The anti-vax propaganda on social media often has allegations of collusion between the governments around the world and vaccine manufacturers. Frankly, Big Pharma does have an unsavory reputation. I was aware of the opioid crisis, and so I had kept an open mind when looking into these conspiracy theories of collusion, but when I found evidence to the contrary, it made me more pro-vaccination than I ever was.
DRUG COMPANIES MAKE MONEY FROM RECURRING SALES. We don't use vaccines frequently like other medicines. In fact, smallpox eradication continues to save us more than a billion dollars annually.
Governments worldwide want diseases to be eradicated, so we don't need to spend money on vaccines. A primary source from 1980 clearly indicates that smallpox eradication saved more than 1 billion in 1980 dollars and much more in today’s dollars.
Smallpox eradication in 1980 saves $1 billion+ annually. Source via vaxopedia.org
EVEN THE RECURRING VACCINES, LIKE THE YEARLY SEASONAL FLU VACCINES, AREN'T THE BIG PROFIT-MAKING ENTERPRISE THAT ANTI-VAXXERS MAKE IT OUT TO BE.
TOTAL GLOBAL VACCINE SALES IS JUST A MEASLY 5% OF THE OVERALL PHARMA REVENUE.
Source: Statista.com. Vaccines as a % of Total Pharma Revenue in 2020.
It is true that the pharmaceutical industry is a trillion dollar industry, and big pharma isn’t selling vaccines for free to the governments. But to imply that somehow this is a big money-making operation and the government is in collusion just doesn’t hold water.
The largest pharma market globally is for musculoskeletal drugs. Just one drug, Humira for rheumatoid arthritis, makes close to $20 billion in revenue, while according to npr.org, a credible news source I trust, the total revenue from influenza vaccines is estimated by the World Health Organization to have been about $2.2 billion in 2018, only about 0.18% of total pharma industry revenue.
I double-checked using other data sources. The projected revenue from global vaccine sales is $59.2 billion dollars in 2020, while the total revenue of the pharmaceutical industry is at $1.296 trillion dollars (currently already nearly $1.2 trillion and projected 8% growth). This results in less than 5% of all pharma revenue from vaccines! There just isn't enough money in the vaccines business to warrant some big conspiracy theory here.
VACCINES AREN'T THE BIG PROFIT-MAKING ENTERPRISE THAT ANTI-VAXXERS MAKE IT OUT TO BE.
Now, on to the oft-repeated conspiracy theory that somehow VICP, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, with no-fault policy towards big pharma is some collusion. Let me debunk this.
If people took the time to read the TIME article by Mr. Kluger, they would understand that the no-fault policy is actually the government trying to keep vaccines affordable.
During a scare over the DTP vaccine, many parents sued the vaccine companies, and the burden fell on the insurance companies, which in turn affected the vaccine manufacturers. Some didn't want to manufacture vaccines at all, and others could no longer make it at an affordable cost. We have a lot of underprivileged people in America and abroad, and not everyone has affordable healthcare. If vaccine costs went up, the government would not be able to afford to have programs like the Vaccines for Children that pay for vaccines for families who cannot afford to pay.
Jeffrey Kluger, Editor at Large for TIME magazine
Also, the government is not hiding any of its data around the compensation program either. It took me less than a couple of seconds to find VICP and all the data! If you look at how the program is set up, the money is awarded even without a confirmation that the vaccine is an underlying cause. People file for reasons as little as soreness on shoulders due to an injection. The clamoring that $4.2 billion has been paid so far doesn't bother to give a detailed picture and with broad brush strokes obfuscates the fact that for every 1 million doses of vaccine that were distributed, approximately 1 individual was compensated, and that too with the way the program is set up, it does not imply that deep scientific study was done to establish vaccine was the cause.
I painstakingly made this after watching the video "The Journey of Your Child's Vaccine by CDC" because I wanted to count the number of organizations the U.S government has for approval, oversight, and continuous monitoring. Which government that invests so much in an elaborate process with checks and balances will be in collusion? I'm fully convinced that there is no truth to the collusion conspiracy theory. I hope you are too!