So how(much) profit do vaccine makers really make? [Edited title]

I think you should ask them how much they, personally, have been asked to pay for their children’s vaccines. My guess, since insurance covers well-child visits, including vaccinations, and uninsured children can get vaccines for free, is pretty close to $0.

Vaccines may cost our *government quite a bit of money because they pay for these programs, but the routine childhood vaccines generally cost the public nothing, or very close to it, even in our screwed up health care system.
*So, really, anyone clinging to this objection is pretty much by definition into Conspiracy Theory territory, and impenetrable to logic.

Are you aware that the government gets its funding from the public?

The conspiracy theory was about who receives the money, not about what pocket it comes out of.

They’d just argue that the stats were faked and change the subject to the TOXINS they claim vaccines are full of, the need to subject children to an unvaccinated vs. vaccinated mass study, the “truth” about how vaccines haven’t prevented disease, etc. etc. ad nauseum.

I applaud your trying to find hard figures on current vaccine manufacturing costs and profits, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to get those figures in the first place, and even if you could it’s not going to take into account everything the vaccine manufacturers have spent to research and test the vaccines, the amount of dough they need to hold in reserve to defend vaccine lawsuits and potentially pay damages if they lose, and so on.

My chief answer to the “Vaccines are hugely profitable” argument* remains: if it’s such a cash cow, how come so few companies have stayed in the vaccine business?

*Secondarily, it is worthwhile asking if it is so intrinsically awful to make money from something that has been so valuable in protecting our health, as opposed to profits made by other businesses selling all sorts of glop that we could all happily live without.

Obviously, they are believers because nobody ever has given them the facts. You will be the first to charge their defenses.

Look, you are fighting the good fight. We all support you. But you’re talking about people who have deliberately chosen to ignore all the facts on the subject. It’s not because they have never heard the facts. They’ve been given the facts and they still deny them. There are lots of studies today that show that the more facts conspiracy believers are given, the firmer they cling to their alternate realities, because the price to their esteem that they have been so loudly wrong all this time is too great to bear.

And you will never get this particular fact, only circumstantial evidence that it must be true. How is that going to go over?

In a few years, all the children who developed disabilities or died from measles, and other easily vaccinatable diseases can sue everyone who ever published the crap that caused thier disease, and all the lawyers who profited by it.

Not that that will work, either, but it does have a poetic sense of justice to it.

Tris

Thank you.

I think I found the entire article online here:

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/3/622.full

While you know I applaud your efforts to combat the anti-vax nutters, I must point out that this figure does exaggerate the issue some: that 68.5% NJ number represents those fully vaccinated. It does not mean that 31.5% of parents are refusing vaccines. Certainly some small portion of those numbers are from those families, but much of the failure is our system is failing to achieve the goal with parents who do intent to vaccinate but who are not geting some.

The refusers and intentional delays/novel schedulers are a worth attempting to educate and debunk, but we can’t blame them completely for our failure to meet the 90% goals.

You can dig through some numbers here. Scroll down for a state by state and by vaccine charts for 2009 anyway. The biggest fail for meeting that complete series is missing the last DTaP dose.

I have no hard cite about how profitable the immunization business is or is not but I am quite sure that it does not meet the level they are looking for with their other investments. Big Pharma really is not too interested in even modestly good profit margin from a product that has two or three or even five doses; they want the “lifestyle” meds. The big money is in a medication someone takes every day: a new Lipitor, or a new Prozac, a better antihypertensive. Or alternatively something so special they can charge thousands a dose. Vaccines don’t measure up on that scale. But again, I’ve got no hard cite.

Thank you.

That’s a very good point.

Unfortunately New Jersey has a very vocal anti-vax lobby. One of their idiot leaders claims to have the governor’s ear. She and her organization are actively engaged in a campaign of misinformation and lies on this subject. I know. I took out her awful book from my local public library.

The article I found by Dr. Offit makes that point very clear. I figure it can’t hurt to pass it along the next time someone posts some idiocy on the parenting message boards I like to frequent.

Here’s another way to go at it. This is a list of vaccine prices according to the CDC, both public and private pricing.

All four under 2 year old Pentacels are just over $200 at the CDC’s cost, the MMR is $18. The complete HepB series about $30. Varivax and Prevnar are the only pricey ones at $70 and 97 each. Yeah we in the private sector pay more, have another level of middlemen who get their cut, but still, this is chickenfeed for Pharma even assuming the same mark up as other meds. To imagine a conspiracy to keep getting their profit off of an $18 per kid MMR, when the average wholesale price of Lipitor is over $4 a pill (!) takes a heck of a lot of imagination.

I know as a guinea pig for whatever new flu vaccination is planned for that year I get the shot [or a placebo] and $75 for getting a shot, keeping 4 weeks of diary and going back for a final checkup.

[heckfire, I just made $300 for taking a combination of 2 naproxen with benedryl as a proposed OTC pain/sleep aid every night for 4 weeks, and keeping the diary. Medical guinea pigging can be fairly profitable as a hobby]