Sharyl Attkisson on how Merck is influencing doctors

"So we can all consult The Merck Manual for all of our problems. A pediatrician I spoke to years ago called it the pediatric Bible as in follow religiously, that's how I took it. So, Merck claims there's a firewall between its pharmaceutical side, which has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for paying kickbacks to doctors, for bribery, for dangerous medicine marketing, all these things. But there's a firewall between them and the editorial side that writes for the doctors. Which, at CBS, even if you'd have told me there was a firewall between news and the advertising division, we all know there's self-censorship, you understand where the bread is buttered. There's pressure, so I don't feel like that holds a lot of water. So I look to see, well, what are doctors taught? I mean, they're shaped so very early to not look at adverse events that vaccines are the best invention since clean drinking water. You'll hear them parrot these kind of like cultish lines about things. And on its face, it's so silly. Vaccines are safe inventions since drinking water. Well, which vaccine? For which people? Certainly the ones that are pulled from the market for safety reasons aren't safe. So. They're making these crazy blanket statements they're taught to parrot in med school. So I look in the Merck manual, what does Merck tell doctors about their controversial Gardasil vaccine? Nothing of consequence. In fact, it says in there, when I looked online, no serious adverse events have been reported. False on its face because the label Merck includes with the vaccine that nobody sees, but that's FDA approved. lists dozens upon dozens of serious adverse events from paralysis to death. But doctors, they're taught in the Merc Manual there's no serious adverse events. And that's repeated over and over again throughout medical school whereby they're carefully aimed away from looking at root causes, looking at adverse events, reporting adverse events. And so by the time you get to your doctor, they're not listening if you're trying to, they're not looking or listening to these things that we're talking about because they've been conditioned not to."