Immunisation — the gateway to health and prosperity

We know vaccines work to prevent disease and save lives. This much has been clear since the very early days, but understanding and quantifying the scale of vaccines’ true value is a more recent contribution. Just recently, in February, research revealed that every dollar invested in childhood immunisation can provide a short term return of US$16, when considering the cost of treating illness. However, in the longer term, using the full income approach where one values the years of additional life gained, the effects of vaccination can be even bigger, providing a US$44 return in light of better school performance, improved quality of life and increased productivity. This means we can confidently outline how vaccination boosts prosperity, making the case for immunisation around the world, helping governments understand the need to invest in prevention, not just in terms of lives saved but in economic terms too.

But the potential of vaccination does not end here. As I often remind people, with more than 30 doses administered worldwide every second, no other health intervention reaches so many children. The point of this, aside from recognising the sheer scale of its achievements, is to highlight how vaccination can be used to build health systems in resource poor settings. For many people in developing countries, vaccination is an established but reasonably rare point of contact with the health system. As Ebola and its fallout continues to demonstrate, health systems that can deal with a variety of diseases at any given time and are trusted by communities are invaluable. With this in mind, governments of the poorest countries and global health leaders are already exploring how immunisation can function as a backbone to other services, whether that be contraception in Pakistan or nutrition supplements in Bangladesh.
 
So it’s time we started thinking even beyond the (impressive) immediate benefits of vaccination, and made the most of its capacity to contribute meaningfully to building universal healthcare systems and prosperous societies across the world.