The cacophony for and against vaccines – even what is a vaccine is in broad dispute – has reached new level of deafening absurdity. There isn’t just one rabbit hole but hundreds. 

Compliance is tanking, which is what one would expect after brutal mandates and ubiquitous injury and death. Meanwhile, pharma bots are dominating social media to shame dissidents, while legacy media turns news pages into nonstop shot-and-pill advertising. 

Everyone is left with questions about whom to trust and what is true. Several states have already seceded from the CDC’s own attempt to change the childhood schedule even slightly. That’s how contentious this issue has become. 

My thesis: this epistemic nihilism is born of the deliberate subversion of economic signaling systems that would otherwise reveal inconvenient truths. 

Let’s begin with theory. 

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises set aside all moral, aesthetic, and philosophical issues concerning socialism and examined how it would work as a purely economic experiment. This was a point rarely considered at all in the centuries before, even by the new leaders of the Soviet Union who had no idea what they were doing beyond nationalizing industry, blathering on about the dictatorship of the proletariat, and demonizing land owners. 

Mises calmly explained that double-entry bookkeeping is the mathematical means by which society has come to evaluate the benefits and costs of resource use. This requires prices, which are indicators of relative scarcities and consumer demand. These prices form the essential building blocks of economic knowledge. They provide pointers regarding the essential questions of what to produce and in what quantity. 

In order for these prices to be accurate, they must be formed in the context of real-world market trading up and down the full structure of production, from raw materials through capital goods to consumer goods. Only that process generates reliable signals from which accounting is built. 

Socialism purports to replace the price system with central commands. In that case, not even the planners will have access to information about the real world around them. They will be flying blind and inevitably screw it up. They did indeed. 

The implications of the argument go far beyond the debate over socialism. They reach into every sector mired in government intervention that distorts pricing signals. With every price distortion, we get further away from having accurate information about economic value and market viability in real-world settings. 

It was Toby Rogers who first pointed out that this accounts for much if not all of the confusion surrounding the vaccine industry and practice. For two and a quarter centuries, this product, practice, and industry has relied fundamentally on statist means of boosting its viability at every stage: investment, production, distribution, consumption, and even liability. There is no stage of this sector that is untouched by government meddling on behalf of the industry in question. 

Rogers writes:

The vaccine era — the years since the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act — exposes a failure neither [Mises or F.A. Hayek] foresaw. Let’s call it the calculation problem under regulatory and epistemic capture. Socialism abolished the price outright. Capture in a mixed market economy is subtler: it leaves a price standing and corrupts it from within until it is worse than meaningless.

Mandates, government purchasing, and insurance rules guarantee sales no matter what the product actually does. School-entry laws force sales upon captive customers (e.g. children who want to go to school). Liability protection removes the price that disciplines a defective product — the damages a court would otherwise make the manufacturer pay. The buyer is compelled and the producer is protected so no meaningful price can form.

Making matters worse, price aggregates what buyers believe about the thing they buy, however regulatory and epistemic capture distort those beliefs. The FDA launders bad data on behalf of the manufacturers and declares the product “safe and effective.” Social media platforms erase the testimony of the injured. Academic journals censor scholars who dissent. Universities blacklist professors who challenge the conventional narrative. So society’s dispersed knowledge about the product and its defects never gets properly communicated or aggregated.

He concludes with a point I’ve made repeatedly on all these vaccine debates. We need not adopt a total position that is either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. Everyone should be free to choose. What society really lacks right now is an information stream to deliver a clear verdict on the merit of these products with clear liabilities for harm. 

The answer is a free market. As Rogers writes: 

Creating a market for vaccines again would require removing all mandates, repealing liability protection, rescinding insurance rules, and ending government purchasing programs. However creating a MEANINGFUL price (that communicates the risks and benefits of the product to society) would also require stopping regulatory capture and epistemic capture (i.e. control of the journals and universities by Big Pharma).

Rogers dates the intervention from 1986. And yet no matter how far back we look, we find wild distortions from the very origin of the vaccination concept in 1796. We need only discuss the American case but parallel interventions took place in most of the Western world. 

News of the medical innovation in Britain reached our shores. Following the War of 1812 – war always gives rise to disease fears – an American doctor (James Smith, our first Dr. Fauci) popped up as the official vaccine agent. He lobbied the president in the hope of bolstering his own business. 

In 1813, President James Madison signed the Vaccine Act (An Act to Encourage Vaccination), the first major federal endorsement of any medical or even consumer product in US history. The government that claimed to be extremely limited, leaving the population alone to pursue its own version of happiness, discovered its first great exception. 

The Act established a national vaccine agent and provided free postage for distributing vaccine material, effectively subsidizing access, supply, and distribution. 

Dealing with a public revolt in response to widespread reports of injury and death, this act was repealed by Congress in 1822. This cycle of hot promotion and cold rejection established a pattern that has pretty well defined the whole experience of vaccines in US history: government intervention followed by consumer protest. Time passes and the industry figures out another plan of action. 

In this case, it was only a decade later that the industry found another path toward subverting market forces. The Indian Vaccination Act of 1832 funded vaccinations for tribes near white settlements with mixed uptake and elements of coercion tied to removal policies in some cases. We have only the most sketchy records of the results of this campaign. One can only imagine: just think of slicing open wrists to spread animal disease in the blood of the native population. 

During the Civil War era (1861–1865), both Union and Confederate armies imposed smallpox vaccination requirements on troops due to outbreaks in military camps. This led to thousands of well-documented injuries and deaths, many of which came from cross contamination and the spreading of syphilis from corpses and healthy people.

Following contamination scandals, safety concerns emerged for another wave of death in 1901. In response to the lobbying by a panicked industry, Congress passed the Biologics Control Act of 1902, creating the first-ever government agency to regulate any consumer production (years before meatpacking was a controversy). This law led the government to effectively certify safety and purity in response to an industry pitch to restore confidence amid growing skepticism. 

Previously, Massachusetts had enacted the first US school vaccination mandate for smallpox in 1855. These requirements spread to other states in later decades. In 1905, the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such mandates in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, bolstering states’ police powers to compel vaccination. As a result, vaccination mandates for schoolchildren and other settings expanded throughout the 20th century. 

Again came the reports of injury and death along with growing popular resistance. That’s when the patchwork plan to shore up industrial failure got two crucial new pushes. First, in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act enabled patenting and revenue-sharing of inventions from federally funded research, facilitating closer ties between government agencies, universities, and industry. Second, in 1986, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act shielded manufacturers from civil lawsuits for harms inflicted. This was intended to stabilize supply through industry protection. 

Throughout this history, various R&D subsidies, advance purchases, public-private partnerships, and agency assurances have been crucial to vaccine development and distribution. 

The Covid period was next-level: panicked funding, fast approvals, quick indemnification, wild propaganda, followed by punishing mandates for millions in the public and private sectors, including on children who were of near-zero risk but thus injected with an experimental potion. The result was injury and death to break all historical records. 

This was a government program from soup to nuts, no different from a Soviet five-year plan, including unrelenting claims of its wild successes, as dictated by industrial priorities. 

That part is well known. Less well known is that even dating back two and a quarter centuries, there has never been a time when these products were subjected to a genuine market test, faced authentic pricing structures with normal standards of liability, and had to deal with accounting metrics faced by nearly every other industry. 

Right now, the entire vaccination industry is socialist on the production side and fascist on the distribution side. The injured are gaslighted, the industry protected, agencies captured, the journals compromised, and the media bought out. This is about as far away from a free market as you can get other than outright nationalization. It’s been a huge profitable strategy, to the point that all social media is filled with nonstop pushes by industry and their bots. 

The only rational conclusion: there is no solid grounds these days for a dogmatic position either for or against vaccines, even if public suspicion and incredulity reach an all-time high. All we are saying is give free markets a chance to tell us what is true. Right now, the signals are false and favor lies. 

Two years after Mises wrote his initial argument, he wrote an entire book that elaborated on the idea. With regard to interventions in the medical sector, applying his theory of economic calculation, he predicted that government intervention in the medical sector would “make a people sick bodily and mentally or at least helps to multiply, lengthen, and intensify disease…We cannot weaken or destroy the will to health without producing illness.”

And yet, we know now that the business of producing illness can be highly lucrative indeed. This is a problem yet to be solved. We have multiple medical industries that profit from the harm they cause. How to stop that and reverse the incentives such that industry makes money from doing good? We can start by ending the corporate machinery designed to subvert market signals in its own interest.