Medicines and Vaccines Part 3: Is it the Water or the Vaccines?

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In this last part of our medicines and vaccines series, we’re going to talk about how vaccines work and how we know they do. I know that vaccines are a contentious topic and I want to start by acknowledging that sometimes delaying or forgoing a vaccine is the evidence-based decision. If someone is pregnant, they shouldn’t have the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine. A child with leukemia probably shouldn’t get the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Those conditions which make vaccines temporarily or permanently unsafe for an individual are, thankfully, very, very rare. For most humans, following the CDC vaccine schedule is safe and will provide both them and their contacts with protection against those diseases.

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Medicines and Vaccines Part 2: Bringing Essential Medicines to Market

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In our last piece, we talked about the pharmaceutical development pipeline and how some drugs are repurposed from other medicines, rather than being discovered as a new medicine completely. In this post I’ll talk about what that pipeline looks like for antibiotics and vaccines, two of the most important types of medicines that we have. 

Vaccines and antibiotics, like all medications, are very expensive to produce (as we discussed in Part 1), but they can’t be sold for the same high prices as nonessential (think Viagra) medications. This creates a problem for the development pipeline: how can companies afford to take risks on new development for products that won’t cover the cost of producing them? The answer was surprising for me when I first started studying public health. 

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Medicines and Vaccines Part 1: The Pharmaceutical Pipeline

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I often hear people express concern that pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) are making a killing on medications and vaccines and fear that we can’t trust them because of it. I also feel a lot of discomfort with pharmaceutical companies skyrocketing the prices for products like daraprim and epi pens. Drugs are really, really, really expensive to make and somebody has to foot the cost for developing them, but we also have people dying because they can’t afford the basic medications they need to live. There has to be a better way, but it’s hard to know what to think when the process is so mysterious. This piece is the first in a 3 part series on how medicines and vaccines are made and what they do. We won’t be able to cover every aspect of it because 1. that’s the stuff of dissertations and 2. I honestly don’t know all of it, but we’ll go through an overview of how the very basics.

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