Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [108]
In most European countries, the government controlled vaccine production, either through licensing or through outright government manufacture. Regulating the manufacture of potentially hazardous goods fell well within the ambit of the American police power. But little regulation of vaccines existed. Just seven states had laws providing for some supervision of the vaccine manufactured or used in the state. The Massachusetts statute, the nation’s strongest, declared that “All vaccine institutions in the commonwealth shall be under the supervision of the state board of health”; but even that law specified no penalties for bad practices. Several of the states governed the use of humanized virus, which had fallen out of favor in most places anyway. Even these measures showed a narrow conception of the rightful powers of government in this area. Florida banned humanized virus outright; Maryland made physicians liable for “knowingly or willfully” using humanized virus that spread disease to a patient; and Michigan required that only bovine product be used in public vaccinations.53
In the late 1890s, the first glimmerings of a new regulatory approach appeared when a few state and local governments started inspecting vaccine farms, testing the virus in the laboratory, and publishing the findings. In an industry that had relied on the endorsements of public health boards to market their products, this must have been for many makers a most unwelcome intrusion. In addition to the Pennsylvania Board of Health, some of the nation’s most advanced municipal health departments—Chicago, Minneapolis, Brooklyn, Charleston, Denver, and St. Louis—began using their new bacteriological laboratories to test vaccines for potency or purity. At the most dramatic level of control, the city of New York manufactured its own virus—still in 1901 the only city in the country to do so. The New York health board rankled commercial makers by selling limited amounts of its well-regarded virus on the open market.54
American vaccine makers were regulated almost exclusively by their reputations, their commercial “trustworthiness.” This encouraged nasty advertising practices. In a 1900 article titled “The Pot Calls the Kettle Black,” the Indianapolis physician W. B. Clarke observed that vaccine advertisements published in the medical journals had become a scandalous “squabble literature.” “In their greedy commercialism,” Clarke wrote, the manufacturers “have fallen out, and are each vying with the others in desperate attempts to show the medical profession that theirs is the one pure virus, and that all the others are dangerous and unfit for the use even of a health (?) officer.” Dr. Clarke was an antivaccinationist (the giveaway was that parenthetical question mark), but he did not exaggerate. As early as 1898, an Alexander Company advertisement had thrown down the gauntlet: “At the beginning of this second century [of vaccination] the tendency is to propagate impure virus, in order to meet the demand for great discounts, thus lowering the price and making it impossible to propagate in a proper manner.” Even assertions of product purity were phrased so as to condemn rivals’ wares by implication: “This Vaccine is Entirely Free from Blood Corpuscles,” a distributor for the New-England Vaccine Company proudly announced. Parke, Davis did not wait for the Camden crisis to cool down before taking a swipe at Mulford (unnamed) in its advertising. “The most successful vaccination is not the vaccination that inflicts the most suffering upon the patient,” said one Parke, Davis ad. “The best virus is our Aseptic Vaccine. It effectually protects against smallpox—it does not infect with disease-breeding organisms.” And then came the kicker, underscored and printed in boldface type: “Not a single fatality was ever charged to our Vaccine Virus.”55
Still, negative advertising