Vaccine Economics – Lots of Money, Lies, and Politics
by Joel Edwards
Imagine if you had a product to sell that didn’t require advertising or marketing, but the majority of people thought they had to have it. Better still, millions of children and adults are forced to obtain your product in order to keep their jobs or go to school.
The government is one of your guaranteed buyers. Your product doesn’t need to be 100% effective or 100% safe. If your product hurts your consumers, you won’t be held liable for damages. Instead, your product is taxed and the money goes to consumers or family members of those who were harmed or killed by the product. You don’t even need to be involved in the court cases, to determine who gets the money. The government will do that for you.
Vaccines operate under a different business model than anything else that is bought and sold in America. And don’t fool yourself into believing pharmaceutical companies don’t make a profit off vaccines. Each vaccine is worth billions of dollars.
The Market Economy, Better Known as the Free Market
In a free market, the public is never coerced into buying anything. There are multiple manufacturers, buyers, and sellers of every product. In order for companies to stay in business, their products must stand on their own. Companies compete with each other and are free to enter and leave the marketplace. No industries or companies receive special protection from the government, so safety becomes a financial responsibility as well as a moral one.
A free market is competitive, with companies competing with one another for customers and employees. In order for this system to work, the marketplace must be decentralized, with market power spread out over many businesses and households, not concentrated in the hands of a few politically powerful businesses and government agencies.
Free Markets Produce Favorable Efficient Outcomes, as if Guided by an Invisible Hand
The free market system is far from perfect, but it is the most efficient means of allocating resources. The father of economics, Adam Smith, explained how this system leads to desirable outcomes for society.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”
“Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it … He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end, which was no part of his intention.”
The same year Adam Smith published his seminal work on economics, An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, American rebels signed the Declaration of Independence. More than 200 hundred years later, many of Smith’s insights still ring true, and his initial research remains fundamental to modern economics.
We could call it a coincidence, but both documents shared the view that individuals are usually better off when left to their own devices, without heavy-handed government interference. This philosophical approach, which places a high value on freedom, provided the intellectual foundation for the market economy and for a free society. [i]
Less Than Free Markets
This is, of course, not the only way to buy and sell goods. Communist economies were built on the notion that the government knew best, and they should be the ones to decide what is bought and sold, and how it is done. This idea has been shown to be a colossal failure, and most centrally planned economies have abandoned this system in order to develop market economies. (China and Russia are good examples of failed centrally planned economies).
Healthcare makes up a substantial portion of the American economy. In 2013, U.S. health care spending reached $2.9 trillion or $9,255 per person. This accounts for 17.4% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). [ii] Increasingly, government has been taking more and more control over our healthcare decisions, mandating insurance and vaccines. This is being done under the guise that they know best.
This level of coercion is not the endgame for government regulators and vaccine manufacturers. As of 2012, there were nearly 300 vaccines in development[iii], and pharmaceutical companies lobby endlessly to make all vaccines, even the flu vaccine, mandatory for everyone. Obviously, this would make pharmaceutical companies more money. Some people believe it would increase our so-called herd immunity, but many feel our freedom is worth more than that. Patrick Henry once boldly proclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Mandated Vaccines Do Not Belong in a Free Country
So far we have seen mandatory vaccines for hospital workers, childcare workers, government employees, public school children, and college students.
Australia has instituted a no jab no pay policy, making government benefits dependent upon vaccine compliance. Many child protective services have begun medical kidnappings, forcing vaccines on the children of uncooperative parents. This is not how a free market, or a free society functions. Our freedoms, especially our medical freedoms, have been eroding for some time now, sold off to the highest corporate bidders.
Years ago, a leading economist wrote a book warning us about what happens when government becomes too heavily involved in our affairs. Milton Friedman’s book, Capitalism & Freedom, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976.
In the conclusion of his book he writes:
The importance of government as a buyer of so much of our output, and the sole buyer of the output of many firms and industries, already concentrates a dangerous amount of economic power in the hands of the political authorities, changes the environment in which business operates and the criteria relevant for business success, and in these and other ways endangers a free market.”
The Revolving Doors of the CDC, FDA, and the Pharmaceutical Industries
No one can be an expert in everything. We live in complicated times. Since the majority of us don’t have time to research everything, most of us turn to our government regulators to tell us, in their expert opinion, if a product, service, or practice is safe. After all, the CDC and other government agencies are paid salaries provided by taxpayer revenue to know these things and to give us objective advice. Theoretically, they work for us, the American people. In practice, however, government regulators like the CDC actually work for the pharmaceutical industries.
There are several independent studies showing conflicts of interest among vaccine regulators. Several government studies going years back have shown extensive CDC corruption. Consider the results of the following report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. This report reveals how the members of influential advisory committees such as the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunizations Practices (ACIP) have been completely corrupted by industry. This report notes that members of these advisory committees have extensive financial ties to the pharmaceutical industries. A few examples of this include:
“The CDC routinely grants waivers from conflict of interest rules to every member of its advisory committee.
CDC Advisory Committee members who are not allowed to vote on certain recommendations due to financial conflicts of interest are allowed to participate in committee deliberations and advocate specific positions.
The Chairman of the CDC’s advisory committee until very recently owned 600 shares of stock in Merck, a pharmaceutical company with an active vaccine division.
Members of the CDC’s advisory Committee often fill out incomplete financial disclosure statements, and are not required to provide the missing information by CDC ethics officials.
Four out of eight CDC advisory committee members who voted to approve guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.
Three out of five FDA advisory committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”[iv]
There are several studies following this report that back up these findings. In June 2007, Senate minority leader Tom Coburn released an oversight report of the CDC. The findings bring many questions to mind concerning the CDC’s effectiveness and how they spend our money. The study was named CDC Off Center: A Review of How an Agency Tasked With Fighting and Preventing Disease has Spent Hundreds of Millions of Tax Dollars for Failed Prevention Efforts, International Junkets, and Lavish Facilities, but Cannot Demonstrate it is Controlling Disease.
Here are a few highlights of this study:
Yet while CDC has been given millions, and in some cases billions, of dollars to help prevent certain diseases among Americans, for many of these diseases the rates have not decreased, but have stayed the same or even increased under CDC’s watch. In the case of HIV, despite spending billions of dollars, CDC cannot even report how many Americans have the communicable disease.
Perhaps there is a budgetary reason why CDC does not “count” over a $1.8 billion dollars it has received and spent over the last few years on HIV/AIDS, but doing so makes it complicated for researchers to compare actual CDC expenditures from year to year.
Since 1996 the CDC had a visitor center which drew 15,000 visitors a year. The agency itself is located in Atlanta, Georgia, home to one of the largest 24-hour cable news networks. Yet when faced with static HIV transmission rates, e-coli outbreaks, and the threat of bioterrorism, CDC spent $106 million of taxpayers’ dollars to build a lavish new visitor center, which includes a 70-foot-wide by 25-foot-tall video wall of rear-projection and plasma television screens inside its new communications center, which houses a $20 million new studio for communicating CDC information.”
Other questionable expenditures include 10 million dollars on furniture, and 3 million dollars a year leasing a private jet.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the CDC has spent more than $1 billion on building construction and repairs of its buildings and facilities from fiscal years 2000 to 2005.”
The report includes many other examples of questionable spending. In December of 2009, The Office of the Inspector General set out to ascertain the extent to which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its special Government employees (SGE) on Federal advisory committees complied with ethics requirements. Nine years following the U.S. House of Representatives Majority Report the conflicts of interest at the CDC have not gotten any better. Consider the following highlights of the report:
“For almost all special Government employees, CDC did not ensure that financial disclosure forms were complete in 2007. CDC certified OGE Forms 450 with at least one omission in 2007 for 97 percent of SGEs. Most of the forms had more than one type of omission. CDC did not identify or resolve potential conflicts of interest for 64 percent of special Government employees in 2007. “
“CDC did not ensure that 41 percent of special Government employees received required ethics training in 2007. CDC did not ensure that 41 percent of SGEs had ethics training certificates on file to document that SGEs received initial or annual ethics training within required timeframes in 2007.”
“Fifteen percent of special Government employees did not comply with ethics requirements during committee meetings in 2007.”
“ In addition, 3 percent of SGEs voted on particular matters when their waivers prohibited such participation. Four SGEs both participated in committee meetings without current, certified OGE Forms 450 on file and voted on particular matters when their waivers prohibited such participation.”
To their credit, The Office of The Inspector General had some specific recommendations on how things can be improved at the CDC.
“We found that CDC had a systemic lack of oversight of the ethics program for SGEs. That is, CDC and its SGEs did not comply with ethics requirements in 2007.
To address our findings, we recommend that CDC:
Ensure that special Government employees’ Confidential Financial
Disclosure Reports are complete before certifying them.
Require special Government employees to disclose their involvement in grants and other relevant interests that could pose conflicts but that are not disclosed on the Confidential Financial Disclosure Report.
Identify and resolve all conflicts of interest for special Government employees before permitting them to participate in committee meetings.
Increase collaboration among CDC officials and with the HHS Office of the General Counsel.
Ensure that special Government employees and CDC employees receive ethics training.
Monitor special Government employee compliance with ethics requirements during committee meetings.
Track special Government employee compliance with ethics requirements.”[v]
One might be tempted to think that what’s needed is a hard-working public servant to come in and reform the system. That is what many observers hoped would happen when David Wright took the job as the director of the Office of Research Integrity. Reforming the system is beyond the influence of one director. Two years into his job as director, Wright wrote a scathing letter of resignation, which included the following:
…working with the research community and the remarkable scientist-investigators at ORI has been the best job I’ve ever had. As for the rest, I’m offended as an American taxpayer that the federal bureaucracy—at least the part I’ve labored in—is so profoundly dysfunctional. I’m hardly the first person to have made that discovery, but I’m saddened by the fact that there is so little discussion, much less outrage, regarding the problem.” [vi]
From these findings, I think it is clear that we have problems at the systemic level, not just with a few bad regulators. We have a clear problem when regulators from the CDC and FDA profit from the decisions they make on advisory committees. These conflicts of interest are the norm and not the exception. The CDC is certainly well funded, but how they spend their tax generated revenue is questionable, and there is little evidence that their efforts are actually controlling disease. Finally, there is the bureaucratic atmosphere that encourages a wasteful kind of work – the look busy but do nothing kind of mentality that is pervasive in our bureaucracies. Agencies like the CDC and the FDA are given billions of tax dollars to serve the American public, to protect us. If they cannot or will not do their jobs, they need to be defunded. Bureaucrats who work for the pharmaceutical industry must be stripped of their authority and put on industry payroll, not the government payroll.
Conclusion
There is a tremendous amount of money in vaccines, especially due to mandatory vaccinations. Billions of dollars is on the line, and while Big Pharma tries to convince the nation that vaccines are a dire necessity and that pharmaceutical companies are just altruistically trying to help us, there are a few arguments that we can make, not only in defense of our rights, but in defense of the free market.
Mandatory vaccinations infringe on our rights, not only as consumers, but as individuals. The most basic right is control over one’s body. Years after slavery and the Tuskegee experiments, the government is overstepping its bounds again. Whether pro vaccine or anti-vaccine, the right to refuse a medical procedure is a right that affects us all.
If vaccines are as safe and effective as many in the medical community claim, why do vaccines receive special protection from liability from the U.S. Government? Because they aren’t safe and effective. Vaccines are so dangerous they are not profitable when subject to the same standards as other medical products under U.S. courts. As a result, vaccines get their own court – the Vaccine Court.
Economics teach us that government run markets have been shown to be horribly inefficient. Healthcare amounts to a large and growing sector of the U.S. economy. Mandated health insurance and forced vaccines are communist methods of running an economy, and they have no place in a free society. We are not, in fact, living in a free society. We have not been for some time. Instead we live in a plutocratic oligarchy, a society run by a wealthy elite. The economics of vaccines are the economics of many different corporate interests run amok. In a free market, the only things that can’t be for sale are the integrity of the market and the freedom of the market. These things are priceless.
Vaccine Economics Lots of Money, Lies, and Politics
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