The Offit Index: Tracking a Patent Owner’s Ongoing Financial Interest in One Vaccine’s Sales

[Guest guest]

http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/01/the-offit-index-tracking-a-patent-owners-ongoing-financial-interest-in-one-vaccines-sales.html

January 05, 2011

The Offit Index: Tracking a Patent Owner’s Ongoing

Financial Interest in One Vaccine’s

Sales

By Mark Blaxill

Vaccine developer Offit has just published a new book, Deadly

Choices, in which he turns up the volume and the rhetoric against

what he likes to call “the anti-vaccine movement.” His target, he argues,

has launched a dangerous assault on the public health, and its misguided

disciples are everywhere, including people like you and me. Based on the

advance description, I don’t plan on boosting his sales.

But my friend and colleague Dan Olmsted has read it and wrote about it

HERE. Dan found the tone mean-spirited and describes Offit’s work as

“a score-settling screed against anyone who's ever criticized him or

vaccine safety surveillance.” Offit isn’t alone in his name calling, it

seems the public relations mavens of the medical industry have been

working overtime to pin the “anti-vaccine” label to anyone they can find.

The reality, however, is that the movement Offit and his industry cronies

criticize so ruthlessly is really a grass-roots consumer movement,

concerned about the health of children, distrustful of the

“public-private partnership” that has emerged with the vaccine industry

and its regulators, and is speaking out with increasing force for

long-overdue improvements in vaccine safety management. This movement is

good for children’s health, but not for the vaccine industry’s profits,

which is why the propaganda is escalating. In his new book, Offit takes

the hate speech to a new level, asking all Americans to fear this diverse

community of concerned consumers because, “the anti-vaccine movement

threatens us all.

Even for Offit, this new book is an escalation. He has written three

books before this one, What Every Parent Should Know About

Vaccines (a standard “vaccines are always safe” propaganda

piece published in 1998), The Cutter Incident (a revisionist

history of one of the great breakdowns of vaccine safety, in which he

offers the bizarre complaint in 2005 that fear of litigation was driving

vaccine manufacturers away from the industry, even as industry revenues

and profits were exploding like never before) and Autism’s False

Prophets (a 2008 attack on the autism parent community for raising

concerns over vaccine safety). The thread in Offit’s writing is clear,

making the world safe for vaccine manufacturers. But why would a

man like Offit, so obviously concerned for his public reputation, get

down and dirty on vaccine safety advocates, parents like Barbara Loe

Fisher, McCarthy and our own J.B. Handley? One possible answer is

the simplest one of all.

They’re costing him money.

By my count, close to $1.5 million dollars so far and rising.

That’s the cumulative sum of royalty income due to the relatively weak

performance (as compared to the industry leader, Prevnar) of his patented

Rotateq vaccine.

Counting Offit’s Millions.

About a year ago, Dan Olmsted and I reported in considerable detail

on Offit’s financial stake in Rotateq before (see

HERE). We demonstrated that he has already made over $10 million and

stands to gain much more if Rotateq is commercially successful.

But exactly how much more?

One benchmark for Offit’s Rotateq royalty earnings is Pfizer’s Prevnar

vaccine, which protects against certain strains of strep bacteria. In

commercial terms, Prevnar, which was introduced by Wyeth in 2000, is the

most successful vaccine ever launched. In its tenth year it reached

roughly $3 billion in worldwide revenues and is on a pace to exceed $3.5

billion in 2010. For any vaccine developer looking to maximize profits,

Prevnar sets the standard. It was adopted rapidly, both in the United

States and globally; it has no competitors in its category; with the

exception of one episode of supply problems in 2003, its growth has been

continuous; and its history has been remarkably free of any reputation

problems due to safety concerns.

Using Prevnar’s commercial history, one can measure Rotateq’s sales

performance in the period since its introduction in 2006. Setting “year

one” the same for both vaccines, (Prevnar was approved in February 2000,

Rotateq in March 2006), the chart below compare the annual worldwide

revenues, showing clearly how Rotateq has already fallen behind Prevnar

in its five years on the market (I projected 2010 revenues for both

products by assuming fourth quarter revenues in 2010 were unchanged from

last year and added that estimate to reported revenues for the first

three quarters).

GO to webpage for more details and graphs

Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Hahnemannian

Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Washington State, USA

Vaccines -

http://vaccinationdangers.wordpress.com/ Homeopathy

http://homeopathycures.wordpress.com

Vaccine Dangers, Childhood Disease Classes & Homeopathy

Online/email courses - next classes start December 2 & 3, 2010 and

January 6 & 7

[Guest guest]

http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/01/the-offit-index-tracking-a-patent-owners-ongoing-financial-interest-in-one-vaccines-sales.html

January 05, 2011

The Offit Index: Tracking a Patent Owner’s Ongoing

Financial Interest in One Vaccine’s

Sales

By Mark Blaxill

Vaccine developer Offit has just published a new book, Deadly

Choices, in which he turns up the volume and the rhetoric against

what he likes to call “the anti-vaccine movement.” His target, he argues,

has launched a dangerous assault on the public health, and its misguided

disciples are everywhere, including people like you and me. Based on the

advance description, I don’t plan on boosting his sales.

But my friend and colleague Dan Olmsted has read it and wrote about it

HERE. Dan found the tone mean-spirited and describes Offit’s work as

“a score-settling screed against anyone who's ever criticized him or

vaccine safety surveillance.” Offit isn’t alone in his name calling, it

seems the public relations mavens of the medical industry have been

working overtime to pin the “anti-vaccine” label to anyone they can find.

The reality, however, is that the movement Offit and his industry cronies

criticize so ruthlessly is really a grass-roots consumer movement,

concerned about the health of children, distrustful of the

“public-private partnership” that has emerged with the vaccine industry

and its regulators, and is speaking out with increasing force for

long-overdue improvements in vaccine safety management. This movement is

good for children’s health, but not for the vaccine industry’s profits,

which is why the propaganda is escalating. In his new book, Offit takes

the hate speech to a new level, asking all Americans to fear this diverse

community of concerned consumers because, “the anti-vaccine movement

threatens us all.

Even for Offit, this new book is an escalation. He has written three

books before this one, What Every Parent Should Know About

Vaccines (a standard “vaccines are always safe” propaganda

piece published in 1998), The Cutter Incident (a revisionist

history of one of the great breakdowns of vaccine safety, in which he

offers the bizarre complaint in 2005 that fear of litigation was driving

vaccine manufacturers away from the industry, even as industry revenues

and profits were exploding like never before) and Autism’s False

Prophets (a 2008 attack on the autism parent community for raising

concerns over vaccine safety). The thread in Offit’s writing is clear,

making the world safe for vaccine manufacturers. But why would a

man like Offit, so obviously concerned for his public reputation, get

down and dirty on vaccine safety advocates, parents like Barbara Loe

Fisher, McCarthy and our own J.B. Handley? One possible answer is

the simplest one of all.

They’re costing him money.

By my count, close to $1.5 million dollars so far and rising.

That’s the cumulative sum of royalty income due to the relatively weak

performance (as compared to the industry leader, Prevnar) of his patented

Rotateq vaccine.

Counting Offit’s Millions.

About a year ago, Dan Olmsted and I reported in considerable detail

on Offit’s financial stake in Rotateq before (see

HERE). We demonstrated that he has already made over $10 million and

stands to gain much more if Rotateq is commercially successful.

But exactly how much more?

One benchmark for Offit’s Rotateq royalty earnings is Pfizer’s Prevnar

vaccine, which protects against certain strains of strep bacteria. In

commercial terms, Prevnar, which was introduced by Wyeth in 2000, is the

most successful vaccine ever launched. In its tenth year it reached

roughly $3 billion in worldwide revenues and is on a pace to exceed $3.5

billion in 2010. For any vaccine developer looking to maximize profits,

Prevnar sets the standard. It was adopted rapidly, both in the United

States and globally; it has no competitors in its category; with the

exception of one episode of supply problems in 2003, its growth has been

continuous; and its history has been remarkably free of any reputation

problems due to safety concerns.

Using Prevnar’s commercial history, one can measure Rotateq’s sales

performance in the period since its introduction in 2006. Setting “year

one” the same for both vaccines, (Prevnar was approved in February 2000,

Rotateq in March 2006), the chart below compare the annual worldwide

revenues, showing clearly how Rotateq has already fallen behind Prevnar

in its five years on the market (I projected 2010 revenues for both

products by assuming fourth quarter revenues in 2010 were unchanged from

last year and added that estimate to reported revenues for the first

three quarters).

GO to webpage for more details and graphs

Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Hahnemannian

Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Washington State, USA

Vaccines -

http://vaccinationdangers.wordpress.com/ Homeopathy

http://homeopathycures.wordpress.com

Vaccine Dangers, Childhood Disease Classes & Homeopathy

Online/email courses - next classes start December 2 & 3, 2010 and

January 6 & 7