Costs
Equitable Distribution
Unfortunately, vaccines are not distributed to all children and people in the world equally. Vaccines have accounted for a 74% reduction globally in deaths from measles in the last decade alone. Despite this, 1.5 million children are dying each year from vaccine preventable diseases. For some countries in the world, the price for vaccines places them out of reach. Additionally, there are challenges in some countries in terms of providing the basic infrastructure to even distribute them.
More than 70% of unvaccinated children live in 10 countries with large populations. Private, public, non-governmental organization cooperation has worked to invest billions of dollars to spread vaccines to these countries, but problems persist in basic infrastructure, like roads and refrigeration, to deliver these lifesaving vaccines.29
Additionally, vaccine development is expensive. It is difficult to nail down the cost of vaccine creation in particular, but a single drug can cost over a billion dollars to bring to market.30 In an instance where vaccination has been its own worst enemy, many companies view vaccine preventable illnesses as already largely solved, and profit margins too slim to continue research on new vaccines. Many companies have stopped work on vaccines altogether. For companies that have continued to work on vaccines, the high costs of research and development are passed on to the patients. In some cases, companies have drastically lowered prices for developing countries while keeping prices high in developed nations to offset the cost of development. 31
Influenza, more commonly known as the flu, is an instance where the lack of development of new vaccines can harm even wealthy nations. In the United States since 2010 the flu has caused between 9.2 million and 35.6 million illnesses, 140,000 to 710,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 and 56,000 deaths.32
Centers for Disease Control estimate that vaccinations have prevented 13.59 million cases of the flu since 2005. However, the flu virus mutates frequently and flu vaccines need to be reformulated each year; scientists have to make predictions about which strain will be more common and how to match the vaccine to the virus – the effectiveness for flu vaccines has ranged between 10% and 60%. Additionally, supplies of the vaccine also often fall short of what is actually needed33
There has been discussion and attempts concerning creation of a universal vaccine for the flu, targeting parts of the virus that do not frequently change or mutate. However, federal appropriations for this research have only reached $40 million, far short of the billion dollar threshold often needed for new medicines to be fully researched and developed.34 This is not to imply that developing a universal vaccine is simply a matter of allocating dollars to the problem, as developing it would be a large scientific undertaking with no guarantee of success.
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