Download Measles Vaccine Mania? The 1987-1989 epidemic and the demand

Measles Vaccine Mania?
The 1987-1989 epidemic and the demand for the measles vaccine.
By David Harrington
Essay Word Count: 461 words
In the fall of 1987, college students in Los Angeles fell sick with fevers, headaches, and scratchy throats.
Soon rashes raced over their bodies and doctors told them, “It’s measles.” Over the next two years, the
measles epidemic in Southern California claimed 14 lives and made 1,626 people very sick (The
Washington Post, 1989). It also sparked outbreaks in Chicago and Houston.
Not surprisingly, the epidemic increased the demand for the measles vaccine by more than 30 percent
(The Washington Post, 1989), an effect that is illustrated in figure 1. Prior to the epidemic, the price of
the measles vaccine was $8.50 per shot and roughly 80 percent of American children were vaccinated
(Specter, 1987). The increase in demand, sparked by the epidemic, is illustrated as rightward shift in the
demand curve from 𝐷1987 to 𝐷1989.
Since vaccines take time and money to produce, the rising death toll and ensuing fear created a shortage
as people vied for a limited number of doses. In figure 1, this shortage is illustrated as the horizontal
distance AB. According to an immunologist working for the state of California, the shortage caused
vaccine prices to “jump” up sharply (The Washington Post, 1989). The higher prices would have
dissuaded some parents from vaccinating their kids, illustrated as a movement up the demand curve from
B to E. On the other side of the market, higher prices would have induced pharmaceutical companies to
squeeze additional doses from their factories, illustrated as a movement up the supply curve from A to E.
The epidemiologist said that prices jumped up but didn’t say by how much, a magnitude that would have
been determined by the shapes of the demand and supply curves for vaccines. Panicky parents of UCLA
students would not have been dissuaded by higher prices, implying that the quantity demanded was
unlikely to have been very sensitive to higher prices. In general, demand curves for medicines tend to be
steep, or, more technically, what economists call inelastic. Since vaccines take time to “grow,” the supply
curve would have also been steep, making the quantity supplied insensitive to higher prices. Looking at
the graph, we can see that steep demand and supply curves would have led to large increases in price for a
given increase in demand. Hence, it is not surprising that the price of vaccines jumped up sharply in
response to the measles epidemic.
What is surprising is that so many people remain unvaccinated today. Measles epidemics continue to pop
up despite the efficacy of the vaccine, implying that many parents choose not vaccinate their children.1
Why? Perhaps, because of a different type of mania, an anti-vaccine mania.
REFERENCES
The Washington Post. 1989. “California Measles Epidemic Claims 17 Lives This Year,” November 7,
1989.
Specter, Michael. 1987. “Cases of Preventable Disease Rising As Percentages of Vaccinations Drop,” The
Washington Post, December 31.
A Lexis/Nexis search of U.S. newspapers using “measles w/3 epidemic” yielded 475 articles that were published
after 1990.
1