One of the tropes of the anti-vaccine world is that Big Pharma makes a ton of money from vaccines, but that always overlooks the huge economic cost of vaccine-preventable disease epidemics.

Honestly, if Big Pharma executives were actually unethical monsters, they’d conspire with anti-vaxxers to eliminate vaccines so that they could make more money from sick children. I am not naïve, I know that Big Pharma executives love to make money, so vaccines are profitable.

A study examined the economic cost of just one infectious disease, measles. If we imagine a world where Robert F Kennedy Jr got his way (not hard to do) and all vaccines are eliminated for whatever pseudoscientific reasons that hit his brainworm, we could multiply that cost by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of children.

Let’s examine this analysis and apply the economic cost of an anti-vaccine world.

Economic cost of measles in an anti-vaccine world

In a paper published in July 2005 in Pediatrics, Gustavo H Dayan, Epidemiology and Surveillance Division, National Immunization Program, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues examined the cost of one hospitalization for a serious measles complication. They concluded that the cost would be US$142,000 (US$240,000 in 2025 dollars) per patient.

The study included students from a college in Iowa that had a high proportion of non-medical exemptions to vaccines. The students traveled to India, where one-fourth of the students contracted measles. One exposed, susceptible student returned home during his infectious period, necessitating two months of containment efforts in Iowa.

To be fair, the US$240,000 cost was not just direct medical expenses, but also included public health measures such as tracing the over 1000 potential contacts by this infected person.

From December 2018 to April 2019, 71 measles cases were confirmed during an outbreak in Washington State. Researchers calculated the overall cost of the outbreak to be US$3.14 million, or US$47,479 per case. Direct medical costs were just the tip of the iceberg, with the public health response incurring approximately two-thirds of the total (more than US$2.3M). 

Another study published in April 2021 in Pediatrics, Jamison Pike, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues, found that the median direct medical costs of three measles outbreaks were US$21,519. The median direct medical cost per case was US$14,270. The median cost per hospitalization (outpatient costs excluded) was US$14,456.

Typically, about 35-40% of direct medical costs are pharmaceuticals and other consumables (syringes, IVs, saline, etc). That means around US$5,000 of each case would end up in the pockets of Big Pharma and Big Medical (for those who don’t know these pejorative terms, Big Medical refers to companies that sell non-pharmaceutical products to hospitals, such as syringes and millions of other medical devices and consumables).

So, let’s assume that the anti-vaccine world was able to stop all vaccinations in the USA because the vaccines are dangerous (they’re not).

In this world, there are about three million live births per year in the USA, all of whom would not be vaccinated against diseases, but we will focus on measles alone. After four years, there would be 12 million US children who are not vaccinated against measles.

In this anti-vaccine world, there’s an outbreak of measles that hits these 12 million US kids who are not vaccinated. Again, according to the CDC, about 30% end up being hospitalized, so of the 12 million or so kids who catch the measles (it’s very contagious, so I’m just going to assume that everyone catches it, which is not far from what would happen), about 3,600,000 would end up being hospitalized.

That would mean one outbreak of one disease in one country would end up giving about 18 billion dollars to Big Pharma and Big Medical. Let’s say that only 10% need serious hospitalization. That’s still over 1.8 billion dollars, far more than the price of vaccines.

Other issues become problematic if we suddenly have a sizeable measles epidemic. For example, the number of ICU beds per capita has dropped by 75% since the 1960s, partially as a result of the reduction in the number of children with infectious diseases. If we suddenly stopped vaccinating because Big Pharma wanted to make billions more, our hospitals would be overwhelmed. And guess who will be making money then? Big Mortuary. Because children will die at much higher rates than in the 1950s, because we couldn’t handle it.

Again, one disease. In one country. Multiply these numbers out over all countries and all diseases, and those Big Pharma execs would be moving gold bars into their corporate headquarters. So, if Big Pharma were only interested in making money in the most unethical way possible, they’d be funding the anti-vaccine movement.

But the truth is that pharmaceutical companies manufacture vaccines because they are able to make a decent profit, the goal of any corporation, and the goal of every human who needs to survive. They are not trying to harm humanity, because if they were truly ruthlessly profit-motivated, they’d crush vaccines and wait for huge epidemics to strike the planet.

And this analysis was just for measles. In a world where the anti-vaccine crowd wins, the economic cost would have to include polio, chickenpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, and many other dangerous diseases. No one is currently manufacturing an iron lung for polio victims, but I’m sure Big Iron Lung is just waiting for the day.

I hope we never have a world without vaccines, but I have an existential fear that we are closer to that than we’ve ever been, especially here in the USA, where RFK Jr is doing his best to Make America Sick Again.

Note

The economic cost of an anti-vaccine world does not include the lost wages and time for parents who need to care for their sick children. That adds billions of dollars in a world where RFK Jr gets his way.

Citations

• Dayan GH, Ortega-Sánchez IR, LeBaron CW, Quinlisk MP; Iowa Measles Response Team. The cost of containing one case of measles: the economic impact on the public health infrastructure–Iowa, 2004. Pediatrics. 2005 Jul;116(1):e1-4. doi: 10.1542/peds.2004-2512. PMID: 15995008.
• Pike J, Melnick A, Gastañaduy PA, Kay M, Harbison J, Leidner AJ, Rice S, Asato K, Schwartz L, DeBolt C. Societal Costs of a Measles Outbreak. Pediatrics. 2021 Apr;147(4):e2020027037. doi: 10.1542/peds.2020-027037. Epub 2021 Mar 12. PMID: 33712549; PMCID: PMC9004490.

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