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Comment by skolos | Hacker News Reader

My perception was that vaccines are not really big profit centers, so their studies should not be tainted by money - no?

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Say what? The global vaccine market was over 30 Billion dollars in 2018. This is the most lucrative pharma market because you are medicating the whole population including healthy people, no other medication can top that.

Not only that, but in the US the pharmaceuticals are shielded from liability for vaccines in stark contrast to any other medication type. How's that not a profit center?

The whole reason the liability shield program exists is concerns that if pharma companies were exposed to lawsuits from the inevitable vaccination reactions that happen or are purported to happen, they'd just drop out of a low-profit market.

Don't you see certain hypocrisy in this? Aren't we told that vaccines are safe?

The whole reason that the liability shield exists was a reaction to the DTP vaccine debacle. Which was eventually taken off the market in many countries including the US.

Nothing is perfectly safe. To be clear, I'm not in favor of anyone being held down at gunpoint and administered a vaccine. I'm fine with at least some organizations, including schools, requiring participants to have been vaccinated or have medical exemptions.That preserves the ability to opt out if you are so concerned about the risks but implies certain trade-offs.

You are confusing revenue and profit. Vaccine companies historically don’t make much profit, especially when compared to pharmaceutical companies who make and sell drug compounds.

https://investors.merck.com/news/press-release-details/2019/...

$6.2B income in 2018.

Uh....you just responded to someone saying "most of the profits aren't from vaccinations" with the profit for an entire company that provides everything from cancer treatments to diabetes medications to also everything else.

They did call out Gardasil as a major cause of the increase in profits from the previous year, but it wasn't 6.2B by any stretch of the imagination.

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