A registered pharmacist technician fills the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine at a vaccine clinic during the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto, 2020. (Credit: Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press files)
Vaccines save millions of lives every year. So it’s worrying that the U.S. government wants to cut funding for a key organization that enables immunization around the world.
The COVID pandemic saw growing rejection of vaccines, a shift that has contributed to the Trump administration’s announcement to cut its funding for Gavi, a global vaccine alliance. Gavi is estimated to have saved the lives of 17 million children over the past 25 years. It says the loss of U.S. support would mean that over the next five years 75 million children will miss their routine vaccinations, and more than 1.2 million could die as a result.
Today most children dying from infectious diseases live in poorer countries. But that’s new. Less than two centuries ago, even in rich countries pestilence was part of life. Infectious diseases caused almost half of annual American and British deaths — compared with only about three per cent of all American deaths today. In the world’s poorer regions, however, infectious diseases still kill over three million children a year.
We need to bring everyone together on uncontroversial, lifesaving childhood vaccines like those for mumps and measles. Governments need to, not just maintain, but increase their spending. Doing so could drive huge advances in global development for a very small investment — a deal that should be attractive to everyone, regardless of their politics.
Vaccines are one of humanity’s most amazing achievements. They have saved more lives than any other medical invention, enabling control of diseases that once caused untold misery. They completely erased one of humanity’s most deadly diseases, smallpox, which killed indiscriminately for millennia. In the 20th century alone, it likely killed 300-500 million people before being finally eradicated in 1977, thanks to a vaccine. If that vaccine didn’t exist, smallpox might still be killing some five million people each and every year.
It is estimated that globally, immunization efforts have saved 154 million lives in the past half-century. That’s one life every 10 seconds for 50 years. The vast majority, 101 million, were infants.
Saving lives is the biggest payoff to investing in vaccines, of course. But stopping diseases like polio, measles and tetanus also reduces pressure on health-care systems in poorer countries, making it possible for them to help heart and cancer patients better. And since infectious diseases don’t recognize borders, there is less strain on health-care systems around the world, as well.
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In research published by Cambridge University Press, researchers for my think-tank, Copenhagen Consensus, have documented the costs and benefits of maintaining and increasing global investment in vaccinations. They calculate that if the world continues its current level of spending, we will save around 3.8 million lives every year between now and 2030, with each dollar spent delivering an astonishing $286 of benefit in lives saved and diseases avoided.
And increasing vaccination coverage is still a great deal. Over the next eight years, we could save an additional 4.1 million lives, or about half a million a year. That would require increased spending: governments would have to expand vaccination campaigns to harder-to-reach places and families, possibly by using food incentives to ensure greater coverage, as India has done.
But the extra cost — worldwide — would still be a relatively modest US$1.5 billion a year, along with about US$200 million in the time of mothers, mainly, who would have to go to clinics. A half million lives saved each year make this an incredible opportunity. Using standard economic evaluations across time and treating upfront avoided impacts as more valuable, the researchers calculate the benefit is worth about US$170 billion annually. In other words, each dollar spent will generate $101 in social benefits. How many investors would decline a return of $100 on a $1 investment?
Saving the lives of 3.8 million children each year with safe, basic vaccinations is already a terrific deal, and saving half a million more every year with extended vaccination coverage is almost as terrific. We should embrace both and ensure that all children get lifelong protection against killer diseases.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “Best Things First.“