Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [120]
The vaccine crisis of 1901–2 also prompted local and state health boards to increase their interventions in the vaccine market. In 1903, the Massachusetts legislature authorized the state board of health to manufacture its own lymph and antitoxin under the supervision of Theobald Smith. “Having provided for compulsory vaccination in this state,” The Boston Globe commented, “the authorities are at least bound to see to it that the humblest citizen is provided with as perfect vaccine as it is possible to secure.” Other state and local boards—including Cleveland’s—regularly inspected vaccine lots in their own bacteriological laboratories.95
Leading biologics makers, particularly the largest firms, welcomed the new regime. The new system defused the vaccine crisis and gradually strengthened public confidence in vaccine and antitoxin. The new regulatory system, like other progressive business regulations instituted during the early twentieth century, fostered corporate consolidation by driving many small competitors out of the industry altogether (a welcome benefit to the likes of Parke, Davis and Mulford). Government licensing conferred a federal stamp of approval upon commercial vaccines, and the law established the government as a cooperative partner rather than a rival manufacturer (or, worse, a monopolistic one) in the brave new world of biologics. The National Hygienic Laboratory shared its research with private firms, ultimately saving those firms a great deal of money. The revolving door between government, academia, and the pharmaceutical industry continued to spin, as Joseph J. Kinyoun, Rosenau’s predecessor at the Hygienic Laboratory, left the government in 1903 for a position as director of the Mulford laboratories in Glenolden. Rosenau himself would leave the laboratory six years later for a position at Harvard.96
Over time, all of this government activity increased the quality of American-made vaccines (not to mention other biologics) and assured the physicians and the public that they were not being compelled to undertake unnecessary risks in the name of the public health. The public would accept that assurance only gradually, and never fully. Four years after the passage of the Biologics Control Act, Congress would enact another, much better remembered statute modeled closely after it, the Pure Food and Drug Act. Together, the two laws introduced an unprecedented level of federal regulatory authority over one of the most profitable areas of American commerce and manufacturing, the pharmaceutical industry.97
The Biologics Control Act resolved one of the greatest contradictions in the practice of the nation’s burgeoning public health systems: compulsory vaccination of the people without any governmental review of product safety. The new inspection regime saved compulsory vaccination at its moment of greatest crisis in the United States. Testifying before a House committee in 1910, Dr. C. T. Sowers of Washington, D.C., recalled the days, before the Biologics Control Act of 1902, when anyone who had a few cows could start up a vaccine farm. “There was no government inspection at that time of these farms, and the consequence was a very impure product,” he said. “For us to have enforced vaccination before government inspection I have always regarded as extremely wrong, but now we can do it with the utmost propriety in stopping epidemics of smallpox.”98
It is possible that Dr. Sowers had always