COVID-19 Vaccines Generated Huge Economic Benefits

COVID-19 vaccine development and delivery generated trillions of dollars in economic value, a new global analysis found (New York University).

What’s going on: The 173-country study, published in the journal “PLOS Medicine,” found that “[e]very dollar spent on COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution generated an estimated $60 to $810 in economic value during the first year that vaccines were given.”

• It is the first worldwide analysis of the return on investment of COVID-19 vaccines.
• “Overall COVID-19 vaccine development and delivery worldwide cost $79.4 billion, but the health and economic benefits of vaccination were valued between $6.43 trillion and $64.3 trillion.”
• The study’s conclusions are in line with an NAM economic analysis, which found that declines in “vaccination coverage currently costs U.S. manufacturers approximately $275 million per year in lost production from parental caregiving absenteeism attributable to vaccine-preventable diseases.”

The methodology: Researchers compared the costs of vaccine development, production and delivery across the 173 countries with the health and economic benefits of vaccination, including years of life gained, quality of life and work productivity.

• They “then used two different methods to quantify the value of saving lives and improving health: a cost-benefit analysis commonly used in the public sector, as well as a cost-effectiveness analysis used in the health sector to quantify savings based on what would be spent in healthcare to save someone’s life.”

The lesson: The study found significant disparities in the vaccines’ ROI across the countries studied as earlier access to vaccines saved more lives.

• Researchers attributed higher ROI to the speed with which higher income countries provided access to COVID-19 vaccines, whereas lower income countries received the vaccines later.
• “The lesson is there should be a way to get this vaccine to countries that need it faster. Because of the delays, it wasn’t as useful to many of those countries as it could have been,” researchers said.

The last word: “By preventing billions of infections and millions of hospitalizations and deaths, the vaccines generated enormous value for societies and economies worldwide,” the authors concluded.