2.16 Medicine and Politics

Dr Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, states immunisation is not a simple decision, “everywhere  else one looks there are financial interests, sometimes obvious, sometimes covert.” He goes onto say when government officials make statements about the absolute safety of the MMR vaccine they are under pressure from the Treasury to ignore evidence to the contrary. When their advisors say no more research is needed into MMR’s side effects, they may really be saying that companies in which they have an interest do not want to do more expensive research with uncertain consequences (Nicholson, 2002).

MacDonald (1999) states “Medicine is an intrinsically political activity and not the neutral and dispassionate clinical science consumers expect,” therefore conflicting influences can have a bearing on the requirements of the individual.  Resources are scarce and choices have to be made on how to allocate these resources with least cost.  Health care is a commodity, something that can affect the economy, so governments start looking at it in terms of cost rather than optimising human potential.

The attitudes of politicians to the problems with vaccination are well illustrated by the attempt to restore confidence in the MMR vaccine.  The then health minister Tom Sackville made a statement to Parliament acknowledging 530 serious adverse reactions to MMR yet  he said “All those cases with a clear link between the reaction and the vaccine made a complete recovery.  For children whom recovery has been incomplete, the evidence did not support an association with the vaccine” (Hansard, 1994).