Forbes is running a rather refreshing article on the state of the vaccine market in the United States. As someone who has spent quite a bit of time on Internet message boards over the years, and been in any number of various and sundry debates ranging from creation/evolution to economic policy, I can tell you that there’s a widespread feeling among the lay public that big drug companies don’t want to create vaccines because cures put them out of business, and this is why there’s no cure or working vaccine for AIDS. Naturally, this is complete and utter bologna. A financial windfall the likes of which has never been seen in Big Pharma awaits the first company to complete such a treatment. (And we’re making progress day-by-day.)
Nevertheless, this is a widely-held opinion, even by otherwise educated, intelligent people. We know argumentum ad populum doesn’t make truth, but it also doesn’t stop people from believing hogwash, either.
The article starts off with what is arguably the greatest vaccination effort in the history of medicine: polio. It quickly runs over the history of the March of Dimes, and how privatization spurred the development of innovative ways of killing the virus, and scaling up the manufacturing of the vaccine to produce millions of doses.
One might consider that the Golden Age of vaccine development. It was all downhill after that when the litigation started:
Cutter followed the government’s instructions, such as they were, but failed to kill all the virus. Seventy thousand people suffered mild forms of polio as a result. Two hundred were paralyzed. Ten died.
The authorities had moved too quickly and carelessly. They would atone by slowing everything to a lawyer-clogged crawl. The ensuing lawsuits established new standards that made it much easier to sue vaccinemakers. Case by case, liability claims came to dominate the industry’s economics. Junk claims overtook legitimate ones and then eclipsed them completely. When liability problems threatened to cut off the supply of some vaccines, Congress imposed a broad-based tax on vaccines to fund an alternative compensation system.
The government’s role in buying and distributing vaccines expanded in parallel. Federal agencies began funding childhood vaccination programs soon after the polio vaccine was commercialized. The government now buys over half of all vaccines used in the U.S., at prices it effectively dictates.
As a big fan of tort reform and privatized healthcare, it’s nice to see articles like this in the mainstream media rather than the usual yammering by politicians over drug re-importation and price controls. (Both of which are fundamentally bad ideas.)
The final two paragraphs of the article. Emphasis and hyperlink mine:
Every week rotavirus kills one child in America and 12,000 children in the developing world. A vaccine against it was developed by Dr. Offit and his colleagues, working at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Wistar Institute. Their work took 10 years. Merck needed another 16 to deliver a vaccine that the FDA approved in February. Nobody wants another Cutter. But what a pity it is that the 16 years could not have been, say, 8. That could have saved 5 million lives.
Developing vaccines is much easier today than it was half a century ago–Dr. Offit says half a dozen important ones could readily be designed and assembled by laboratories like his. It doesn’t happen because no drug company wants to market them.
That’s pretty sad. I rather hope Gardasil might be a turning point in vaccine marketing and research. I think it might be — vaccines are growing in popularity for all sorts of stuff.
[Image from Harvard Medical School]
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