Stuart K. Hayashi
The following is a section of the longer essay, “How Billionaires and Capitalism Save Billions of Lives — Including Yours.” That essay includes an index listing various case studies of a for-profit initiative saving lives. The blog post below is of at least one such case study. You can return to that index here.
Many vaccines other than the one for COVID have also been a blessing. Perhaps the vaccine creator to make the most news over the past several years has been Paul Offit of CHOP — the Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia. Anti-vaccination activists castigate Dr. Offit as “Dr. Profit.”. And, sadly, Offit does not disagree completely about there being something shameful in that moniker.
Prior to there being a vaccine for it, rotavirus put 75,000 Americans in the hospital for dehydration yearly, mostly babies younger than two years of age. Rotavirus
killed 60 to 75 Americans yearly; the global tally of deaths from it was far larger.
Those figures changed due to Offit and two of his CHOP colleagues, Stanley Plotkin and Fred Cark. Over the protracted course of twenty-six years, the three of them together fashioned the rotavirus vaccine. CHOP owned the patent for it and sold it to Merck, which gave it the brand name RotaTeq. Upon the sale, the three doctors
received $6 million a man. When Offit hears himself denounced for the money he made, he
answers, “I don’t know any scientist who does it for the money... You do it because it’s fun and because you think you can contribute. And the reward...was watching this vaccine dramatically reduce the incidence of rotavirus hospitalizations in the US and now getting to watch the vaccine enter the developing world in countries like Mali, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ghana, and Nicaragua.”
Producing a helpful medicine “because it’s fun” is still a self-interested motive, of course, and it is the best self-interested motive of all. And it may be true that Offit feels more rewarded by the vaccine’s benefit to others than by raking in money. Still, the $6 million is not something that should embarrass him as it apparently does. The money was well-earned and, somewhat grudgingly, he
admits, “I can live with that.”
After all, globally this rotavirus vaccine saves
an average 2,000 lives every day. This amounts to 730,000 lives a year or 1.46 million lives every couple of years.
Return to index of case studies of lifesaving for-profit ventures.
