Key info


Date:
14 February 2022

Authors:
Rob Johnson, Bimandra Djaafara, David Haw, Patrick Doohan, Giovanni Forchin, Matteo Pianella, Neil Ferguson, Peter C Smith, and Katharina D Hauck1

1Correspondence:
Prof Katharina Hauck
k.hauck@imperial.ac.uk 

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WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Jameel Institute, Imperial College London, in collaboration with Eijkman-Oxford Clinical Research Unit Indonesia, Umeå Universitet Sweden, Imperial College Business School and University of York.

Now published in Vaccine; 10-03-2023doihttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2023.01.068

Summary

Countries face competing priorities in responding to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The key trade-off is between deaths and pandemic mitigation that reduces SARS-CoV-2 transmission via mandated closures of non-essential economic activity and schools. Vaccinations are one of the key interventions to address this trade-off. They not only reduce deaths, but also the need for policy makers to implement socially damaging and economically costly pandemic mitigation measures. There is little comprehensive quantitative evidence on the societal benefit of vaccinations. Here, we project the socio-economic gains of vaccinations in terms of averted deaths, averted economic losses and averted educational losses with the dynamic epidemiological and economic model Daedalus, applied to Indonesia. We model a twelve-month Moderna booster vaccination campaign, beginning in September 2021, with 80% target coverage against a counterfactual of no boosters. We assume the booster campaign is delivered against a background of optimised epidemic mitigation with economic and school closures that are gradually eased, double-dose vaccinations reaching 90% of the eligible population, and epidemiological characteristics of the Delta and Omicron variants in sensitivity analyses.

We find that the total expected socio-economic gain of the booster campaign is $381 billion (95% confidence interval $260-$640) for our central scenario. It comprises of 19 million years of in-person education, $81 billion in economic activity, and 300,000 life-years (or 14,000 deaths). Depending on monetary valuations of education and life years, the expected gain ranges from $365 billion to $608 billion. The social benefit of each Moderna dose ranges from $2,000 (95% confidence interval $1,400-$3,100) to $3,300 ($2,600-$5,200). Projected gains per dose are higher for a booster vaccination campaign with 40% target coverage at $2,200 ($1,200-$3,300) to $4,200 ($3,400-$6,600).

Our findings are sensitive to the decision makers’ valuations of life years and education, and to the unpredictable evolution of the virus. However, results are very similar for epidemiological parameters corresponding to the Delta and Omicron variants. Our results demonstrate that the majority of benefits of vaccination manifest in the reduced need for costly mitigation, rather than averted deaths. This calls for a comprehensive modelling of the benefits of vaccinations focusing not only on health impacts, but also on economic and social impacts.

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