Where are vaccines manufactured? Remember this story?

[jeff47]

66. Except you were claiming a change in infection rate was evidence of that.

But the vaccine was not changed during that time period.

Nothing in biology is black and white. Everything is probability. That probability is itself measured via probability. When stats like "the measles part of the MMR vaccine is 98% effective" are mentioned, there's two probabilities - the effectiveness of the vaccine, and the likelihood that we measured the effectiveness accurately.

What their suit comes down to is the second probability. How likely is it that the effectiveness was measured accurately. One bit of evidence is their claims of mistakes - deliberate or not. Another bit of evidence is how effective the vaccine has proven to be in the real world.

A quick Google search hasn't found what Merck claims the effectiveness of the mumps part of MMR is, so for the sake of this discussion I'm gonna pretend it's 98% like the measles part. How's that stack up against "the real world"?

(It's a lot more complicated than this, but I'm gonna make a lot of assumptions to make it simpler and round numbers because this is a discussion board and not an academic journal.)
In a "good" year, they got about 200,000 cases down to about 200. That would mean the vaccine is roughly 99.9% effective.
In a "bad" year, they got about 200,000 cases down to about 6000. That would mean the vaccine is roughly 97% effective.
(Again, this ignores 3 metric craploads of confounding factors and complications.)

So a claim of 98% effective doesn't look like it's way out of line. Even with all the "make it easy" assumptions, it's about where the real world ended up. The vaccine couldn't be only, say, 50% effective or the real-world results would look much worse.

If the "real" number turns out to be 90% effective and Merck covered it up they should lose their suit. But the vaccine still works well enough as a public health tool. What 90% would mean is there's room for someone else to create a better vaccine.

Which, btw, we would have found out anyway. Because we do actually monitor real-world results over the long run. So a cover-up really wouldn't help Merck for very long.