Expanding vaccination program will give Netherlands more benefits than costs

Expanding the Dutch vaccination program could have a lot of social benefits for the Netherlands, according to a study by consultancy firm Sirm published on Tuesday. The health benefits, lower demand for healthcare, and reduction in absenteeism outweigh the costs of vaccinations by a massive margin, Sirm concluded, the Financieele Dagblad reports.

Sirm calculated what benefits expanding the pneumococcal vaccination and introducing the shingles vaccination can produce. “From a social point of view, more vaccination for the conditions studied is a good idea,” Project leader Roderik Ponds told FD. The study was paid for by pharmaceutical giant GSK, which sells vaccines against shingles and pneumococcal disease. But Ponds stressed that the research was independent and “all assumptions are based on public sources.”

For its calculations on the shingles vaccine, Sirm worked on a 67 percent vaccination rate - the vaccination rate for the flu shot in the Netherlands. Large-scale shingles vaccination will more than pay for itself, Sirm concluded. Every euro spent will yield 1.3 euros in social profit. According to Sirm, adding the shingles vaccine to the national vaccination program will yield 2,000 healthy years of life, prevent the deployment of 50 full-time healthcare staff, lower healthcare costs, and prevent absenteeism.

For the vaccine against pneumococcal disease, Sirm used the 72 percent vaccination rate of existing programs. According to Sirm, the potential benefit of adding this vaccine to the national vaccination program is even greater - 2,300 healthy life years, saving 150 full-time healthcare staff, and preventing absenteeism. That results in a social profit of 370 million euros - more than twice the expected costs of a more extensive vaccination program.

Health economist Bram Wouterse of Erasmus University looked at the Sirm study for FD and found it “overall quite sound.” But he did have a few notes. First, the study places a lot of emphasis on savings in personnel deployment. Wouterse thinks the effects of the vaccinations are somewhat small to result in freed-up healthcare workers on a one-to-one basis. He also warns that vaccine prices change. “The price ultimately determines how many of the social benefits end up with the producer and how much with the consumer.”

Wouterse also questioned whether distributing cost-effective vaccines is necessarily a government task. “Most of the benefits, both health and a large part of the gain in labor productivity, go to the individual themselves. And the costs of such an injection are not terribly high, either,” he told the newspaper.