Date: 1809–Present
Location: Worldwide
The Conspirators: Governments
The Victims: Innocent civilians
Today, vaccine conspiracy theories are everywhere and could easily make up an entire book of their own. Most take the general form of governments secretly knowing that vaccines do more harm than good, but forcing vaccines onto the public anyway to give the government more power. Other theories promote the Big Pharma version of this, which puts forth the idea that Big Pharma makes huge profits from vaccines by having the government force people to buy them. Some also push a connection between vaccines and autism, claiming that the government conspires with Big Pharma to force vaccinations in order to give as many people autism as possible, in order to then profit from people seeking autism treatments.
Vaccines are the single most important and successful public health initiative. They are responsible for saving more lives than any other medical intervention in history.
By 1800, smallpox was responsible for about half a million deaths annually, but scientists knew that inoculating a person with material from a cowpox lesion could cut the chances of contracting smallpox by about 95 percent. This has been widely recognized as the first major medical advance in history.
It was so effective that in 1809 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted the first compulsory vaccination law that required all citizens to receive the smallpox vaccine. Opposition—and conspiracy theories—took hold right from the start. Many felt that it was a forced intrusion of government into people’s private lives—which, of course, it is. Mistrustful and ignorant of the science, some people concluded that there must be an unknown dark purpose behind the government’s forced medication initiative, and vocal opposition was mounted. Although embattled, the law stood, and other localities also began mandatory vaccinations.
Throughout the twentieth century, schools began requiring vaccinations before students would be allowed to attend. Because children are the most vulnerable to disease, and schools are where children are most likely to infect one another, this policy is actually one of the most important public health initiatives on the books.
Unfortunately, toward the end of the twentieth century when the worst diseases were all but eradicated, an amazing new phenomenon occurred: parents began seeking exemptions from compulsory vaccinations for their children, usually citing religious or ideological reasons. Ever since, the rates of some vaccine-preventable diseases such as whooping cough have been growing steadily. It’s as if parents have been saying, “We know it’s been proven that this vaccine will save lives, but we want our child excluded, which will put them at risk as well as other children around them.”
Why? Conspiratorial thinking.
According to UNICEF, vaccines save about nine million lives per year. They work, and they work amazingly well. They also do not cause harm—at least not to 99 percent of people who receive them. (For most vaccines, about 1 percent have some adverse reaction. Serious reactions, depending on the vaccine, range from about 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 1,000,000. Pretty darn safe.) And, the smallpox vaccine alone has been saving lives since the 1700s, probably totaling close to one billion lives. Vaccination is science’s greatest achievement in the fight against disease. No other public health measure comes close.
Should vaccines be discarded because they are a Big Pharma conspiracy? Well, to analyze this claim, let’s be clear about one thing. Pharmaceutical companies who manufacture vaccines do get paid for it. But not nearly as much as you might think. It turns out that vaccines are among the least profitable products that pharmaceutical companies make. Prices are often capped by the public agencies that buy most of them. Most vaccines go to developing nations, where money is scarce and it’s hard to cover costs. Financial incentives to manufacture vaccines became so low that companies started dropping out of the business entirely, in favor of selling more profitable drugs instead. In 1967 there were twenty-six pharmaceutical companies manufacturing vaccines; that number dropped to about half by the 1980s.
Today the number is rising again as more manufacturers get back into the business, driven by major public health initiatives to sell hundreds of millions of annual doses in poor countries, as well as newer vaccines such as hepatitis B and HPV that can be sold at a profit in wealthier countries. In 2014 Merck sold $1.7 billion in HPV vaccines, while the entire rest of their vaccine product line treating measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox brought in only $1.4 billion.
However, the short answer to the Big Pharma version of the vaccine conspiracy theory: at only about 2.5 percent of the global pharmaceutical market, vaccines are hardly the place where Big Pharma makes its money. So if Big Pharma were going to pay off the government to conspire to make their product required for all citizens, wouldn’t they be likely to choose a more profitable one?
And what about the conspiracy theory that vaccines—particularly the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine—cause autism? Is it true that autism is more common now than it used to be? No. Or, more accurately, there is no evidence of that. It is true that far more cases are being diagnosed today than used to be. There are two reasons for this. First is that the definition of autism spectrum disorders keeps getting broadened as we recognize more and more cases to be connected. Second is that the stigma of being autistic is going away, and parents are more likely to allow their children to be tested and diagnosed than they used to be. So while we do indeed have more diagnoses being reported, there is no reason to suspect that the actual prevalence of autism is higher today than ever before.
In response, science advocates have pointed out that the rise of autism more closely correlates with the rising popularity of organic food; shown on a graph, the lines match up astonishingly well. Although this is obviously a joke directed at the fact that the people who reject vaccine science are often the same people who reject food science, it is a perfectly serious lesson in the dangers of confusing correlation with causation. We can say that these trends correlate with the rise in autism diagnoses, but it’s clearly incorrect to say that they cause autism.
Each iteration of the vaccine conspiracy theory falls apart on its own under the slightest scrutiny. They simply make no sense. Vaccinate yourself, and vaccinate your children to keep them (and their schoolmates) healthy.