When a pediatrician insists your child stay up to date on the CDC’s schedule of nearly 100 vaccine doses by age 18, you might think:
Wonderful!
The doctor must be confident all the shots are safe and effective, must have reviewed all relevant data, and must be selflessly acting solely in my child’s best interest.
You’d be dead wrong.
First, not one physician has publicly stated they’re confident in Covid shots for children while accounting for Pfizer’s allegedly obfuscated trial data, which FDA asked a court to hide from the public for more than 75 years.
Second, there’s the issue of acting only in your child’s interest.
Payments to doctors for vaccinating kids happen all the time and create an ethical conflict of interest rarely known to parents, says pediatrician Paul Thomas MD.
In the excerpt above from this video, he reveals:
Dr. Thomas’s practice, Integrative Pediatrics, included 10 providers and 33 staff and served 15,000 active patients.
The practice's gross billings were approximately $3 million with substantial operational costs.
A significant portion of the practice’s income derived from vaccines, which became apparent when the practice noticed an increase in patients refusing vaccines.
The practice upheld the principle of informed consent, allowing parents to choose whether their children would follow the CDC's vaccination schedule or receive some vaccines or none at all.
To understand financial impacts, the practice reviewed an entire month’s billing to track losses from refused vaccines.
Revenue from vaccines in pediatrics comes mainly from the administration fee, which is about $40 for the first antigen and $20 for subsequent ones. This fee is ostensibly for the time doctors spend discussing vaccines, but in practice, little time is spent as education is mostly provided via a standard CDC Vaccine Information Sheet (VIS).
Additional revenue comes from well visits, which are scheduled frequently for children up to age two, as well as older children needing boosters. These visits involve multiple vaccines and can generate significant administration fees.
Dr. Thomas’s practice faced a loss of over a million dollars in administration fees due to vaccine refusals.
Running a pediatric office is costly, with overhead often reaching up to 80%, necessitating near-complete adherence to the CDC vaccination schedule to stay afloat financially.
Other financial incentives related to vaccines include small markups on vaccine costs and larger "quality bonuses" for meeting vaccination targets.
Dr. Thomas’s practice, with only 1% of two-year-olds fully vaccinated, failed to meet these targets, resulting in significant financial penalties under “quality” measures.
Dr. Thomas links the financial pressures to maintain high vaccination rates to broader systemic issues, suggesting pediatric practices are economically unsustainable without substantial vaccination “compliance.”
The interview also touches on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS), positing a connection to recent vaccinations, which Dr. Thomas suggests leads to higher incidences of various infections among vaccinated children compared to unvaccinated ones.
(Link to full interview here.)
Doctors must reveal conflicts
Physicians face an ethical obligation to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, including financial incentives from drug companies, to their patients.
This is important for several reasons:
Transparency
Transparency about financial relationships with drug companies helps maintain or build trust between physicians and their patients. Patients generally expect their doctors to make recommendations based on the patients' best interests, not influenced by outside financial interests.
Informed consent
Knowing about a potential conflict of interest can help patients make more informed decisions about their care. It allows them to consider whether recommended treatments might be influenced by a physician's financial gain. Informed consent is a foundational element of medical ethics and a legal obligation in many jurisdictions
Ethical guidelines
Many medical associations and guidelines emphasize the importance of disclosing any conflicts of interest as a part of ethical practice in medicine. For example, the American Medical Association (AMA) states doctors should disclose conflicts of interest that could influence their clinical judgments.
Legal requirements
Depending on the jurisdiction, there can be legal requirements for disclosure. For instance, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act in the US requires drug and medical device manufacturers to report payments and gifts to physicians and teaching hospitals, which are then made public.
Disclosure of such financial incentives is crucial to uphold ethical standards of medical practice.
Where vaccine payment incentives exist, disclosure is ethically and often legally required to ensure parental decisions are made with all relevant information available.
Nondisclosure of vaccine payments can lead to medical malpractice
The failure of a doctor to disclose a conflict of interest may constitute medical malpractice under certain circumstances. Here's how:
Violation of standard of care
Medical malpractice involves a breach of the standard of care expected of a healthcare professional. This standard includes the duty to act in the best interest of the patient and to provide care a reasonably competent physician would under similar circumstances.
If disclosing conflicts of interest is the expected standard of care, and it often is, failing to do so could be seen as a violation of the standard.
Duty to inform
Physicians have a duty to ensure patients make informed decisions about their care. If a conflict of interest could reasonably affect the patient's choice of treatment, nondisclosure might impede informed consent.
Causation and harm
For nondisclosure to rise to the level of malpractice, it typically must be shown a physician’s failure to disclose a conflict of interest caused harm to the patient. This harm could be physical, if it led to inappropriate treatment, or it could be psychological or financial, if the patient would have chosen a different treatment had they been aware of the conflict. A causal link between nondisclosure and harm can be hard to establish but is vital for a malpractice claim.
Legal and ethical guidelines
Noncompliance with regulations requiring disclosure of conflicts of interest can support a case for malpractice, particularly if those regulations explicitly classify disclosure as part of the standard of care.
While failure to disclose a conflict of interest alone does not automatically constitute malpractice, it can be a contributing factor if it results in a breach of the standard of care, interferes with informed consent, and leads to harm to a patient.
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Incentive payments to doctors for child vaccines pose conflict of interest hidden from parents: pediatrician