Vaccines are strongly competitive for drug markets In fact they are far stronger competition for a disease indication than another drug could possibly be. This is because an effective vaccine can handle a disease far more cost effectively than a drug but preventing the overwhelming majority of infections that would otherwise occur. A vaccination program for an entire population can easily cost less than the cost of treating the cases that are thereby prevented since treatment costs include far more (and far greater in total) than just the cost of drugs used to treat, even though the number of vaccinations is generally much higher than the number of treatments required absent vaccinations. Adding greatly to vaccines cost effectiveness is that they also prevent the loss of income and many other indirect costs of the illnesses prevented.
In addition, vaccines are far more effective at containing or limiting the spread of disease: Drugs (except when used prophylactically - which has a number of problems) cannot significantly contribute to containment or reduce the spread of disease because they're not used until a patient is diagnosed with a disease, by which time (for most diseases) they may have already infected a few others. In contrast, has those who were infected been vaccinated, most of those infections would never have occurred and in addition infections of those would have been infected by those infections would never occur and so on down the full length of each and every chain therein.
Because of this, vaccines are potentially very strong competitors for a drugs market. And effective vaccine could (and has in many instances) reduced the market for a drug to a small fraction of what it was before a vaccine was available.
This is not, of course, to say that drugs are therefore not needed. It is still highly essential to develop and produce drugs as well even when an effective vaccine is available. Very few vaccines are 100% effective and there are always some who do not get vaccinated.
NOTE: for this reason, despite some contentions to the contrary, vaccine are unquestionably a topic highly relevant to a company that produces drugs.
Drano: I suggest you look "herd immunity" up on wikipedia. Also look up “vaccine” and see how they really work. You apprear IMHO to have some serious misconceptions here. Due to the effect of the percentage of those vaccinated lowering the ROI of the disease, even if only 80% of a population is vaccinated, and the vaccine is only 80% effective, a disease will die out in that population if it's ROI in an unvaccinated population is less than 3, for example. (there is always a possibility of reintroduction from outside unless a disease is totally eradicate (as was Smallpox) - something only possible when the disease exists ONLY in humans (does not apply to Ebola, infuenza, MERS and other NNVC targets).
So saying a vaccine is “ineffective” just because a single individual, or even a fairly large number of individuals get ill despite being vaccinated is just plain incorrect . "Efficacy" is a very well established and precisely calculated concept for vaccines and does not remotely require 100# to be considered "effective". I would suggest you do a search on wikipedia for "vaccines and efficacy".
As for the problem with pertussis: this kind of problem happens occasionally. Most technologies are subject to a few such problems and very few technologies are perfect. The fact that occasional problems exist should not obscure the vastly more significant fact that the overwhelming majority of lives saved by medicine in the last few hundred years were saved by VACCINES and not by drugs.
The big problem with the anti vaxers is their apparent inability to deal with simple math. What antivaxers recommend would cost far more lives than are lost due to very rare bad reactions. Almost no drug is totally safe. The appropriate question is whether or not the benefits outweigh the risks. And the statistics show that in the case of the measles vaccine, the benefits are many orders of magnitude larger than the risks. Anti vaxers are mostly wealthy and well educated. What the anti vaxers are attempting to do is to “free ride” (the kind of parasitic activity that the wealthy class is prone to unfairly accusing the “economically challenged” class of doing). They know what herd immunity is and figure that their unvaccinated kids will be protected by other people's kids being vaccinated. (what they failed to consider is that in the USA the wealthy live in highly concentrated areas and herd immunity acts on a local level. Plus they tend to travel a lot. So all it took was ONE person bringing measles into their enclaces and the disease took off.)
As for long term studies, there is some merit to that concern BUT it applies to the overwhelming majority of medicine, to the overwhelming majority of our food supply (hydrogenation of fats was NEVER tested and killed MILLIONS of people before they finally, after more than a half century, acknowledge it was doing serious damage), to a great deal of the chemicals used in households and at workplaces, to the use of fluorescent lighting (actually a powerful study was done and then ignored because it would have cost employers too much money). And much more. It is totally unreasonable to hold vaccines to a standard that is not used for everything else. Plus many of the other things provide no benefits whatsoever except for increased profits for manufacturers. Whereas, again, vaccines have saved more lives in the last few hundred years that all drugs put together.
As for the elderly: even a 5% effective vaccine would be better than no vaccination. Most diseases are far more serious in the elderly, for whom a vaccine is more likely to be preventing a serious illness or death than an inconveniencing illness as for most of the young. It is important to prevent vaccine doses from being too high or they may cause adverse reactions by the immune system. But the elderly have weaker immune systems so a higher dose for them would be appropriate.
You appear to condemn all vaccines based on a very small number with problems (and most of them minor and all of them far less than the benefits). Your conjectures about the WHO are so obviously wrong that they, IMHO, are not even worth addressing, most especially considering what the who (and CIDRAP) are doing right now, which totally contradicts your rank conjectures.
www.who.int/en
and
www.CIDRAP.umn.edu
It is very difficult on a personal level to deal with very rare cases of extreme adverse reactions. But are you seriously suggesting that thousands of children should die so that one might live? If you claim that's not your intent, please explain just how exactly, there could be any different result if vaccination if not done just because in very rare cases they cause problems. Note that virtually every drug, including even aspirin, causes serious problems in at least a few rare case (and in general in far larger numbers than vaccines). They are trying very hard to learn why such rare reactions occur and how to predict and avoid them. But in the meantime, the benefits vastly outweigh the risks. FOR EXAMPLE a very small percentage (less than 1 in 10,000) of people died from smallpox vaccines. So would you say that, because of that unfortunate reality we should have let smallpox rage uncontested and let many thousands of more people die?
Treatment is NEVER preferable to effective vaccination. Any physician will tell you it's better to never get a disease than to get it and get a drug for it. This is not to say that treatments are not needed. They most assuredly are, even when an effective vaccine is available. But treatment IN LIEU OF vaccination is never PREFERABLE and no responsible physician will say that. No drug is ever 100% effective and, in the real world, in no case is any drug always administered in a timely fashion to all cases. A percentage of cases treated will always have serious problems or even die despite the treatment and effective vaccination keeps the number of total infections (and hence also the number of deaths and poor responses to treatment) far lower.
