Anti-vaxxers are the best friends big Pharma could have asked for

For people who say they hate Pharma corps, they’re sure providing them with a ton of help.

Angry profile photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels, Vaccine photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels, photoshopping them together by author

So you hate big Pharma, do you? So do I. Vile vampires, getting fat off of human misery, I can’t stand ’em. That’s why I gladly took the first Covid vaccine that was offered to me.

Well, it’s not the only reason, of course. The unique new pathogen that has already killed millions of people despite the biggest collective effort to prevent the spread of an infection in human history also had something to do with it. And the impressive track record of vaccination as a technology pops up in there, too. Remember polio? I barely can, because it was already well on its way to being mostly stamped out before I reached the age when I started paying attention to such things. But let’s imagine for the sake of argument I had been diabolically brainwashed to believe that polio was a hoax and that the patent for the iron lung was some sort of an elaborate ruse. Sure, it seems unlikely, but let’s pretend that I got stuck in a hypnotizing machine from an original Star Trek episode after suffering a severe cranial injury or something. Even then, I would still want the shot, and I would know that I was at least symbolically sticking it to those bastards at big Pharma by saying yes.

To understand why, you need to understand something about where vaccines and other medications come from, and that requires unpacking a few details about the vague “them” that falls under the label of “big Pharma” inside your head. Pharma companies are corporations, and the operation of a corporation involves a lot of people, and those people’s roles and powers and responsibilities aren’t all the same. When the General Motors company knowingly sold defective vehicles that would kill some of their drivers for more than a decade because it was cheaper to pile up 124 corpses than to replace a faulty $0.57 part, the people in the boardroom who made that decision knew what they were doing and were responsible (although none of them went to prison or suffered even the slightest inconvenience for this mass murder, because of course they didn’t), but some guy who staffed a car lot showroom didn’t know and doesn’t share equally in the blame. So if your favourite…