Coverage of Vaccine Crisis Shows
Good, Bad of Media

     The vaccine crisis gave the media opportunities for good and bad reporting of healthcare and free-market issues. Newsweek and Time magazine delivered detailed accounts of the problem and pointed out some of the flaws in the current vaccine market that contributed to the crisis. NBC Nightly News and U.S. News & World Report used the problem to attack companies or even the free market system.

     At NBC Nightly News on October 14, 2004, reporter Kerry Sanders did a story about “price gouging” on vaccines.

     Sanders openly took sides in the story: “The attorneys general in both Kansas and Florida have now filed suits against a Fort Lauderdale company, Meds-Stat, to stop the alleged gouging. The defendants are part of an unconscionable ‘gray market’ vaccine distributorship, now seeking a 10-fold increase in price.”

     On November 1, 2004, U.S. News & World Report’s Jodie T. Allen used the opportunity to criticize private industry’s ability to produce flu vaccine and that, according to Allen, “is a bitter pill for dyed-in-the-wool free marketers to swallow.”

     Allen took a decidedly pro-government approach, asking, “How many competitors do we want in each field?” Allen never pointed out that limited competition is a large part of the problem in the first place. There are only two U.S.-approved manufacturers. 

     Both Newsweek and Time magazine did a better job explaining the actual nature of the crisis. The November 1, 2004 Newsweek article by Geoffrey Cowley and other staff even discussed the problem in terms of tort reform. “By President George W. Bush’s account, the vaccine crisis is a reminder of the need for liability reform, but no cause for alarm.”

     The story then cited several reasons for the vaccine crisis including: “narrow profit margins,” “Liability costs really are higher here than in other countries,” and “the cost of conducting the huge trials needed to secure FDA approval for a product used in healthy people.”

     Time magazine’s Christine Gorman got to the heart of the issue in her Nov. 1, 2004 piece: “The bottom line is that the flu vaccine, as it is designed and manufactured, is too expensive to make in the U.S. for the price at which it is usually sold.”

     She added: “Manufacturers cannot factor in to the price of their vaccine the cost of a potential lawsuit the way they can with blockbuster drugs because no one would buy the vaccine. But that means they are assuming some hard-to-measure level of risk.”

     Gorman’s article also pointed out that “One of the reasons Germany has so many competing flu manufacturers is that the law shields them from product liability.”

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