Here's a post of common charges (well, within my vaccine-hesitant family - mainly Big Pharma conspiracies/scepticism) that I can't seem to argue convincingly against.
- This BBC article shows that - for the big 2 vaccines, Pfizer and Oxford-AZ - the >75% of vaccine funding was from the private sector...
- ...which is a stark difference from this abstract in this (unfortunately) paywalled paper from 1997:
"Of the $1.4 billion that fund US vaccine research and development annually, 46% comes from vaccine sales, 36% from taxpayers, and 18% from risk capital."
This alludes to a much smaller role for the private sector (granted, this abstract includes past profits, but still, there is a reversal in private vs public influence).
This is important because I would assume more gov't funding -> gov't can stipulate regulations and/or ensure a publicly-funded trial (vs a manufacturer-led vaccine trial) in order to get the gov't grant. Or are all biologics (cf. drugs and supplements) required to undergo a public-trial (where all results are to be publicised, not just those which make the firm look good).
It just seems that any argument against the COVID vaccines can appeal to this, as well as the lightening speed at which they were developed/approved, in order to voice vaccine-hesitancy. How can I refute this?*
Even if the vaccines were funded 100% by the gov't, it is easy for someone who's vaccine-hesitant (especially in the UK, where we suffered one of the worse death-tolls early on) to say that there were vast political gains to resolving this crisis swiftly.
I think my parents (well, they're mainly my 'other' parents as I have divorced parents and don't see the vaccine-hesitant parents often) are smart enough to understand that the 13 or so cases of blood-clots were spurious and nothing to do with the AZ jab. But it's the Big-Pharma arguments that are harder to argue logically against.
*Aside: why did this reversal happen? You would've expected a much larger role for the gov't given the scale of the outbreak? Aren't vaccines also relatively unprofitable cf. other drugs (or is COVID different because of it being likely to be a recurring disease)?
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