Lethal injection - Hillary Rodham Clinton's Children's Defense Fund issues recommended but futile vaccination policy for school children - Editorial

National Review, March 15, 1993

"Two for the price of one" was Mr. Clinton's campaign warning to American voters about his wife's likely influence in the White House. The former chair of the leftist Children's Defense Fund seems to be setting the pace for the new Administration's policies in at least one big area--health. The "talking points" being used by the White House for demagoguing drug companies come not from the HHS, insiders say, nor from any of the White House advisors, but straight from the Children's Defense Fund.

The CDF provided NATIONAL REVIEW with a four-page "background" paper advocating "Universal Vaccine Purchase and Distribution," effectively a national-health scheme to provide vaccines free of charge. The reasoning: "The cost of vaccines makes immunizing their children in a private doctor's office prohibitively expensive." The CDF solution: "the government purchases vaccines from private manufacturers and distributes them to immunization providers free of charge."

What the CDF fails to reveal is that this very system of government purchase has already been tried at great expense, and it fails. In 11 states vaccines are now available free and yet about 40 per cent of children remain unvaccinated, about the same as the national average. As former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said recently, the real problem is not the cost of vaccines, but new generations of parents who see no need to have their children vaccinated because they have no personal memories of polio, diphtheria, and the other childhood diseases.

The Clintons, for their part, see a political need to beat up on the drug companies, given their drive to introduce a regime of government price controls. And they show few scruples about the truth. Mrs. Clinton complained about the "shocking" profits of the drug companies, yet only two companies (Merck and Lederle) make childhood vaccines today compared to 20 firms ten years ago. Eighteen have abandoned the business because of soaring liability costs and the pressure on profit margins of government purchasing negotiations.

Mr. Clinton, in remarks at a Virginia health clinic, repeated CDF numbers almost precisely in accusing the manufacturers of increasing their prices from $23 ten years ago to more than $200 today. But he omitted certain key facts. The regimen of vaccination ten years ago involved 10 shots; today it is 17. The companies now pay $33 of federal excise taxes, which were not there ten years ago. And the shots cover twice the diseases they did back then.

The same is true of the President's remark that drug companies charge $10 for polio vaccine here compared to less than $2 in Europe. If it were the same vaccine, the solution would be simple: buy it in Europe. There would then be no need for brow-beating local manufacturers and price controls.

But it turns out that U.S. polio vaccine is made to completely different specifications. The U.S. product is made according to standards laid down by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and has six times the potency of the European vaccine. It is also made with different safety checks and quality-assurance standards. The European product is made according to an earlier World Health Organization formula. Several countries which use the cheaper WHO polio vaccine have had problems of polio epidemics among immunized populations. That is a problem that has not occurred in the U.S.--yet.