Cost-Effectiveness of Meningitis Vaccine

Generally preventative medicines have a good shot at being cost-effective. They prevent hospitalizations, medical/ surgical procedures, additional medicines, etc. The trade-off is that vaccines need to be given to everyone who can get the vaccine for it to be effective. Like the flu vaccine ads say,"don't get it for you-- get it for ___ (insert name here)___" highlighting how getting a vaccine not only protects the person who gets it-- but also the all of the people who that person comes in comes in contact with.

What we don't want to see is the resources a vaccines saves in illness care for the small number of people who are infected, get made up for in the quantity of people having to get the vaccine (albeit, the vaccine is much less expensive than the medical treatment treating the disease). This is the case when the vaccine is very expensive and the disease the immunization protects against is relatively rare.

As a recent NPR piece highlighted, the bacterial meningitis may be in the position discussed. At first the vaccine was only given once and cost $100. Now ACIP (Advistory Committee on Immunization Practices) is recommending a booster-- which raises the cost to $189. NPR states that this would cost the government $387 million annually. All of this is estimated to prevent only 23 deaths per year. Is that okay? If all 23 deaths were people covered by government health care-- that would be more than $16 million per life saved. If you included what other non-government entities were spending on the vaccine- the cost would be even higher--since there are still only 23 deaths per year. Is that an acceptable amount to pay to save a life given the fact that there are budgetary constraints?

From the article:

....experts can't solve the fundamental problem of how to put a dollar value on preventing death or disease, says Mark Pauly, a health economist at the University of Pennsylvania.

"You do have a rough idea that if it's $1.98 per life saved that sounds like a good thing to do and if it's $198 million per life saved, that sounds like not a good thing to do," he says. "But where to draw the line is the part that any sensible person will run away screaming from trying to answer that question."