On the coming vaccine wars, and what they reveal about the crackup in medicine

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The interventionist American attitude toward vaccines and fast adoption of new shots shouldn’t surprise anyone.

It exactly mirrors how the United States approaches medicine generally and drugs in particular: newer and more expensive is always better.

Direct-to-consumer advertising means that pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies can hype new therapies that deliver marginal benefits (and sometimes unexpected risks) at massive cost. The money Big Pharma pours into the system corrupts both academic research and individual physicians’ decisions.

None of this is a secret. A former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote a book called “The Truth About the Drug Companies” in 2004. Yet no one seems to be able to fix the problem — or even slow the growth of drug spending.

Worst of all, the extra money now seems to be doing harm. European and Asian nations spend much less on healthcare but have significantly longer life expectancies than the the United States, and the gap is growing.

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But the vaccine issue is about much more than money. Vaccines aren’t a big part of American medical spending, but they have become a fulcrum of opposition to the medical establishment.

There are any number of reasons why.

• Most jabs are given to children, and many people will research, scrutinize, and question treatments for their kids far more than they will their own care. They’ve seen for themselves that the flu and Covid vaccines don’t work well, and those failures have led them to question all shots.

• The medical bodies pushing vaccines hardest — notably the American Academy of Pediatrics — are demonstrably woke, captured, and out of step with average parents, as their advocacy for trans surgeries has made obvious.

• The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 provided vaccine makers with complete immunity for jab-caused injuries. Even at the time, the act was controversial. But drug companies insisted it was necessary because vaccines were low-margin, inexpensive products and even a few large verdicts would devastate the industry.

  But the immunity the act provides has, perversely, led companies to begin selling vaccines that are less effective and potentially riskier than those that existed before 1986. Why wouldn’t they? The risk of multi-billion-dollar class-action lawsuits is gone. As a result, parents of vaccine-injured children feel they have no recourse. Even if they can win money from the federal government, they will not get the chance for justice that only a lawsuit and discovery can provide.

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(Cheaper than a lawsuit… and more fun to read.)

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Public health bureaucrats would be wise to understand this rising public frustration with vaccines and where it fits in overall anger at healthcare. They’d be even wiser to accept meaningful compromises.

One possible move would be dropping the flu jab push for kids. Another would be pushing for for large new clinical trials for mRNA Covid shots for older adults, since the risk of the shots is higher than was initially understood.

Instead, the health bureaucrats have their backs up, as the CDC’s refusal to bend to Kennedy even on the issue of Covid shots for kids shows. They’re working with the media to demonize Kennedy, and pretending that this year’s measles outbreak was anything other than minor by historical standards.

Americans aren’t fools. Childhood vaccine rates remain consistently high for measles and other old-style inactivated or attenuated virus shots. (To be clear, I have all my kids vaccinated on the standard schedule — though not against Covid and flu — and I have no regrets about doing so.)

But the Covid clown show and the trans magic act have done enormous damage to trust in the media and medicine since 2020. And if reporters and health bureaucrats won’t bend, sooner or later parents are going to start tuning them out entirely, not just about the Covid shots.

(SECOND OF TWO PARTS)