Off the Deep End of the Stupid Pool

Let's start with the basics:

1)  Vaccines do not cause autism.  They also do not cause asthma, leukaemia, hay fever, type 1 diabetes, gait disturbance, Crohn's disease, demyelinating diseases, bacterial or viral infections, or bad hair.  At last count, the evidence supporting this claim included 5 randomized control studies, one controlled trial, 27 cohort studies, 17 case-control studies, 5 time-series trials, one crossover trial, 2 ecological studies, and 6 self-controlled case-series studies. Combined, these studies include data from just shy of 14.8 million children, from at least four different countries, and span a period of almost two decades, a time span that meets any reasonable definition of "long term," and quite a few unreasonable ones.  These studies have consistently shown that the risk of serious side effects from the vaccine is vastly smaller than the risk of serious effects from the disease they prevent.

2)  There is no profit motive for Big Bad Pharma, or really, anyone else, to convince anyone that vaccines are safe.  Quite the contrary, the strongest profit motive is, consistently, to convince people that they are as dangerous as possible.  Here are just a few examples:

2a) Mr. Andrew Wakefield had patented a measles vaccine a few months before he proposed that they should switch to the exact vaccine he had patented. His patent would be worthless unless confidence in the extant MMR vaccine could be shaken. All that was a coincidence I'm sure. Since then, he's made a killing selling books to people stupid enough to believe his persecution complex, books that would be worthless if his customers believed that vaccines were both safe and effective. Therefore, Mr. Wakefield has had at least two clear profit motives to convince people that vaccines are dangerous.

2b) Mr. David Mercola has made himself an obscenely rich man partly by peddling a "natural alternative" to vaccination that has never actually been shown to work (on the contrary, its effects are consistently indistinguishable from a similarly-administered placebo). Obviously, his products are worthless if vaccines are seen as safe and effective, giving him a clear profit motive to convince as many people as possible that vaccines are dangerous.

2c) Mr. Mark and David Geier have made themselves quite rich by convincing desperate parents that vaccines cause autism, then chemically castrating austistic children in an (invariably, failed) attempt to cure it. No, by the way, that isn't an exaggeration at all; until they lost their licenses to practice medicine, they literally did exactly that. They called it the Lupron protocol.  Not only are Mr. Mark and David Geier reprehensible excuses for human beings, the treatment they propose has absolutely no chance of working unless vaccines cause autism, so they clearly have a strong profit motive to convince as much of the public as possible that vaccines actually cause autism.  Or at least, they did, until the medical ethics boards of every state where they had been licensed to practice medicine decided that castrating children was crossing a bit of an ethical line.

2d) Pediatricians?  They have a very clear profit motive not to vaccinate.  A recent study analyzed how much money pediatricians actually make off of vaccines (Margaret S. Coleman, PhD, Megan C. Lindley, MPH, John Ekong, MPH, Lance Rodewald, MD Net Financial Gain or Loss From Vaccination in Pediatric Medical Practices PEDIATRICS Vol. 124 pp. S472 -S491).  The conclusion of this study?  At best, pediatricians break even, or, in specific cases, turn a minuscule profit.  On average, they generally lose money every time they administer a vaccine.

2e) As for Big Bad Pharma? The profits they make off of vaccines, per year, essentially amounts to round-off error. They're expensive to produce, difficult to get approved, and high-risk. They also kill profits in other areas of business. Every single dollar spent on, just to name one, the MMR vaccine, saves about $30 more (Zhou, et al., J Infect Dis, 189(2004): S131-145). On average, for every dollar spent administering the vaccines on the standard schedule, around $10 more are saved. Whether vaccines are administered or not, a fair amount of money goes into a pharmaceutical company's pocket, but if we stopped vaccinating, there would be a lot more of it. There is very little to gain on Big Pharma's part for manufacturing vaccines.

Faced with this, a lot of anti-vaccination advocates (the honest ones -- the ones who realize that they can't deny, for instance, that Big Pharma would make a lot more money if they halted all vaccinations, or that a lot of prominent anti-vaccination advocates either have, or have tried to make obscene amounts of money off of that position) go way off the deep end of the stupid pool.  Sure, they'll say, vaccines are a profit killer, and the last thing that Big Pharma would ever want to do is convince you that vaccines are safe, but what they're really doing is causing everyone to get autism (setting aside, for the moment, that vaccines don't actually cause autism), so that they can make money off of treating that.  In other words, Big Pharma cannot possibly have a non-evil motivation for providing vaccines to the marketplace.

To understand just how unbelievably, mind-bogglingly stupid this is, we again need to cover a few basics:

1)  Big Pharma doesn't make any money off of off-patent drugs.  It's called a "patent cliff" for a reason. Here's what happened to the profits Johnson & Johnson made off of Plavix when its patent expired.

This is the norm, by the way, not the exception.  Once a pharmaceutical company loses its patent, it no longer makes any money off of the drug it once had patented.  Then it's the generics manufacturer's turn to make money.  While a lot of pharmaceutical companies have wholly-owned generics companies under their respective umbrellas, the amount made of the drug in generic form is not remotely sufficient to recoup their daily cost of operation.

2)  There are no drugs that cure autism, or even treat its primary symptoms.  The only people who claim otherwise have never shown their treatments to actually work; and often require procedures that are ineffective, and in some cases even dangerous (see above, re: Mark and David Geier).

3)  There are, however, some drugs that can treat some of the related symptoms.

4)  However, none of those drugs are patented.  The primary treatments for symptoms associated with autism are Prozac and Zoloft (whose patents expired in 2001 and 2006 respectively).  In addition, some antipsychotic medications are sometimes used to control energy levels (Resperidol is the most common; its patent expired at the end of 2003, closely followed by Haloperidol, which has been out of patent since the '80s).  Ritalin has been shown to have beneficial effects on people with ASD (its patent expired in 1967).

To be clear, a lot of pharmaceutical companies are researching ASD, and attempting to develop pharmacological interventions that may alleviate its major symptoms.  The amount spent on this research runs in the range of 2-5 billion dollars per year, depending on the company you're talking about.

So, in summary, there are a few rather major flaws with the narrative they are proposing.

1) For this narrative to be true, Big Pharma would have to have drugs marketed that make money off of treating autism.  They don't.

1a) Therefore, if this narrative were true, they would be causing a disease that they have absolutely no way of making money off of, and will not for the foreseeable future.

2) If this narrative were true, it would mean that Big Pharma already knows what causes autism, and therefore wouldn't need to spend billions researching its causes and progression.

2a) So, for this narrative to be true, Big Pharma would have to be knowingly wasting billions of dollars researching the underlying causes of a disease that they themselves are knowingly causing.

4) Finally, and most importantly, for this narrative to be true, vaccines would have to actually cause autism.

4a) So, for this narrative to be true, they would have to spend enormous amounts of money manufacturing all of the evidence evidence that vaccines do not cause autism (since that's literally what all of the evidence says), and concealing evidence that it does (since nobody has yet produced any), to keep a product on the market that they don't make much money off of, in order to increase the prevalence of a disease that they can't make money off of, and won't be able to for the foreseeable future.

The TL;DR version?  They're literally arguing that Big Phrama is an evil, profit-mongering corporation, that is pursuing a strategy that cannot possibly produce a profit any time in the foreseeable future.

Thank you for your attention.

THERE HAVE NEVER BEEN ANY STUDIES SHOWING THAT VACCINES ARE SAFE!!!11ONEONEELEVENTYONE!1!!

Except, of course, for these ones:

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