Handbook of Applied Health Economics in Vaccines

Abstract

Vaccine discovery, financing, and distribution offer technical challenges requiring difficult choices. Patients, parents, providers, and politicians all must decide about who, when, where to vaccinate. Billions if not trillions of dollars and millions of lives depend on getting these choices right. Economics, the science of choice under uncertainty, can help clarify the principles for these choices. Yet standard economics models do not apply to most vaccines because they are a commodity offering both private benefit and risk as well as population level benefits through herd immunity. The book explains the vaccine development and financing landscape and the principles that invalidate standard market-based approaches to vaccine discovery and distribution based on free unregulated markets. Because government involvement in vaccine policy is universal, tools to determine costs and benefits of vaccination from various perspectives are explained and illustrated with exercises. The applications of economic evaluation to vaccines are presented with a range of sophistication from simple static models to advanced stochastic Markov models with dynamic effects of secondary disease transmission. Finally the book covers the need to plan and provide for public and private financing for vaccine discovery, production, and distribution. Throughout the book there is a focus on showing the benefits as well as the limitations of an exclusive focus on economic efficiency. Applied exercises help readers immediately begin to apply principles to typical problems facing decision-makers.