Vaccination is one of the true wonders of humanity, having saved more lives than any other medical invention and providing population-level control of diseases that once ran rampant. Yet we often don’t appreciate how fundamentally they have changed human life for the better.
At the turn of the last century, infectious diseases caused more than a third of all deaths in the US, beating cancer and heart disease today. But vaccines have made diseases like diphtheria, typhoid, measles and whooping cough virtually extinct.
Look at the poorer parts of the world. Smallpox was one of the most serious infectious diseases, killing indiscriminately for millennia, before being eradicated in 1977 thanks to a vaccine. It killed 300 million people over the 20th century, and without the vaccine, it might still kill five million yearly.
Just measuring the currently dangerous infectious diseases, vaccinations save 3.8 million lives yearly.
And yet, millions of children in the poorer parts of the world are without vaccines—a situation exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic that strained health systems and caused 25 million children to miss out on vaccinations in 2021. That was 5.9 million more than in 2019 and the highest since 2009. Even as Kenya sustained a strong vaccination rate of 91 per cent, 130,000 children missed the jab in 2021.
Global leaders promised in 2015 to dramatically reduce child deaths by 2030 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But there are far too many different SDG targets: 169. By promising too much, we fail to achieve any of the promises. This year marks halftime for the SDGs yet we are nowhere near halfway. We could achieve the SDG promise on vaccines more than half a century later.
We need to identify and prioritise our most crucial goals. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) have documented both the costs and the benefits of increasing global investment in vaccinations. With our current spending, we will continue to save 3.8 million lives from avoidable diseases till 2030.
But if we were to increase that coverage just slightly, nudging it upwards as in the past decades, over the next eight years, we could save an additional 4.1 million lives. That would have real costs. Yet, the additional financial cost will still be a relatively modest $1.5 billion extra per year along with about $200 million in additional time costs.
Saving half a million lives each year makes this an incredible opportunity. Using standard economic evaluations across time and considering that avoided impacts closer to now are more important, such a benefit is worth about $170 billion annually.
That means every dollar spent will generate $101 of social benefits. Achieving a 100-to-1 value for money is an absolutely phenomenal return on a policy to increase global vaccination.
Of all the hundreds of SDG promises, a few stand out for their incredible effectiveness. Increased vaccination is clearly one of them. We must ensure that resources are allocated to increase vaccinations.
Dr Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. [email protected] . @Bjorn-Lomborg https://lomborg.com.
