisfy the FDA that its product is safe and effective basically loses all of its development costs. For a small company, that's a death blow.
Keep in mind that the anti-vax movement is fundamentally leftist.
As the worn out saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The anti-vax movement isn't right even once. Frankly, they are pushing a dangerous level of complacency that has the potential to result in death and disability that does not have to happen. Actually, I think that some of the masterminds behind anti-vax kookery intend this result. They are leftists. A favorite leftist meme is that there are so many humans that we are irreversibly damaging the earth. Many leftists want a drastic (and violent) reduction in the numbers of human beings. Therefore, anything that has the potential to cause humans to die is something they support. Of course, they won't reveal their true intentions of wanting people to die young and needlessly--which is completely consistent with their propensity to lie about their motives. They know no one would support their ideas if they were honest.
Is it really about anti-vax, or a rebellion because something just isn't right, and they feel fear? Are vaccinations another agent orange where the truth is well known decades later.
I think that the proponents of the various anti-sciences (including anti-vax) pick their target audience for very specific characteristics. From what I've seen, anti-vax followers are scientifically and mathematically illiterate. They are truly incapable of discerning whether someone is describing real science, or is fabricating nonsense full of big sciency sounding words. They have no concept of relative risk (is a tender inflammation at the injection site really more serious than a disease that can kill a child?) I also get the impression that the anti-vax followers are genuinely upset that experts who spend years at university and more years during their career studying a subject actually do know more about that subject than someone whose knowledge is limited to typing words in a search box (what we disparagingly call "University of Google"). I have a feeling that this is because of self-esteem training in school--where, instead of praising students who do well, the teachers praise everyone, regardless, so that no one "feels bad", then these kids who all but failed school get into the real world and find out the real world cares about what you know, not your self-esteem. And suddenly, their self-esteem falls into the ditch.
Oh, the reason I quoted the sentence about agent orange is because it amused me. That happens to be the topic of my PhD work. I have not studied agent orange since I left graduate school, but it will always hold a special place in my heart.
I can tell you this, there are plenty of holistic doctors who left AMA practices, they left the medicine machine. They weren't able to do what they sacrificed for to become a doctor, and that is to help individuals. There's a multitude of such doctors, and even AMA doctors that refuse inoculation for their kids.
Oh, I am well aware that a small minority of doctors turn against their training and the Hippocratic oath to offer "alternative medicine." They do it for the money. They know that there are people who are desperate, and who don't want to hear that there is no known cure for their condition--and they are willing to take those people's money in return for promises they can't keep. Or they will sell all kinds of useless "cures" and "natural remedies" to people who are not sick, but have bought into new age mysticism and so forth. Etc. There are many ways that the unscrupulous sell quackery, and it is unfortunate that some individuals who legitimately earned the MD decide to become quacks. (They were probably marginal physicians to begin with.)
In closing, I will say this: there is a fundamental difference between refusing to vaccinate your children and choosing to fork over money to a quack instead of seeking legitimate evidence-based care. Vaccination is a public health issue. To protect the members of our society who cannot be vaccinated or whose immune systems respond inadequately to some or all vaccines, a certain percentage of the population has to be vaccinated. We call the level at which the vulnerable members are protected "herd immunity." Anti-vaxxers count on there being enough other children to prevent their unvaccinated children from being exposed, but they don't care a whit for other people's children who are exposed when their unvaccinated kids do pick up one of those dangerous diseases.
OTOH, when you decide to go to a quack for new-age faddish "treatment" of your serious disease, you are the only one whose life you are endangering by that decision. (You do not, btw, have an absolute right to take your seriously ill kid to a quack--you have to take your kid to a legitimate doctor to receive evidence-based medical care.)