Vaccines are hopeless losers, Big Pharma concluded decades ago.
The ability to charge monopoly prices did little to warm Big Pharma to vaccines. The market for particular vaccines tended to be small, with little repeat business. Moreover, much of the public didn’t see value in many vaccines, regardless of price.
Not so with the U.S. government health establishment, which saw vaccines as silver bullets that would one day be able to lower health care costs by eradicating disease.
The report attributed the undervaluation of vaccines to media coverage that highlighted adverse reactions, ignorance among patients and their physicians, and the failure to recognize that, although an individual may correctly assess that he or his children wouldn't benefit from being vaccinated, the “vaccination of an individual conveys a benefit to other members of society by protecting them against disease. Thus, total benefits from immunization programs may be greater than the sum of benefits to each recipient.”
Big Pharma now had a can’t-lose business proposition: government-guaranteed payments for millions of captive customers who had little choice but to inoculate their children and no ability to hold companies accountable if their products caused harm. This government intervention in what had been a relatively free pharmaceutical market radically changed Big Pharma’s attitude, eliminating the industry’s perception of vaccines as risky, money-losing sidelines. Vaccines soon became a burgeoning growth area in Big Pharma’s portfolio.
Without the past support of Western governments, the free market would have largely done away with vaccines because too few wanted them, most especially Big Pharma. Vaccines would only have thrived in totalitarian countries, such as those of the then-Soviet Union and communist China, where the health of the government trumps that of the citizen.
Without the continuing support of Western governments, today’s vaccine industry would again turn anti-vax, as it had in its pre-1985 free-market days. Big Pharma’s resolve to withdraw from the industry would only be steeled by the track record of COVID-19 vaccines, where studies almost daily report high levels of injuries and deaths attributed to the vaccines. Those costs, which are mostly borne by the vaccinated, would have bankrupted Big Pharma but for their exemption from liability. Unlike governments, which are notoriously poor at picking winners, Big Pharma can spot losers when it sees them and knows how to protect itself from governments that don’t.