Is this really how it works?
To this day, meat processing and inspection are largely a federal matter, a fact which has come under fire given the regulatory pressure on local farms. They are perfectly capable of processing meat or working with local processors that cannot afford to pay all the fees to be licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But they are simply not allowed to do so. Not even today.
Even with renewed pressure from the Make America Healthy Again movement, there has been no real development to change these laws, even though doing so would help make small farming profitable again. Part of the reason for resistance to change comes down to the fable above, namely that federal regulation came about to save the public from contaminated food.
He puts his thesis succinctly: “The regulatory movements were usually initiated by the dominant businesses to be regulated. ... It is business control over politics (and by ‘business’ I mean the major economic interests) rather than political regulation of the economy that is the significant phenomenon of the Progressive Era. Such domination was direct and indirect, but significant only insofar as it provided means for achieving a greater end—political capitalism.”
Kolko’s revised story begins with the antitrust actions on oil and moves to food through the story of the meatpackers and onward to the creation of the Federal Reserve. He demonstrates conclusively that it was the industry itself that shepherded the regulatory efforts.
For example: “It was the meatpackers themselves who pushed for the federal regulation as a method of bolstering public confidence in their product. Regulation had the benefit for them of cartelizing a highly competitive market. No one could after that point offer their products for sale without inspection that they not only welcomed but wholly controlled.”
For years, I’ve used Kolko’s extraordinary research as a resource to better understand this period in American life. But recently, I found a major oversight in his book that directly impacts our own times. The meatpacking regulation of 1906 itself had a precedent in the Biologics Control Act of 1902. This was the language of the time that referred to the vaccine industry.
In 1901, a familiar nightmare began to unfold. In St. Louis, Missouri, a 5-year-old girl died after being given contaminated diphtheria antitoxin that was produced from the blood of an infected horse. That contaminated serum ultimately killed 13 children. Around the same time, nine children in Camden, New Jersey, died from contaminated smallpox vaccines. Other highly publicized deaths occurred in Philadelphia; Cleveland; Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Bristol, Pennsylvania.
The top dogs in the industry got to work with an innovative game plan. Rather than just watch their companies be slaughtered by a consumer revolt, they would seek federal regulation of their own industry, one that required licenses, inspections, and annual renewals that only most capitalized companies could afford. Anyone distributing vaccine products without such approvals faced criminal penalties.
In addition, “the 1902 Act may also have been motivated by a desire of the large manufacturers to reduce competition by establishing strict governmental standards that small producers would have difficulty meeting,” he wrote.
The leader in the industry was a company called Parke-Davis, which quietly backed the legislation to shore up public trust at a time when many people had grown skeptical of vaccines. Parke-Davis essentially wrote the legislation. The industrial journals at the time agreed that such policing was necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff and bolster public confidence.
The result was the Biologics Control Act of 1902—the very earliest federal legislation pertaining to pharmaceutical drugs. It was supported unanimously by Congress as a smackdown to an industry that had become too freewheeling. In reality, industry fully supported the intervention because they needed the government to declare their products to be safe and effective, and also to cartelize the market and protect the largest players from stiff competition.
The Biologics Control Act established inspections by a new agency, the Hygienic Laboratory of the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, over which the vaccine industry exerted firm control. In 1930, the name was changed to the National Institutes of Health.
As for Parke-Davis, it received the very first license to distribute vaccines. The Supreme Court decision of 1905 (Jacobson) helped enormously by affirming the right of states to mandate their shots. That company was bought by Warner-Lambert in 1970, and later, this new company was purchased by a familiar name: Pfizer.
This pattern has repeated itself over and over. The regulatory intervention is advertised as new, tough controls on business. Beneath the surface, the hidden hand of the biggest industrial players is always involved from the inception. It happened in meat, vaccines, banking and finance, education, oil and housing, and every other industry you can name. Looking at this long history, it’s best to assume that the hand of large industrial players is in all forms of federal regulation.
The reason it is important to get this history right is that it casts a shadow on all government controls pushed as a means to control industry. Very often, the people behind the scenes working for such regulation are the companies that are in the best position to bear the extra costs and have the knowledge necessary to fashion regulations that support their interests. In the end, in the affairs of government, it is the money and not the ideals that does the talking in Washington. It was true in the Progressive Era just as it is true today.
As this regulation pertains to the vaccine industry, it is highly doubtful that the industry could have survived the waves of deaths of 1901 without federal intervention to assure the public that these shots are necessary, safe, and effective.
The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act completed the picture by erecting a liability shield so that the major distributors would bear no financial burden from lawsuits. If the shot is on the childhood schedule, the injured have essentially no recourse, which is why there is such panic in the air concerning the removal of injections from the schedule. As usual, the real fears trace to financial interests.
There was a time in U.S. history when the people were largely naive about the true nature of government regulation. A closer look at the history and the truths behind the fables helps make better sense of both the past and the present.
