Governments and pharmaceutical companies cannot be trusted

The argument

Vaccines should not be mandated because the governments and the companies responsible for making these vaccines cannot be trusted. The primary goal of pharmaceutical companies is to sell drugs and make a profit. Therefore, with profit in mind, there is no guarantee that these companies aren’t rushing out vaccines that are not only unsafe but not as effective as they could be. Politicians have pointed out that there is an “incestuous relationship” between the public health community, vaccine makers, and government officials. Often public health experts who are part of organizations like the WHO or the CDC will also do work for vaccine companies simultaneously. The simultaneous work for the government and a capitalist corporation creates a conflict of interest and compromises the trust between these people and the public. People can look to the coronavirus situation as another example of how vaccines are prone to corruption. President Trump wanted to rush out a vaccine to help his re-election bid. He did not care about the safety or effectiveness of it. There is no way to guarantee that vaccine makers have only the best interest of the public in mind. The desire to line their pockets may lead to unsafe and ineffective vaccines that are distributed and have the potential to do harm.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Vaccines should be mandated because they can be trusted; they can be trusted because of how heavily regulated they are. There is no way to guarantee that vaccine makers have only the best interest of the public in mind, but there is a system of checks and balances that makes up for this uncertainty. Any licensed vaccine is rigorously tested across multiple phases of trials, must be approved by various organizations, and goes through a heavily regulated and strict process before ever making it into the public’s hands. This system of checks and balances and heavy regulation ensures that the public can trust vaccinations to do no harm and function as promised.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A profit motive creates an incentive to cut corners and also a powerful incentive not to. Licensing failure, product withdrawal and liability are extremely costly, and the multi-phase trial and approval process exists precisely to make an unsafe product unprofitable before it reaches anyone. [Rejecting P2] Overlapping employment between researchers, regulators and manufacturers creates an appearance of conflict; the argument does not identify a single approval that was actually corrupted by it. Vaccines are separately assessed by regulators in many countries, so the objection requires those independent bodies to have failed together. [Rejecting P3] Even granting untrustworthy actors in one episode, the conclusion sweeps in the entire class of vaccines — including long-established ones with decades of post-licensure safety surveillance, developed under none of the political pressures the argument cites. [Rejecting C] Distrust of the producers is an argument for stronger independent oversight, transparent trial data and robust adverse-event monitoring. It does not reach the conclusion that mandates should be abandoned, since the alternative to a regulated mandatory programme is not a safer one.